Rennie Harris

Lorenzo "Rennie" Harris grew up in North Philadelphia within the social world from which his art would emerge. His formation came through an African American community steeped in hip-hop—not as a style he discovered later, but as lived environment: music, language, fashion, dance, and neighborhood exchange. Televised performances by Don Campbell and the Lockers sparked his early interest. As a young teenager he organized and danced with local groups including Cobra III, the Step Masters, and later the Scanner Boys, crews whose exact chronologies and membership are best understood as formative stages in oral-dance history.

During the 1980s Harris worked in the commercial hip-hop circuit. He toured on the Fresh Festival in 1984, a landmark national hip-hop tour documented in Alvin Ailey's records, and took work on Philadelphia dance television and with recording artists. Those jobs taught him stagecraft and production. But his larger ambition was more historically urgent: to build concert work from street and club vocabularies while naming their creators, lineages, and social meanings. He returned to Philadelphia late in the decade and performed with the Scanner Boys until the group's final appearance in 1992.

In 1992 Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement. The company joined performance to preservation, lecture-demonstrations, and teaching, asserting that hip-hop dance deserved both theatrical resources and serious historical study. Harris later described this as "Street Dance Theater"—a theatrical framework in which popping, locking, breaking, house, and Philadelphia street-dance vocabularies could carry narrative, abstraction, character, and social commentary without severing those forms from their communities. RHPM's early work established a model for a street-dance company operating in the nonprofit concert field.

*Rome & Jewels*, recorded at Jacob's Pillow in 2000, became a defining example. Harris's reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy through hip-hop language, male street-dance crews, and Darrin Ross's sound design demonstrated how battle, gesture, rhythm, and group identity could function as dramaturgical systems. His later works—*P-Funk*, *Facing Mekka*, and *Nuttin' But a Word*—continued testing how social dancing could hold spiritual, political, and interpersonal ideas on a proscenium stage. In 1998 Harris began the Illadelph Legends of Hip-Hop Festival, bringing street-dance pioneers into teaching, discussion, and performance contexts.

Harris built educational infrastructure alongside his theatrical work. In 2007 he founded Rennie Harris Awe-Inspiring Works as a youth-focused second company centered on mentorship and performance discipline. That same year United States Artists selected him for a USA Fellowship. His teaching has extended to universities, professional companies, and a teacher-training program that stresses technique alongside cultural and historical knowledge. Rennie Harris University codifies foundations in hip-hop and house without claiming ownership of those forms. The University of Colorado Boulder lists him as an artistic director and choreographer.

Commissions for major repertory companies widened his reach. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered *Home* in 2011, and in 2018 presented *Lazarus*—the company's first two-act work, created with Darrin Ross's original score and sound design. Ailey named Harris its first artist in residence. He has also received commissions from Philadanco, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Ballet Memphis, Colorado Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, among others. In 2023 the American Dance Festival presented him with the Samuel H. Scripps/ADF Award for lifetime achievement in choreography. A multi-year Penn Live Arts residency has combined new creation, repertory reconstruction, and work with Philadelphia students—an effort to reconnect his creative process with the city and preserve knowledge held in bodies, relationships, and oral history. Performance, pedagogy, and historical correction remain inseparable in his work.