A dance production which brings together hip-hop and jazz tap comes to Auckland on Wednesday. GRAHAM REID talks to choreographer-dancer Rennie Harris.
The phone call catches Rennie Harris putting together a film documentary about hip-hop in his hometown of Philadelphia.
And the Philly style of hip-hop dancing is quite different to any other, he is quick to point out.
"A lot of times what the world doesn't know is that there is a movement and vocabulary in hip-hop dance which is indigenous to the cities, but also to the community and the neighbourhood.
"So if I go to Atlanta they may be doing different steps. We have more knowledge of styles now, and more people participating, but in California it's mostly poppers and lockers. On the East Coast it's more b-boys."
Welcome to the language and codes of hip-hop dance which Harris has been performing for as long as he can remember. Dancing since he could walk, he says, and first paid to do it when he was 14.
Since founding his own company in 1979, Harris has been taking the dance and rhythms of the hip-hop streets to American audiences, most of whom are familiar with it only through noisy beatboxes on subways.
Right now Harris' Pure Movement company has joined Herbin van Clayseele's Urban Tap in a show which has had critics scanning for superlatives, but which Rennie pointedly talks down as simply a work in progress and part of a greater tradition of black dance.
Cool Heat Urban Beat brings together Harris' hip-hop dancers and three jazz tappers to a soundtrack from DJ Signify on turntables, percussionist Daniel Moreno and rap-poet Joey Middleton jun.
The common ground may be the percussive rhythms and what Harris calls "the vocabulary of black dance," but the show is choreographed as a dance battle between the two rival sides.
The hip-hoppers make head-spins and gravity-defying break-dance manoeuvres, whereas the tappers are pure urbane Broadway but respond with increasing athleticism.
Since the 80s, Harris has been presenting hip-hop dance to theatre audiences but insists the Cool Heat Urban Beat show was a specific commission from the Dance Umbrella organisation.
Finding mutual ground between the two styles was not difficult.
"The tap dancers project the tap rhythms through their feet and hip-hop dancers project it through their mouths.
You'll see them verbalising the rhythm and beat in their mouth, like a scat jazz singer.
"And because tapping is percussive, they are right at home with a DJ." But Harris is insistent this particular project is not what his company usually does and that he sees all his work within a cultural continuum.
For him, the move into theatres from life on the streets where many of his friends were gang-bangers, was less conscious than a natural progression.
"I didn't have a theatre background but had been dancing all my life. So it wasn't like I started in the western structured way of thinking where there's a beginning and an end.
"It was more in the same way as traditional African dancing culture where you live and dance and sing about it.
"I wasn't necessarily thinking of it as something that was outside of me and my culture. Exactly when it became theatrical I couldn't tell you because it was always theatrical for me.
"In the early days of slavery they presented black culture in minstrel shows and Vaudeville, that's when the culture became very theatrical. People started to push that vocabulary in the theatre and crossed those lines a long time ago. So in that regard I wouldn't say I was doing anything that was new."
Within African culture and the Diaspora what you can observe, he says, is people who may well look similar but whose cultural expression can emphasise their individuality. He cites jazz by way of example, and the hip-hoppers who draw on common moves but add their own flourishes.
Seen in that light, Cool Heat Urban Beat takes on another meaning beyond simply bringing street culture to theatre audiences.
Harris says there is a lot of text and poetry in the programme to expand the audiences' knowledge of hip-hop culture. It advances his concept of bringing together various styles into pure movement which has diverse cultural and social references, and draws on a broad language of dance.
While Harris may be winning acclaim for this present work, he will take his Pure Movement company back to what it was doing before this highly successful digression.
After New Zealand performances in Wellington and Auckland, and a few mopping-up dates back home, the company will be recast and he will be happily exploring other aspects of hip-hop dance.
Rennie Harris, a reluctant hit maker it would seem.
* Cool Heat Urban Beat: ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, Wednesday March 22 to Sunday March 26. (Matinee performance at the ASB Theatre, Saturday March 25, 2 pm)
Hip-hop moves off the streets on to the stage
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