Pure Spirit and Sheer Joy.

Rennie Harris/Puremovement is bringing a highly spiritual form of African-influenced hip-hop into concert halls around the world.

Scratch the surface of the company Rennie Harris/Puremovement, and you're on mystical turf. Talk to this hip-hop artist about dance, and Harris talks to you about God. Is this a 1960s hippie heralding the Age of Aquarius (which happens to be his birth sign)? Not by a long shot. Harris emerged from the hellfire of growing up on the mean streets of North Philadelphia--a rite of passage that takes its toll on residents. With wit and genius, he is forging an aesthetic revolution by expanding the definition of concert dance. Deftly, he has brought hip-hop dance styles into theater dance venues while making choreographic links between hip-hop and traditional, African-based dances. With no formal choreographic or dance training, Harris has developed a wonderful sense for moving groups, a sense of stage space that many choreographers would die for.

For him, hip-hop is the dance of life. "We love what we're doing," he says of his troupe. "Any one of us would rather die dancing because you get to a high, and the high is God. This work has nothing to do with social commentary. It's about our journey on this planet, reaching a higher plane. When I speak of God--when you dance--when you do anything you love to do and have that feeling inside that you felt when you had your first kiss--that's God! When somebody makes your day with a smile, God has smiled at you today. And that's what this is all about."

What is so captivating about Puremovement is the almost tangible sense of love, light, and positive energy that infuses the dancers' performance of this angular, percussive, yet humorous and playful style of vernacular dance known as hip-hop. They manage to give this idiom an embracing, almost lyrical presence. These men are spiritual shamans: dance is their medium. Ranging in age from twenty to thirty-five, they offer affirmative stage personas to counteract the stereotypes of violence and nihilism so easily attached to young black males.

Harris was born in 1964, and by age eight he was being praised for performing steps he had taught himself by watching the television program Soul Train. He and a friend and one of his five brothers, billing themselves as the Cobra Three, won a church talent show the summer prior to his enrolling at Philadelphia's Roman Catholic High School. As a freshman, he was "challenged" while dancing outside a classroom. His challenger, one Franklin "Money" Stewart, became his friend and mentor and taught him "stepping," a Philly-style vernacular dance that is a form of tap performed without taps.

In his sophomore year, Harris joined a group called the Scanner Boys who were "poppers"; according to Harris, popping is "internal pantomime--to go to another space and be invoked by a spirit." By using stop-start, freeze-frame, or slow-motion gestures, poppers "create monsters and all kinds of illusionary beings. To dance like you had no bones was the big thing." By 1982, the Scanner Boys had moved on to break dancing, a specific style defined by its acrobatic floorwork.

Puremovement came about as a fluke. In 1993, invited to perform at the Movement Theater International Festival in Philadelphia, Harris was encouraged by entrepreneur Michael Pedretti to scrap the Scanner Boys, and the new company was born. Present company members, some of whom have been with Harris since the Scanner Boys days, are Clyde "Prophet" Evans, Jr., Brandon "Peace" Albright, Ron "Zen One" Wood, Leslie "Rhino" Rivera, James "Cricket" Colter, Rodney "Duck Butt Baby" Mason, and Harris himself, "Prince Scarecrow." As in traditional African culture, these nicknames are symbolic of the performers' special personalities. Each dancer is a world of improvisation and ingenuity unto himself. All are expert in slow-motion and in super-speed acrobatics, basic African-based social dance steps, and--most important--irony and humor in movement. For them, hip-hop is a culture, a society, a way of life.

"People often mistake our spirit for mere energy" says Harris. "Hip-hop is more than acrobatics and athleticism. It is the African-based vernacular dance of the present era--the spectmm of traditional black culture at this particular moment: stepping, locking, popping, breaking, house, vogue, trendy, second-line, go-go--all these variations of grassroots dance fall under the hip-hop umbrella. From plantation dances to cakewalk, Charleston, camel walk, and moonwalk, it's just traditional African culture that comes around each time with a different flavor."

Harris and his dancers still look to club culture for their lifeblood, and depend on the club spirit for inspiration and rejuvenation. Contending that it's easier to bring hip-hop culture to the stage than the movement itself, Harris asserts, "The movement is an improvisational, spiritual thing. When you're onstage, you're in a box with people looking at you, so you have this different type of relationship with your movement. When you're at a club, you're in a circle--in the round--and energy surrounds you. It's difficult to re-create that feeling onstage." To offset this difference, he tries to choreograph around an improvisational core. "We take improvisation as far as it can go," he says, "and then bring it back and then let it go again. That way I can bring some of the club essence onstage."

