In praise of Cookie Harrist’s The Liberated Dancer

Bay area dance artist Cookie Harrist published the zine The Liberated Dancer in 2020 based on her research of consent culture in the area for professional dancers. If you can’t read the whole thing (which I highly encourage!) Here are some snapshots that I found super inspiring and relevant to my own research:

These statistics are appalling, and though they are from a small pool of respondents, it reflects an unacceptable lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in dance spaces and the need for work to mitigate harm. Though I very much believe that dance can be healing, it is not inherently so, as noted by Harrist. While pushing boundaries and cathartic expression have long been part of performance, there is a difference between the discomfort that comes with growth and crossing boundaries that can be triggering or re-traumatizing for a performer. Unfortunately over 28 million people in the U.S alone have reported sexual abuse, so we need to create spaces for performance that are conscious of this reality.

My experience in dance/movement therapy and cultural studies positions me well to research questions similar to Harrist around the professional dancer experience in Toronto.

In my research at York University I will be using the below chart created by dance artist Megan Emerson illustrating the stages of consent culture to place Toronto’s professional dance community on the spectrum.

I am grateful to Cookie Harrist and others like IC Nicole Perry who are working hard to bring consent-forward practices to dance spaces and are educating all of us on the power dynamics at play in dance spaces. Here is an excellent article by Perry on Disrupting Oppressive Patterns of Power in Dance Spaces, and below is a slide of some of the power dynamics I’d like to flesh out further in my thesis project.