RENNIE HARRIS/PUREMOVEMENT.

RENNIE HARRIS/PUREMOVEMENT BEHNKE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE MAY 6-16, 1999

"All the work is truly about me," Rennie Harris said in his pre-curtain speech at Seattle's Behnke Center, which makes him another link in the long chain of modern dance choreographers whose companies also bear their names.

The founder and artistic director of Rennie Harris/Puremovement draws cheering audiences everywhere these days: his brilliant dancers--including two women--help him make the popping, spinning, breaking, locking, dueling, high-energy, virtuosic vocabulary of hip-hop into completely viable theatrical art. He doesn't need to make pre-curtain speeches to explain it--the work speaks for itself.

None speaks more eloquently than Endangered Species, an excerpt from an autobiographical piece that begins with a solo performed by Harris, accompanied by a rap text that tells part of the story of his life. Alternately wryly humorous and emotionally wrenching, in movement terms this is a masterpiece. The big, light-footed dancer uses his arms as intricately as any classical ballerina in snaking, hand-twisting movements, and his whole body moves in joint-separating, jerky bursts that are graphically evocative of the fear engendered by life on inner-city streets.

Endangered Species was made in 1993; Harris has had time to polish both the choreography and his own performance, but it hasn't lost any spontaneity or power in the process.

The same cannot be said of one of the company's signature works, Students of The Asphalt Jungle, which Harris, emphasizing hip-hop's roots in an African tribal dance, likens to a male rite of passage.

Packed with virtuoso dancing by the eight bare-chested male cast members, Asphalt is performed against a background of video projections of a tribal mask and other scenes from Africa and has plenty of tremendously effective lighting bells and whistles. The unison movement packs a real wallop, a head-spinning solo is electrifying: but I missed some of the gritty edginess it has had in earlier performances.

Rome & Jewels, a highly ambitious work in progress inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, opened a concert that also included Trinidad native Clyde Evans, Jr.'s passionately witty Breath and Harris's Continuum. Danced to a cacaphony of sound mixed by Darrin Ross, as well as Shakespeare's prologue delivered in rhythms faintly evocative of rap, this "R and J" is still rather inchoate, the unison movement of the rival families seemingly unlinked to anything else, the narrative barely discernible from the movement. What Harris is doing with this piece is intriguing and promising, but the jury is out until the premiere of the finished evening-length work that will be held in Philadelphia next year. [See article, page 60.]