The emotion of motion Rennie Harris and Puremovement kick off FirstWorksProv BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
	Music + dance + multimedia + more FirstWorksProv floods the senses The first week of the 2005 FirstWorksProv Festival kicks off on Thursday, September 29 from 5 to 8 pm with Pixilerations v.2, interactive digital installations by more than 40 digital media artists at The Space at Alice, 186 Union Street. Pixilerations v.2 will feature electronic art works; hypertext, video, and audio screenings; holographic installations; a gestural glove controller performance; a selective chronology of 20 explosions of the US invasion of Iraq; and much more. The opening night event will have West African music by Timinandi and lighted costumes by Pink Inc., animated by dancers from Fusionworks Dance Company. On Thursday, September 29 at 8 pm, Pixilerations v.2 performances will take place at the newly renovated 3000-square-foot Pixilerations Gallery, 191 Westminster Street. These will include a collaboration between Butch Rovan, from Brown’s Multimedia & Experimental Music Experiments program and Berlin-based cellist Ulrich Maiss; a video and live music piece by Laura Colelle and Alec Redfearn; and a video/dance performance by Jamie Jewett, titled Snowblind. On Friday, September 30 at 4:30 pm, Providence Black Repertory Company will host a panel discussion on the hip-hip tradition that includes Rennie Harris, founder and artistic director of Puremovement, MIT choreographer Thomas De Frantz, and RISD professor Wendy Walters. At 7:30 pm at the RISD Auditorium, the music ensemble Aurea (featuring Charles and Consuelo Sherba, Chris Turner, and Nigel Gore) will premiere Paul Phillips’s War Music, based on Christopher Logue's retelling of The Iliad. Aurea commissioned Phillips’s score for strings, percussion, and harmonica to accompany a dramatic presentation. (Go to www.arttix.ri.com or call 401.621.6123.) At 9 pm, a free forum with the artists, focussed on the poetic themes of War Music and The Iliad and their relationship to the current political situation, follow the performance. On Saturday, October 1 at 6:30 pm, JumpStart will show off moves and music from Case Closed (headed by Sokeo Ros, a member of Everett Dance Theatre) and The Rhode Show, in the lobby of the VMA Arts & Cultural Center. Free admission to ticket holders for the Rennie Harris Puremovement performance. At 8 pm, a pioneer of hip-hop choreography and an ambassador for hip-hop culture, Rennie Harris and his company Puremovement will perform at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center. (Check out www.tickets.com or call 401.272.4862.) The month-long festival of FirstWorksProv will continue with several events on October 8 and November 4. Go to www.firstworksprov.org. _J.R.

North Philadelphian Rennie Harris began dancing professionally in a hip-hop group he co-founded when he was just 14. After a second dance group split up in 1992, Harris, now 41, put together Puremovement, the hip-hop dance troupe that has brought him international acclaim. Puremovement comes to the FirstWorksProv Festival October 1 at 8 pm at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center for a 90-minute show of five classics from their repertory.

Harris and Puremovement brought their hip-hop opera Rome & Jewels to Rhode Island College in 2004, and in an interview with Harris then he told me that if he had not made dancing his life’s work, he "would have been a priest or a preacher." That kind of fervor infuses Harris’s choreography and the workshops he does with young people.

"It started in the late ’60s with the Robot," Harris noted, on the phone from Philly. "A lot of people think of hip-hop as this frivolous thing, and it’s being redefined via the media. People are teaching it and cashing in on the money and not teaching the history of it.

"If you want to know about dance, you want to know how that particular generation was thinking — what led them to move in a certain way," he continued. "People take it for granted that they’re going to teach some hip-hop dance but not know the history from the plantations. Once you understand the history from the slaves and you see the same movement and structure and vocabulary there, then you’ll understand what this really is. Movement is the last manifestation of reality, so the movement is defined by your consciousness and your subconscious."

When asked about the collective consciousness that led to hip-hop, Harris had one word for it: "War." More specifically, the Vietnam war and the War on Poverty in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

"War changes us," he reiterated. "Major wars change the way we think, in a way that people don’t even understand. It changes the consciousness of a people; hence, it’s going to change their expression."

What I remember most from the first time I saw Puremovement perform in ’98 are the powerful emotions pumping through the dances, but Harris maintains that he creates "from a purely technical and choreographic place — the emotional part of it is up to the dancers. If they are feeling it that day, hopefully that will connect to the audience."

The pieces Puremovement will perform, in their signature blend of popping and locking, tumbling and spinning, include: "Students of the Asphalt Jungle," which Harris has described as "an affirmation of our African-American heritage through movement, handed down through spirit and instinct"; "Endangered Species," an on-the-edge chase by a solo spotlighted dancer; "Continuum," a rush of gravity-defying moves that show the spiraling effects of hip-hop on thoughts leading to feelings that lead to movement; "P-Funk," a dazzling display of hip-hop chops to an irresistibly funky beat; and "The March of the Antmen," an intense work inspired by the life and death of Dru Minyard and set to original compositions by him.

Harris explained that what may look like improvisation in his dances is quite carefully choreographed. If his dancers take solos, that’s part of the structure: "For me, it’s not a different vocabulary — I’ve known it all my life. I think it’s the way Western culture operates: if it’s not in their world, it doesn’t exist and therefore is new.

"When you really get down to it, hip-hop has to do with humanity," Harris added. "This spirit of freedom of words and freedom of expression and freedom of choice continues to revisit every generation and disguise itself as something new, or rather it comes back with every generation. It was called rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, swing, jazz, bebop. Now it’s called hip-hop. With every musical form, there comes a point when the music defines the dance. Rap and hip-hop is all about communicating. The term hip-hop means to re-open your eyes."