Givin' Props, cont.

4/12

HOFFMAN: Thank you, Baraka. Next I'd like to ask Rennie Harris to speak.

RENNIE HARRIS: I'm just going to start talking and throw some things out, and basically talk about the things that are happening and where we are as far as hip-hop dances are concerned. In the beginning, when I named my company Rennie Harris Pure Movement, one of my reasons for doing so was because I didn't want to become labeled as a hip-hop dance company. Because for me it was something that was beyond hip-hop—it was about pure movement, about addressing movement in its purest state. So if you decide to make up your movement, you know, it's your movement. And if it's hot, it's hot; if it's not, it's not. I mean you come into your home state of creating new form and technique and philosophy behind it. And so to call it Rennie Harris Pure Movement was the right thing to do. And then to say, ‘Oh, yes. I'm a hip-hop dance company.’ And when I said that, in the very beginning, it was to kind of pique someone's interest, yet not be labeled as hip-hop as far as the [company] title. Because traditionally in hip-hop your title is something really funky—like the Funk Masters, the In Style Rockers—you know what I mean. I didn't want to do that.

But, in any case, I'm only hip-hop because that's all I know. If I knew something else I might be that, you know what I mean. I grew up in it and that's just pretty much it. And that's what makes me hip-hop. So anything that I do, as far as I'm concerned, is hip-hop—whether I'm still in my old neighborhood or not.

One of the things that came up was that the more I performed in theaters, some people would say, "Well, you know, that's not hip-hop." But from my understanding, when I was younger, from my two-block radius of hip-hop, we drew from everything. So I know rock music like nobody's business because that's what we listened to as part of hip-hop culture growing up. The DJ’s played a lot of the break beats from rock music. It's like—oh, my God—Queen was the biggest thing. I didn't even know Queen was a white band! You know what I mean? I'm like “No, are they white? Oh, my God.” You know what I mean? Because hip-hop always looked to shock you--to draw from something that you don't know anything about and where it came from—like ‘Oh, my God, where did you get that move from!’ And he might have got it from watching the Nicholas brothers late at night, you know, or from some Kung Fu movie where he saw this kind of partnering, and so he and his buddy did it. But because the movement is transferred into that person’s body, the movement changes. So you're not going to recognize it.

So hip-hop is based on adapting the culture and drawing from all of these different mediums. And it became clear to me that I needed a reference point to continue to do work in the theater--that I needed to look back and ask “Where's my foundation?”

And, so, with that kind of thinking in my head I began this festival called the Legends of Hip-Hop Dance. We just finished our first trial date in Colorado where I brought the Legends, the guys who created what you're seeing, you know, the actual guys who trained Michael Jackson—the people who he doesn't give credit to. All of his movement from the “Billy Jean” era, it was all credited to the Electric Boogaloos who trained him and toured with him constantly, you know what I mean. So these Legends—I had the Electric Boogaloos, Don Campbell, who is now 50 years old and who created what I would call the second style of hip-hop form called Campbell Locking. This man toured with Frank Sinatra, he hosted on the Grammys, performed at Carnegie Hall as the Campbell Lockers. You know, he's done amazing things as a hip-hop dance company in the ‘70s. And actually no one—no other hip-hop company—has come close to it yet.

And so a lot of people don't have the information of someone like Don Campbell who's still dancing and performing, or Boogaloo Sam who created the whole style of boogaloo which some may know as popping. And his back slide that he does—which people call the Moon Walk. But that's not the Moon Walk, you know what I mean. All those things—this guy Boogaloo Sam was the one who created all this movement. He said he was watching an old man walk and he began to imitate this man. And him and his buddies were laughing and kind of teasing like, “Y'all look, check this out.” And they started doing a movement. And then one guy said, "Oh, yo, man, that's just tight, man. Yeah, let's do it like that," you know. And so they started to create this form because they were watching—they was watching all these people, like disabled people, and so on. And they started calling it Boogaloo, which really got its terminology from James Brown—“Do the Bugaloo,” you know.