The Harris movement lexicon is purely vernacular: pops, locks, breaking (which includes acrobatics), stepping, cha-cha, boogie, and so on. His hip-hop works took on their decidedly African flavor in August 1996 when he accompanied Chuck Davis and the African American Dance Ensemble on its annual "Dancing Through West Africa" excursion. Davis became one of his mentors, along with choreographer, teacher, and consultant Reginald Yates, who is based in Miami. Even in their structure, his pieces are not fashioned as conventional concert-dance works. One piece segues into the next, as though the dancers were in a village--or a club. His commitment to improvisation--a defining ingredient in all African-based dance--has meant that a dance choreographed in 1993 isn't quite the same when performed in 1999. As Harris puts it, "All the pieces I do we still kind of work on." Don't be misled by that casual tone; he will also add, "I'm a person who is still desperately seeking, and totally frustrated with myself when I don't live up to my own expectations."

Since 1993 he has been teaching in colleges and universities, in dance schools and arts centers here and abroad. "Teaching was the way I began to find out what I was doing" he says. "As I taught, I learned." Refreshingly free of race or class biases, Harris talks about a teaching stint with a group of white, middle-class, female, suburban ballet students as an example of call and response. He taught them that hip-hop was about history, tradition, and the spirit of a people; they taught him, in mm, that in hip-hop there were the plie, tour jete, chasse, and pas de bourree: "They were there, but I didn't know them by those names."

Several of his works--Endangered Species (1993), P/Funk (1994), March of the Antmen (1997)--end with a man being shot down. In Species, an autobiographical solo, the fragmented gestures of popping (or electric boogie) parallel the psychic fragmentation experienced by an African-American male coming of age. Says Harris, "I realized that there's a lot of the violence, rage, and abuse that goes on, especially in the black community, that's kept under the rug--that I was touching on a lot of things that people weren't talking about, at least not in public."

P/Funk ("Philadelphia Funk") represents a particularly masculine, aggressive-defensive style of hip-hop and is dedicated to "the hustlers hanging on the street corner who once were boys celebrating their `moment of purity' before they lost their way." Harris also dedicates it to his brother Patrick, who was shot twelve times in a street chase but survived. It represents the mood Harris characterizes as "funk"; in an earlier era and a slightly different mode, it would have been called "the blues."

The work Harris says he feels closest to is Students of the Asphalt Jungle (1994): "I always looked at things like that when I was growing up: just do your thing, whatever happens." Like Alvin Ailey's Revelations, this work may prove to be the early high point in one man's career. The piece begins in silence, then explodes into samba-based African steps performed forcefully and in unison to a sound track of African-inspired hip-hop music known as "tribal house," and concludes in a round of astoundingly difficult improvised but loosely structured solos. Harris declares, "The only reason I was able to not blame society for the way I grew up was because my spirit is like that --always celebratory. I'm just happy to be alive."

That spirit is coming into its own and receiving international recognition. Touring steadily for the past two years, Puremovement will perform and teach in Germany, Italy, and France this fall; tour Australia and Asia from January to March; and then return to Philadelphia for a late spring season.

Harris's first priority is a new work, Facing Mecca, which he describes as "a hodgepodge of everybody's religion. It's a celebratory dance, a fusion of traditional African, capoeira, hip-hop, and courting dance." (There will be women in this dance.) It was inspired, conceptually, by Doug Elkins (who himself has gotten quite a lot of inspiration from hip-hop culture) and by a DanceAfrica Chicago collaboration between Puremovement and Iwisa, a South African company. Harris is also attending to a fascinating project called Continuum, described as a house piece that "really works with space and moves across the stage," to be structured in between other pieces: "two minutes here, four minutes there"

Recent Puremovement performances have concluded with a remarkable series of bows. Two dancers enter from opposite wings upstage to a mesmerizing fragment of music by the Afro-British pop artist Seal, singing, "Saw my blood on the ground, and it changed my life"; they embrace upstage center, move downstage, proffer some personalized gesture--a raised fist, the peace sign, the sign of the cross--and exit as the next pair enters to follow the same pattern with individual variations. All exude a power that defies stereotypes, transcends negativity, and brings spectators and performers alike into a clear place.

Puremovement is pure spirit and sheer joy. Rennie Harris's work is truly transformative.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Dance Magazine correspondent in Philadelphia, is author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Greenwood Publishers, 1998).