Rennie Harris is a consummate storyteller in street dance, forging narrative, summoning whole worlds and spotlighting art, music and movement that resonate with his own. He is also a keen preservationist and his American Street Dancer, which came to New York’s Joyce Theater last week, highlighted three regional dance traditions in an engrossing documentary format.
In it, rhythms passed imaginatively from performer to performer. Invoking Africa, master djembe player Brytiece Wallace circled performance artist and beatboxer Akim Funk Buddha. Imbued with the beat, Funk Buddha stamped his feet, crouched and swiveled, then lay down on a miked wooden platform and drummed against it with his fists. A disturbing echo of the Middle Passage surfaced as his body quivered in agony before dissolving into soft, wave-like undulations as if he’d slipped into the sea.
Tap dancer extraordinaire Ayodele Casel arrived in the company of a white-robed ancestor figure who haunted the proceedings mostly from the sidelines. There was a luminosity to Casel’s footwork, light, restless and whimsically accented. She seemed to be listening to her feet, as if she had no idea what they were going to do next. She had a little back and forth with Harris’ disembodied voice who asked her about tap’s connection to enslavement and their shared heritage (she is Black and Puerto Rican.) She responded wordlessly in tap. She delicately lifted and crossed one leg over the other, whipped into a turn one way then unwound it as an afterthought. Her heels shimmered, and her arms billowed briefly like wings, as if she wanted to fly.
Casel was a tough act to follow but the extraordinary beatboxers Funk Buddha, Alexander ‘Bizkit’ Sanchez and Kenny Muhammad summoned up the sounds of birds and other animals, of heavy machinery, pistons and crashing cymbals. Together they conjured up a kaleidoscope of feeling, from yearning and hopeful to belligerent protest.
Reclaiming the rhythm, a trio of bucket drummers with the master djembe player locked into a tight, hypnotic groove.
The beating heart of the evening was divided between Creation Global’s bouncy, electric display of Chicago footwork, the House of Jit’s superbly jagged blitz of Detroit jit, and the Rennie Harris Puremovement dancers’ classy exposition of Philadelphia GQ.
Pride in their craft mingled with pride in their communities. “Footwork runs through these Chi-town streets, rooted deep,” a Creation Global dancer declared. “And people always ask, how do you move your feet at 160 beats. I say, culturally it’s embedded in me to use my feet against my oppressor. See, us footworkers were born into living conditions where dance and music are the movements that saved our lives.”
The dazzling display of jit from Detroit, the birthplace of Motown, techno and America’s automotive industry, seemed to reflect the coiled, torqued energy of the workers depicted in Diego Rivera’s monumental Detroit Industry murals of the 1930’s: bodies sharply angled, heroically braced against machinery and poised for action in the factories of Ford and others around the city in the Depression era. Angular and full-bodied, the movement radiated a cool, contained power – arms flung with intent, effortless level shifts and smooth drops, legs slicing the air.
In his hometown of Philadelphia, explained Harris, the Latin cha-cha was an influence which evolved into stepping in the 60’s and then into GQ. You could see traces in the gliding, sliding quality of his dancers’ walk, the hip-driven accents, clean lines and cool, debonair attitude.
They sported a classic look: bowler hats, suits, bow ties and two-tone wingtips. Brim touches and hat angle shifts, along with gestures like flicking handkerchiefs, brushing their jackets and hitching up their pant legs read like gestures to cultural memory, echoing the cool self-possession of earlier soft-shoe traditions and big-band jazz club swagger. Nothing beat that diagonal planting of a foot and slick drag back in.
Not to be missed was the cypher as prologue, in which the companies gathered in a circle and cheered on each individual as they bounded into the center and offered their own signature moves.
Less compelling were the video projections on hanging panels that flanked the stage and hung below the turntablist’s dais. Their aspect ratio seemed deliberately distorted which didn’t serve much purpose when we could barely make out the historical footage of the cakewalk and other heritage dances.
Although some American cities have served as living archives of style – boogaloo in Oakland, locking in L.A., jookin’ in Memphis – street dance remains erratically documented and at risk of fading into obscurity. Work like American Street Dancer provides rare and valuable context, particularly at a time when whole chunks of American cultural history are being censored.
