Rennie Harris Puremovement. - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, March, 1997 by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Rennie Harris is all over the Philadelphia dance scene, collaborating with more performers than you can shake a stick at. Right now he has the freshest, most creative imagination in the house, with an output that is nothing short of amazing. Between September and November he presented a variety of works and works in progress in six different Philadelphia locations.

As a former break-dancer and current hip-hopper, Harris has that magic component that funders crave: crossover appeal. Everyone postmodern wants to work with him, it's the cool thing to do. The danger is in being exploited by the groups riding on his energy and using his name as a calling card.

With those concerns aside, a look at his work shows that Harris's strength is in refashioning hip-hop dance into a viable, flexible concert-dance medium. His October concerts at the Susan Hess Studio and the Conwell Dance Theater showed him digging deeper---even beyond hip-hop-into the grass roots African and African American dance bag to come up with something new.

A "dancing through West Africa" trip last August with choreographer Chuck Davis resulted in Panlogo, Harris's reworking of a traditional Ghanaian fisherman's celebration dance. Shown as a sketch on October 11 and 12 with some parts more fleshed out a week later, the seeds of an ingenious fusion are evident here. Like Harris, his dancers are self-taught. Their basic vocabularies are hiphop genres, including stepping, popping, locking, electric boogaloo, breaking, and house. They are real troupers, and their performances are always an energy fest that would galvanize even the most jaded audience. It was a revelation to see these African American youth perform traditional West African dance movements. The get-down postures, flexible torsos, and multirhythmic ease of African traditional dance was interpolated into the hard and fast angularity of their urban American street styles. Congratulations to Harris for taking these African strains, filtering them through hip-hop, and giving them a concert form.

Interestingly, the connecting link for this Africa-to-America movement trip is the mambo and cha-cha, which were preeminently popular in urban black America in the 1950s through the 1 970s. Having begun with the Panlogo, the tap steps derived from grassroots stepping (not to be confused with black fraternity stepping, this style is indigenous to Philadelphia and is a cousin of tap hoofing, without the taps) ran interference with the twists, freezes, and falls from break dance, and ended up in the mambo setting.

In the October 18 performance the dancers moved more clearly from African to mamba/cha-cha to hiphop/house. However, the African flavor remained with each transformation, so that the fast turns ending in cross-legged pretzel stops and the angular arm gesturing of the hip-hop vocabulary took on a decidedly African air. Harris slyly and subtly moves the choreography and the soundscape from African to Afro-Latino as we watch his dancers take on the rhythms and body stances of these oncepopular social dances. In this sense Harris serves as a choreographic archivist, preserving these decades-old social dances while redefining them in the concert dance milieu.

Crystal Frazier is Harris's principal female dancer, and she is wonderful. At times in this work she looked as though she was doing an Irish jig in triple time, on top of which she added hip rails.

As Panlogo illustrates, Harris is moving in many new directions, although hip-hop remains his fundamental technique. A most adventurous collaboration was The Three Willies, performed at the Painted Bride in November. Billed as "a multimedia jazz opera," this work combined the efforts of Harris with those of internationally renowned jaz composer and violinist Leroy Jenkins and media artist Homer Jackson. (As part of a funded program known as Arranged Introductions, it will travel to Chicago and New York City.) All the "Willies" in the title--and, by association, all black men--are equated with or related to the infamous Willie Horton (Dukakis's downfall, the reader may recall). The piece is held together by Jenkins's brilliantly spare, bare-boned score--a matter of tones scattered and grouped together around downbeats. Three generations of black men are represented: grandfather, father, and the young, hiphop son (a great theatrical device here: the one son is simultaneously played by four of Harris's PureMovement dancers).

One beautifully choreographed scene involved the grandfather (Wilbert Boone) singing the aria, "They say times is hard; all I see is things crumbling 'round me," while downstage one of the sons (Sabela kuMathonga) performed hip-hop stop-and-lock movements in counterpoint. The stage movement is effective and well designed, mainly by its unobtrusiveness. It was refreshing to see Harris's dancers holding their own in a nondance stage setting. The piece ends in a beautiful polyphonic aria, NWe'll never be free." Nevertheless, Harris's work is liberating, breaking down barriers and blurring traditional boundaries between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" art forms. He was one of only two 1996 recipients of the coveted Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography, a welldeserved recognition for his endeavors.