Rennie Harris: Sharing the Hip-Hop Legacy
Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris has been on the educational trail since he was a founding member of the Scanner Boys, a Philadelphia crew. Even earlier, at the age of 14, he taught at Philadelphia’s Smithsonian Folklife Center. Harris is now uniquely positioned as one of the dance educators driven by the belief that every person deserves the opportunity to dance, to express him or herself kinesthetically, to experience the joy found in moving and to rise to a higher place of being. These educators seek occasions to expose people to dance through performance.
As an innovator and keeper of hip-hop culture, Harris and his company, Rennie Harris Puremovement (RHPM), are ideally suited to exposing people to dance. Hip-hop is deemed cool, accessible, happening – all words that bring young people into the world of dance, which can be obscure, especially for boys and young men. In lecture-demonstration or workshop format, Harris creates a lens into the history of hip-hop through which we discover not only its roots in African tradition and culture but also in Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican cultures from the early 1960s forward. Puremovement dancers, live percussionists, vocal, and video-collage projections paint a particularly compelling scene, one that is sure to fire the mind.
Part of what drives Harris is his ongoing desire to be an outstanding spokesperson for the origins of hip-hop and its associated styles – B-boy (breakdancing), house, and stepping – all born in the streets of urban American inner-cities. What makes Harris unique is the concomitant desire to bring all this to the concert stage and to weave in other dance forms. The result is work that is immediate and readily adaptable to converging styles. In transforming hip-hop from the street to the concert stage, Harris teaches some valuable lessons. He crosses invisible boundaries and breaks barriers over cultural and socio-economic lines, eradicating biases and/or stereotypes. In so doing, he teaches us how to be a better audience. Before the novice viewer even enters the auditorium, expectations of how to see and behave are clearly delineated in pre-distributed literature written by the company.
Harris is deeply committed to the cultural heritage, ritual and community values created by the traditions of hip-hop. Quoted in a press-release for RHPM lectures, dance critic and scholar Suzanne Carbonneau says it best: “Harris continually reminds his audience that hip-hop is an extension of traditional African dance and culture, the latest in the succession of American vernacular forms including the cakewalk, animal dances, the Charleston, the lindy hop, rhythm tap, bop, funk and disco that are derived from an African aesthetic. As such, hip-hop must be regarded as a spiritual endeavor.” However, because hip-hop is now “codified” and taught within the confines of a dance studio, we lose some of its improvisational nature and original richness to counts and positions. It seems that Harris instinctually understands this. For him, the movement is a rite of passage, not a phrase to be tapped out in eights. He relays this to his dancers and audience and acts as a role model as he displays this in the very nature of his own posture.
Puremovement’s Director of Education, Tina Heuges, who has worked for the company since 2000, speaks of Harris’ educational mission as the essence of his persona. She said Harris never waivers in commitment often saying: “I don’t want to just go there to entertain. I want to do some kind of education.” Pure entertainment, full of the signature head spins and such, doesn’t have the impact Harris wants to impart to his audience. Case in point: Asked to present a performance on a Saturday, he insists the company be booked for Friday too, so a lecture demonstration can be given prior to the Saturday performance. The performance alone allows the audience to walk away feeling entertained. But, the added lecture demonstration provides insight into the work, giving it context and a place in history. The audience walks away with a fuller understanding of the meaning in the movement.
“I believe Rennie is the ultimate advocate for the creation and survival of hip-hop dance at all levels,” Heuges said, relaying her passion for what Harris represents and why she is so committed to his work. She describes his work as “social activism.” Harris uses hip-hop as a means of community outreach and has even visited some prisons. His purpose is to offer the gift of movement in its purest sense. He attempts to literally engage people to the point that they are forced to get up, move and be a part of the world. “With music that resembles the consistency of the rhythmic heartbeat, he invokes a physical transformation in these people in which there is nothing else left for them to do but move,” Heuges said.
It is hard not to imagine that for Harris, aka Prince Scarecrow, dance has been his own salvation. His passion is that real. It is equally hard not to imagine that he feels a tremendous responsibility for keeping alive the souls of all those dancers with whom he grew up around, along with their interrelated cultures. It isn’t a matter of dancing for a living; for Harris, hip-hop is a way of being. Imagine translating this sensibility to young aspiring artists, non-dancers and audiences around the globe. A richer experience would be hard to find.
“I am a product of his education,” said Duane Holland, a dancer with Puremovement for many years, who now assists Harris and Heuges in the company’s education goals. Holland is most animated when speaking about the desire to consider hip-hop a major dance technique alongside ballet, modern, jazz and tap. He, too, believes in passing on the “accurate” history and development of hip-hop. “It is impossible not to look to those who were there in its most initial stages. Rennie was there,” Holland said. One of the goals cited on the RHPM Web site drives Holland and the group to “provide audiences with a sincere view of the essence and spirit of hip-hop, rather than the commercially exploited stereotypes most often presented by the media.”
It is no wonder that Rose Eichenbaum refers to Mr. Harris as “the messenger” in her book, “Masters of Movement: Portraits of America’s Great Choreographers.” In an interview she did with him back in 2001, she asked, “How does what you do inform us about ourselves – and I’m not referring now to only the African American community. What are we gaining from your work?”
Harris responded: “I can put that in one word – humanism. Being universal. It goes beyond what you’re seeing on the surface. If you are not equipped to look beyond what I’m presenting, then it’s not your time to understand universality. We, unfortunately, are taught to look at things at face value. … The truth of the matter is that movement and action are the only things that communicate. I can use words to say something to you, but if I don’t include gesture and my body to support the words, then the words might not be believable.”
And so goes the messenger, delivering hip-hop’s history, culture and legacy one lecture, one visit, one interview or one workshop at a time.