Creative Capital

Rennie Harris celebrates hip hop culture on its own terms. As artistic director of his dance company Rennie Harris/Puremovement, he is using some of the world’s most influential forms of movement, music, and storytelling to revolutionize contemporary concert dance. Fresh off the global success of 2001’s Rome & Jewels, a reconstruction of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story that won him three Bessie Awards, Harris is currently at work on Facing Mecca, an evening-length dance that, among other things, traces the roots of hip hop through the African diaspora.

As inquisitive as he is articulate, Harris spent several years studying and collaborating internationally as part of his research for Facing Mecca. The choreographer worked extensively with Chuck Davis’s African American Dance Ensemble, and later traveled to South Africa to join forces with the IWISA Dance Company, and to North Africa and Brazil to study the connections between hip hop, ceremonial dances, and the martial arts form Capoeira. Facing Mecca will bring these many influences together, along with Harris’s patented blend of b-boying (what’s commonly referred to as ‘breakdancing’) and freestyle club dancing, creating a work that illustrates the way dance can unite people and cultures across boundaries of time and place.

Of course Facing Mecca will be more than a simple history and geography lesson. The piece describes a turn toward enlightenment and celebrates dance as a spiritually liberating force. In the end, the work will include as many as 17 performers, live percussion, video projections, multiple DJs, and original music performed by Philip Hamilton, Kenny Mohammed, and HotMouth composer Grisha Coleman.

As with Harris’s previous pieces, the choreography in Facing Mecca will adapt cinematic elements and music sampling techniques to the movement itself. The dancers in Puremovement, many of whom have worked with Harris for 10 or more years, can slow, speed up, repeat, and vary their movement with jaw-dropping accuracy, creating the illusion of stop-action, instant replay, and slow-motion. These performers are also able to manipulate the quality of a single sequence over time, from hard-edged and rhythmic to serene and ethereal, as in Rome & Jewels, when a single repeated phrase alternately signals either an invitation to battle, a come-on to a lover, or an elegy for a fallen friend.

The way Harris choreographs is deeply process-oriented, influenced by many things along the way, including how each dancer moves. A hip hop child prodigy, Harris was only 14 years old when he was first commissioned to bring his work from clubs to theaters, but the transition was smooth. “All hip hop dancers are choreographers first and dancers second,” he explains. “It’s about creating a movement vocabulary for our bodies only.” For the past 10 years, Harris and Puremovement have toured the world, and Harris himself has taught and lectured extensively at colleges and universities. The choreographer has also kept a hand in more commercial hip hop, working with many recognized stars, including Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Kool Moe Dee, and West Street Mob.

Now 36 years old and based in his hometown Philadelphia, Harris is clearly a choreographic innovator, part of a group of artists from around the world who have been exploring hip hop in the theatrical context since the 1980s. He describes the breadth of this de facto coalition: “There are hip hop, rap groups, and dance groups from France, Switzerland, Japan, South Africa, India, Korea, and Croatia.” Widely recognized, Rennie Harris represents the best in hip hop today.