Rennie Harris still
a man on the move

By Rita Charleston
For the Times

Rennie (Lorenzo) Harris has been known to mix Shakespeare with hip-hop, poetry, rap music and movement. He is a pioneer in performing, choreographing, teaching and bringing the African-American dance form hip-hop to a worldwide audience.
He is doing so once again, as Rennie Harris Puremovement celebrates its 15-year anniversary retrospective with performances at the Kimmel Center from June 20 to 22. A free Rennie Harris artist chat will take place following each performance in the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater.
Actually, in explaining his beginnings and current creations, Harris has a lot of say. For instance, the 43-year-old artist admitted that starting out in this art form was "never my decision. I was commissioned to do it one night and then just started getting gigs ever since. It isn’t something I ever thought about doing. It just happened."
But what has kept him going all these years is that he simply loves to dance.
"That’s what keeps me going on this planet, and probably always will," said the artistic director, choreographer and director who is well-versed in the vernacular of hip-hop.
The genre, Harris explained, includes the various techniques of B-boy (misnomer "break dancing"), house dancing, stepping and other styles that have emerged spontaneously from the inner cities of America, like the North Philadelphia community where he was raised.
"The term hip-hop is an umbrella term created by the media in the eighties," Harris said. "It’s a terminology adopted in the early eighties, but the terminology itself dates back to the thirties and it parallels the music forms of jazz, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, it has the same history as those music forms."
And to dance the dance, Harris said he and his company stay away from acrobatics.
"In this country, we have a history where anything black is pushed up to athletics, to acrobatics," said Harris. "It’s always about how physical black people are. But if we’re just physical then there’s no intelligence about what we do, so I decided to be clear about the fact that creating hip-hop for the concert stage was not about doing acrobatics. It’s about bringing the aesthetics of hip-hop culture and exploring those levels that people don’t understand because they haven’t been exposed to it."
And that, added Harris, is one of the major challenges he gladly faces. Many people come to his performances only to leave halfway through because they don’t see or hear what they had expected to see and hear.
"I’m not just an entertainer the way people define that word," he said. "If I were, then I’d be on Broadway. Sometimes people come and bring their kids, and the first time they hear music, which isn’t rap, and sometimes my voice raised in a monologue, you see people get up and leave. And I say good. If they came to be entertained in hip-hop as they know it, then let them go to Broadway.
"If I go outside my community, it’s to work. I have a lot of people counting on me for the truth, and this is how I make my money. This is what I do."
In fact, in his desire to teach, Harris has taught workshops and classes at many schools and universities, including the University of the Arts, UCLA, Columbia College and Bates College.
He is a 1996 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for choreography and has received awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Pew Repertory Development Initiative grant, the City of Philadelphia Culture Funds and much more.
"Still," he said, "educating the public is a slow process. I’m just like a little pea in a whole vat of soup, but I’m doing the best I can! ••
"Rennie Harris Puremovement" will be presented Wednesday, June 20, through Friday in the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center, 260 S. Broad St. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. For ticket information, call 215-893-1999 or visit www.kimmelcenter.org