Rennie Harris
As his dance company Rennie Harris Puremovement approaches its 30th anniversary, Philadelphia street dance pioneer Rennie Harris is quick to point out that his work is only one part of a much larger discipline with a much longer trajectory.
“Dance is a part of the culture,” he explains. “African-American culture as a whole since as far back as I can remember, or even research, back to folk who were enslaved. That is all hip-hop is, or street dance is — an extension of traditional African culture. A lot of it can be traced back specifically to West Africa, from music to the dance and the rhyming.”
For Harris himself, his own connection to street dance is a lifelong one. From childhood when he first saw Don Campbell’s lock dancers on the Carol Burnett show, to adulthood as a Guggenheim Fellow, choreographer for companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and (when we catch up with him) artist-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder, Harris has lived a life steeped in the myriad disciplines of street dance.
He’s quick to point out that “street dance” is a larger term that encompasses multiple styles. “‘Street’ is a euphemism for community,” he says. “This is community dance. These dances come out of the community … Some of my colleagues may disagree and want to use ‘hip-hop’ as an umbrella term. And I used to use it that way. But I realized that as a popper, I'd never call myself a hip-hop dancer. Because I was a popper. When I was a breaker, I didn't call myself a hip-hop dancer because I was a breaker. Same thing for locking. I'm a Campbell locker. For house dance, I’m a house dancer. For waaking, I’m waaking, for vogue, I’m vogue. Nothing other than hip-hop dance proper — when you actually do the real hip-hop dance, which is a party dance — that's what you call hip-hop. Once I came to that realization, I was like, ‘Oh, I'm going back to calling it a street dance because it came out of the community. And some of my colleagues may think of it a lower connotation of some other dance forms. However, it is only a lower connotation if you're looking through a Western lens. It's not coming from a Western lens whatsoever.”
When Puremovement comes to Nashville, Tenn. Oct. 14–16 to present their work Nuttin’ but a Word at OZ Arts in partnership with Lovenoise, Harris will bring this knowledge to his lecture-demonstration at National Museum of African-American Music. But, more importantly, this knowledge runs throughout Puremovement, brilliantly saturating their work.
Harris got his start as a kid in Philly dance crews, with his stages progressing from kitchen floors and churches to clubs, his own local television show, and national hip-hop tours like the Fresh Festival — all before beginning Puremovement in 1992.
However, Harris points out that, while stages may grow in size and prestige, the pride of a street dancer is the ability to perform anywhere. “If I dance on a table, I should be able to still do my piece I did in the theater on that table. We battle anywhere, we dance anywhere. And that's the community dancer because there's no stage.”
He adds that street dance is a freestyle dance and, especially in the mid ’80s, “Nobody really wanted to do choreography, because they felt like all people wanted to do was solo … and so the choreography came as a means to get to the solo.”
When he started Puremovement, there was no such thing as street dance theatre. As he built his group, he knew he had to build work that held space for dancers to express individuality within a larger framework. When I mention that it sounds to me like jazz, where each artist is allowed space to improvise and solo within a larger chord structure and arrangement, Harris is quick to point my attention back to history.
“That's what I mean by this,” he says. “So you keep going back and back and back in African-American expression, we find the same sort of aesthetics or structure or infrastructure for, quote, unquote, their composition of dance, or even the music as well. This idea that you the individual was a representation of freedom, and there's a time signature you have to adhere to — you should adhere to the collective creating that time signature. However, you're allowed to go out and experience life, and … have that experience and come back to the fold. So that's been jazz and swing and bebop and all this stuff, prior to hip-hop culture, and it's pretty much the same as street culture.”
In fact, if we look at his growth as an artist over the decades, Harris exemplifies this need for elasticity between the collective and the individual. His early street dance theatre works were solo pieces of autobiography in dance form — deeply personal explorations of individual trauma. His early piece Endangered Species was just this, a prodding of old scars that proved to be personally transformative and immensely healing.
