Rennie Harris, Philadelphia PA Interview by Arnecia Patterson

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Photo Credit: Bob Emmott

How she sat there,
The time right
Inside a place so wrong
It was ready.
From Rosa in On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

In my conversation with Rennie Harris, dancer, choreographer and founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement, a hip-hop dance and music company based in Philadelphia, he dropped a lot of names: revolutionaries, artists, athletes, pop entertainers, writers from both the past and present. Yet, while Harris cops to having no first-hand knowledge of the sordid, racist part of American history, this legacy influences his obsession with the state of humanity in his native Philadelphia neighborhoods and it drives his incisive choreography.

Arnecia Patterson: Would you characterize the way you work as being part of the western concert dance tradition?

Rennie Harris: No, not at all. I would say I actually—no—I was going to say I tried. I didn't try. I hadn't realized when I was starting out that the way I was creating hip-hop, the foundation of it, was really within a scheme that was very traditional, too.

You can have an idea for something and nine times out of ten it's hard to get the idea to come out because of what's happening divinely, or what's happening by way of nature is not necessarily what you're thinking with movement. First I develop a lot of stuff I never even use because it doesn’t fit what I am working on.

I think the whole concept of how to create is a projection of western assumptions that separates the work from what it really is. Dance is one of four or five tools used to worship. So with that being said, you experience dance—you are dance. It's not something that's outside of you as a human being. So we're dancing all the time, if we define it as such. So it's redundant to go back and explore what it is that you know as opposed to being aware of what it is that you're already doing: to be aware of your motor skills and how you move through time and space. And then to take that information and apply it to worship—so to speak—to movement, which is the dance, the work, the piece. When I do my own work I don't think about the stage until the day I get there and go “oh, that doesn't work.” And then I fix it.

AP: What does the western concert dance tradition mean to you as an artist?

RH: Nothing, nothing at all because it's not part of my value system. We're all conditioned: the way I think is because of the way my mother thought and the way people around her thought. And they were thinking a certain way because of their parents and the society around them and what was going on politically in their time. We also have to recognize that cultures think differently. Western culture thinks totally different from eastern culture. Generations think differently in certain ways. But we all come from a foundation—the foundation being our parents and their society—and we're all conditioned in a certain way.