RENNIE HARRIS PUREMOVEMENT.

RENNIE HARRIS PUREMOVEMENT
WILMA THEATER
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
JUNE 14-18, 2000

No Shakespeare in b-boy baggies, Rennie Harris, choreographer and artistic director of Puremovement, offers a Romeo and Juliet that deserves its new name--Rome and Jewels. This is postmodernism par excellence, with text shaved and pasted onto rapper's delights, making Romeo into a trickster with words and a jester with movement. This hip-hop opera, with rap-poetry arias, is a fourth-generation abstraction: Shakespeare filtered through two movies (the 1961 Jerome Robbins musical West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo and Juliet). The result is a pared-down, street-smart encounter between African-American cultural forms and the naked truth of love and death that undergirds Shakespeare's plot.

Harris's production delves beneath Shakespearean language and form to focus on the experience and situation of teen sex and adolescent violence. (Lest we forget, Juliet may have been as young as 14, and Romeo was not much older.) Whether it's the Sharks and Jets, the Crips and Bloods, or the Montagues and Capulets (here renamed the Monster Q's and Caps), the issue in each case is an ongoing feud, with everyone forced to take sides. With sophisticated techniques and consummate skill, Harris's scenario focuses on the conflict.

The story begins and ends with a stage strewn with lifeless bodies. The action in between is really a memory, an extended flashback; our attention focuses on the death and destruction wrought by gang violence. Another ingenious departure from previous versions: Jewels is not an onstage character, but a powerful presence who drives the male cast and stirs its desires. (Aleksa Chmiel and Julie Urich, the only female cast members and both fine dancers, function as male members of the warring families.)

The performers are nothing short of phenomenal, applying their individuality and improvisational skills to keep the work fluid. The leads are rappers as well as dancers. In words and movement Sabela Grimes's Ben V. (Benvolio) is dark, sly, menacing; Clyde Evans Jr.'s Merc (Mercutio) is exuberant, joking, lighthearted. Ron Wood's Tibault is cutting, hard, possessive.

Rodney Mason's Rome is one of the most sophisticated, layered, self-mocking characterizations I've seen recently. In the middle of a line he alternates between Shakespearean speech and Ebonics (African American colloquial English). Likewise, his dancing moves from hard-bop hip-hop in the gang scenes to a yoga-like sensuality in his "love scene" with the absent Jewels. Using backbends, head- and shoulder-stands, cobra and crow poses, he slithers through his courtship dance. Earlier, he became a crouching animal--really, the "animal" of himself--as he squatted and hunkered over bodies sprawled on the battlefield.

Harris could cut the atmospheric smoke in the opening scene, and Howard Goldkrand's multiple-screen videography was not only improvised--which is fine--but also wavered on opening night. Grimes's intricate "aha" is overtly sexist; and an absent heroine is inescapably an object of (male) fantasy. But despite any shortcomings, this is an intelligent, complex, engrossing look at the human tragicomedy. With its hip-hop poetry, dance and music (by DJs Cisum, Miz and Evil Tracy, joined by Owen Brown, an amazing musician playing electric violin), this is total theater for the twenty-first century.

As my companion said, "We are seeing dance theater history being made." Catch it if you can.