Eyes wide open Hip-hopping with Rennie Harris BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

By the time he was 14, North Philadelphian Rennie Harris was dancing professionally, in a hip-hop group he co-founded. When his second group split up, in 1992, Harris, now 39, put together PureMovement, the hip-hop dance troupe that has brought him international acclaim. This week, PureMovement will bring their interpretation of Romeo and Juliet — Rome and Jewels — back to Rhode Island College. Based on their visit here in ’98, I would urge you to run, don’t walk, to this performance.

Harris will use 12 male dancers for this particular show (Jewels remains offstage), with three DJs also onstage. Reviews of the premiere of Rome and Jewels, in June 2000, cite the amazing dexterity, both physical and verbal, of the dancers, as the Monster Qs and Caps square off for some serious rap and B-boy challenges. In addition to the breakin’ and poppin’ and rappin’ going on, there’s a video projected behind the dancers. All of which adds up to an unforgettable eye- and earful from a dancer/choreographer who responds to the question of what he’d be doing if he weren’t dancing with "I would have been a priest or a preacher."

Harris’s dances accomplish a similar mission, especially when experienced live. The following is from a phone conversation with all the noises of the city in the background: the swoosh of cars passing, the rhythm of feet on concrete, the wail of fire trucks, the honk of cabs. And through it all, Harris’s intent concentration on my questions.

Q: You say you’ve always been dancing and that you were there before they called it hip-hop. What do you mean by that?

A: I’ve not not danced and choreographed since I was very young. Hip-hop is something that’s community-based, a part of my culture, a living art.

Q: Can you tell me about writing Rome and Jewels?

A: When I did the first script, I didn’t like the acting, so, with a few of the characters who were poets anyway, I had them utilize their own poetry, and we edited that together with slang and with the words of Shakespeare.

Q: What’s the particular conflict in the show?

A: The conflict is the same conflict — crew against crew — though there are twists in what happens because I didn’t want to repeat the same thing as in Romeo and Juliet.

Q: What do you tell students about your work?

A: We talk about the history of hip-hop dance and then we demonstrate that style of dance. If you want to know about dance, you want to know how that particular generation was thinking which led them to move in a certain way. Movement is the last manifestation of reality, so the movement is defined by your consciousness and your sub-conscious. People take it for granted that they’re going to teach hip-hop dance without [teaching] the history from the plantations. Once you understand the history from the slaves, you’ll see the same movement and structure and vocabulary and then you’ll understand what this is.

Q: What was it specifically that brought about hip-hop?

A: Like everything else, war. Remember, after WWII, jazz was no longer something you danced to, it was something you listened to. War always changes the consciousness of a people and new things begin to come out of that.

Q: So, if hip-hop emerged in the ’60s, that would be Vietnam?

A: Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Cuba, all of it. We were on the brink of nuclear war — that’s major. We’re all calm and cool about what’s happening now, but in the beginning after 9/11, it changed the way we all think. We’ve gotten used to it. It’s nothing to be held up at the airport and people walking around with guns. So war changes us; it changes the consciousness of a people; hence, it’s going to change their expression.

Q: How do you think hip-hop is evolving?

A: It’s evolving in a very capitalist way as it always does here. When you have black people who are constantly pushing and creating all the time, it becomes a sincere expression of struggle and of happiness. The popular culture has adapted to it and co-opted it. Now it’s part of the mainstream. This is throughout the history of black people being here in the Americas. It’s been bastardized by Western culture. What’s on TV, they’re calling it hip-hop. That’s just movement; that’s not hip-hop dance. Hip-hop is something internal.

Q: But how do you look at the dynamics of hip-hop dance?

A: The way this country thinks is that it’s flipping and acrobatic when it comes to anything that’s black because then it’s physical and therefore there’s no intelligence. The Western perspective is always to think of anything that’s not European as something savage. The truth of the matter is that the dynamics that people see are the dynamics that Western culture projects. ’Cause they don’t understand how a person gets to that level of control and spirit, as well as to let the spirit take the body to another space in order to do some of the feats that the dancers perform.

Q: So there’s a certain amount of improvisation in hip-hop?

A: I specifically don’t do improvisation. For me, everyone is a soloist who comes together to learn the choreography. At times, I allow them to do solos — all choreographed.

Q: Well, regardless of how we’re able to define it or talk about it, it’s wonderful to experience.

A: That’s what it’s always been about. Cultures outside of the European construct understand the idea of human beings a little bit differently than Westerners. When we call ourselves human beings, the being part means we are, we is, we exist, without rhyme or reason, so it’s always about experience rather than, "OK, let’s record it and control it." It’s not about worshipping structure as a god-line, but as a guideline, which allows you to step off the path and step back onto the path.

And then when you really get down to it, this has nothing to do with hip-hop. This has to do with humanity. This spirit continues to revisit every generation and disguise itself as something new or rather it continues to tell each generation that you have freedom of words and freedom of spirit and freedom of choice. Hip-hop is all about communicating. The term "hip-hop" means to re-open your eyes.

Rennie Harris and PureMovement will perform on Thursday, February 19 at 8 p.m. in the Auditorium in Roberts Hall at Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence. Tickets are $26. Call (401) 456-8144.