“I began to create these works that were personal to me, like Endangered Species and March of the Antmen, Students of the Asphalt Jungle, even though it was a very dynamic work,” he explains. “Endangered Species about my life, my family, what I went through as a child — molestation, rape, all these things. The church. My belief in things as a Black man living in America.
As I did the work, it was really hard to even walk out into the lobby to talk to people. Because, you know, it was putting my life on my chest and say, ‘this is what happened to me,’ right? And this was pre-victim popularity, so to speak … pre ‘me me me me me me me.’ And the interesting part about that solo, was that no one wanted to talk about it. … when I first did it, my family came one at a time for some reason. One of my brothers, his wife called me, and said, ‘What did you do to him? He’s bawling’. What happened to me probably happened in my family in general … My mom came to see the work, I went out the back door, I couldn’t face her. She called me she said, ‘I guess we have to talk.’
“The more I did that work, the more it was easy for me to talk about that work,” he adds. “By performing it so many times over and over, and going through that process, and sometimes sobbing on stage — and it's real and not acting or something — or I'm hyperventilating afterward, that's when I met by healing. It was kind of cathartic for me to do that solo.”
We look at his company’s upcoming performance at OZ Arts.
“The stuff that we want to do in Nashville is … questioning how the audience views street dance. As a Campbell locker, I should be able to not only get down to funk and lock, I should be able to dance to Al Jarreau and figure out what that feels like. Then if I'm dancing a round with Al Jarreau, and I'm doing hip-hop or street dance to it, changes how the viewer sees the dance. It’s no longer this ‘entertainment, ‘acrobatic,’ ’energetic,’ ‘aerobic’ dance that we as African Americans always get the stamp for. ‘Athletic.’ We get ‘oh it's so athletic,’ right? All these all these adjectives, all these descriptions suggest one thing: that it’s physical. And that's what my culture has always been stereotyped. When you look at a Western dancer, your Euro-American dance, and it's ‘how brilliant,’ ‘how intellectual,’ ‘how smart does this choreographer is.’”
“We do what we do, we give you the celebration,” he adds. “But what people always confuse with street dance is, they confuse spirit with energy. When someone is just having a moment of feeling God, if you will, like that moment … It uplifts that person and God is in that person. Bam. That's the dance.”
When I ask him what purpose he feels like art serves in this tumultuous American moment, he is again quick to turn me to a longer cultural arc.
“I get the term ‘art,’” he says. “However, I feel like it’s just folk being folk. You know what I mean? Folk decided, ‘I’m gonna speak this way,’ versus ‘I’m gonna use my mouth.’ I'm gonna do it physically, or I want to put it in colors or paint, or I want to write these words and create it this way, or I'm going to sew or design. And I say that to say … that the purpose is voice. The purpose is for you to remember, for others to remember, that you have voice and you have a choice. And that the position that you're in right now, based on all the choices that you made, of the decisions that you made, and those decisions are made by you. So you have to deal with those decisions and make better choices and make decisions. However, if you never know you have a voice, you’re not going to make the best decisions.
“It's about your voice and how you speak. And that's why it's so dangerous. Because I don't have to say, ‘eff the government,’ I can just make the work and you'll get the thought in your head based on how I put a particular sequence together, or how I put a particular music together. How I compose these words to make you think. That's why it’s dangerous. Movement itself is the most dangerous. Movement is the last manifestation of your reality. It is not what you say or what you do that confirms who you are. We know who we are by what we do. And movement also changes reality. So without action, reality could never change. But it can never be progression. So the infamous ‘they’ are afraid of movement. Because dance is not tangible. Can't take it home, you can bottle it.
“People don't understand. They think you're possessed. They think you're crazy. So ‘why would you move this way? What's in you? Why would you do that? What? Oh, this is savage. And this is vulgar’ … We’re still engaged, as you can see from the last two years, our philosophy, our culture — and this permeates us — not only capitalism, but it is a Puritan value. We are still and — I say we, because I'm part of that — Black, white, gay, straight or indifferent. We are all still part of that system. And we may not be 99.9% like some folk, but we have a percentage of us that is very Puritan.”
He laughs and adds, “So we're trying to expel those demons with with what we do, right?”
