MARLBORO — Marlboro alumna Cookie Harrist will be returning to her alma mater to present a dance piece performed by Hio Ridge Dance Collective, a new collaborative formed by Harrist with Delaney McDonough and Caity Richards.
On Friday, March 7, at 5 p.m., in Serkin Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Marlboro College, the collective will perform “Or Shall We,” a half-hour work that the collective has described as “an investigation focused on rock 'n' roll band dynamics, groove, youth, and presence.”
“I am very excited that Marlboro will be one stop on our very first tour as a collective,” says Harrist.
A choreographer, performer, and writer, Harrist studied choreography in the dance program at Marlboro College, graduating last year with a bachelor's degree in dance and poetry.
Harrist's most recent choreographic work, “Present Present Present,” was featured at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the 2012 National College Dance Festival.
Last fall, she co-founded the Hio Ridge Dance Collective “as a way of insisting that young choreographers have the space to rehearse, collaborate on, and perform evening-length work,” as she writes on her website.
“'Or Shall We' is our first presentation as a company,” says Harrist. “While this abstract dance may not have a story per se, it is about the relationship of the three of us in the collective. The piece will have a minimal set, which we move about as we perform.”
“And although by now 'Or Shall We' is a finished work, some of the dance will be improvisational and so it continually changes from performance to performance,” she adds.
Besides their dance performance at Marlboro College, Hio Ridge Dance Collective will also be working with students in the school's dance program.
“Marlboro may be a small school, which makes dance rather specialized, but it has a fine dance program,” says Harrist.
On its website, Marlboro describes its dance courses, under the guidance of Professor of Dance Kristin Horrigan and visiting adjuncts, as designed to help students develop an appreciation for experiential learning, gather tools for creative expression through movement, and hone their abilities to think and write critically about movement and performance.
In the dance program, student plans - the college's multidisciplinary self-designed project requirement for juniors and seniors - may focus on creative work in choreography and improvisation or on dance scholarship in history and theory, or they may combine the two.
Shortly after graduating from Marlboro, Harrist felt she needed to take stock of what she wanted to do with her career, so she moved into her father's old vacation home in Maine. She found the location very congenial for inspiration.
She invited McDonough and Richards to join her. She had met the two dancers in the summer of 2012 at the Bates Dance Festival Professional Training Program.
A New Jersey native, McDonough graduated from Colby College with honors in theater and dance. Her choreographic work has included an evening-length piece developed as an installation in the first annual Performance Lab Series at Colby College, “Move: The Summer of 1963” (2012), which relied on more than 20 student collaborators to create a mixed-media dance theater piece exploring the early Civil Rights Movement.
As a performer, McDonough was featured in Paul Matteson's “Set Forth” (2012) and Heidi Henderson's “Leslie” (2013) at Colby. She served as president of Colby Improv, a short-form comedy improvisation group.
Caity Richards pursued American studies at Yale, where she also trained in performance and dance criticism. She sang with the all-female a cappella group Something Extra, as well as with Yale's only folk-singing group, Tangled Up in Blue, which she co-directed in 2009 and 2010.
Since Yale, Richards has performed at various venues as an actor, dancer, and musician, including the Baryshnikov Center for the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Theater, and Fenway Park.
Harrist writes at the Hio Ridge Dance Collective website that the three of them “removed ourselves from our lives in separate cities and threw ourselves into an old, remote family home in Denmark, Maine. We live together, cook together, and make dances together.”
“We are bound by our passion for post-modern dance and fed by our own and each other's backgrounds in diverse facets of performance.
“We are inspired by our youth - that thing that makes us reach for the ineffable and the impossible.”
“Our close bond is reflected in the work we create,” says Harrist, who believes that the collective formed quite naturally from this remarkably fruitful collaboration and cohabitation.
Harrist characterizes it as a post-modern choreographic collective. “We are greatly influenced by the work of performance art, but everything is based on the solid techniques of modern dance,” she observes.
She writes that the three “founded the company based on the belief that the best dances are developed not from specific ideas but from significant time and space to let the work develop and distill itself.”
Harrist is convinced that the trio crafted “a way of developing dances rarely experienced by young choreographers. We let the scores for the movement develop out of our time together and our mutual interests that arose, rather than implanting a theme on the work from the start.”
Though not even six months old, Hio Ridge Dance Collective already has been commissioned by Denmark Arts Center for an evening-length dance piece about the town that they have made the creative hub of their collaborative.
“We are very honored and excited about creating this piece,” Harrist says. “Denmark is a small, poor rural community, but located in an area of Maine littered with lakes. It is incredibly beautiful. All three of us have come to love Denmark, and are eager to give something back to the community.”