"joyousness and edge ... pure, explosive, positive energy"

July 9, 2005 performance, reviewed by Jocelyn McGrath

One dancer is balanced on his hands at an impossible angle for an impossibly long time. Electrical currents inhabit another, his arms rolling back and forth like ripples on the water. Yet another is magically pushed up and down by pulsing, unseen forces. Returning to Jacob's Pillow this summer, these are only a few of the many supernatural hip hop occurrences found in a Rennie Harris Puremovement performance.

Supernatural is the appropriate word. "Super" as in exceptional. "Natural" as in created without tricks or technology. Some of these feats are tossed off casually, some joyfully, some with high-intensity aggression and showmanship. Yet the strength of the dance is not based in its physical virtuosity, but in the communal and individual relationships that push the virtuosic edge. Individual competitiveness, wit, and imagination are given an honored place in the group and the results are phenomenal.

The first piece, Continuum, opens with one of the characteristic structures of hip-hop movement and culture, the improvisational circle. The last piece, Students of the Asphalt Jungle ends with another. As a structure, a circle feeds both artistic support and competition, embodying the idea of the group as a source, as well as a testing and honing ground for material. The joyousness and edge were palpable, the dangerous undertones of hip-hop culture contrasted with pure, explosive, positive energy.

Harris is the largest person of the group, physically and theatrically. In Continuum and in P-Funk, the second work shown, Harris's hand-on-lower-back-old-man-goofing set a tone of accessibility, and seemed to show a supreme confidence in his own place as a player onstage. One of my favorite moments was when Harris, dancing the first part of a synchronized corps sequence, broke out of the figure when the rest of the group hit the floor, saying, "I ain't doing that..." It was amusing, and sent a jolt through the crowd. In a beautiful example of how breaking ranks doesn't always mean alienation, Harris became a walking foil for their motion, a relaxed presence moving through them and around them in his own sweet time.

Harris's solo piece, Endangered Species, opens with his spotlighted figure running in slow motion, going nowhere. Gone is his previously light-hearted affect. In its place is a sinister, controlled persona. In the soundtrack, the sound of slow, heavy breathing is combined with a flat-voiced narrative, a story told in the first person, a non-linear description of domestic abuse, racial discrimination, and street violence. In the course of the piece Harris transforms from a simple running figure to monstrous forms and back to the runner. He melts and becomes disjointed, then rises into a towering Frankenstein–like figure. At some point his chest can literally be seen jumping with the beating of his heart. This piece powerfully describes nightmarish realities on the edge of where our reason meets our fears.

One ironically attractive quality of warfare and organized violence is the intensity of the human connections forged in dangerous situations. In March of the Antmen, the group transforms from solders in a battle to gang members in a drive-by shooting. This change describes the essential similarity between all violence, state-supported or state-suppressed. These scenes inspire both revulsion and fascination. With these performers, the bonds of friendship and mutual dependency feel real, not just theatre. That people in a war zone, official or urban, can be ripped apart at any moment gives the piece its tension, the ache of human frailty.

Rennie Harris, at 41, is becoming an "old man" of hip-hop, and his change of identity also reflects the aging of the hip-hop vernacular as a recognized art form. Though he feels strongly that is it is important to acknowledge his artistic debt to his teachers, Harris has contributed in a huge way to legitimizing and promoting hip-hop as a dance form for high art venues. With his Puremovement troupe he has rooted the physical vocabulary of hip-hop in cultural, historical, and spiritual ground. It is clear that in this rich soil, the dance is thriving.

Rennie Harris Puremovement
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