ABSTRACT
At the level of production, the dance idiom of Rennie Harris and his company reflects the periphery of the late capitalist, post-urban world in which he grew up – fits and starts, shape shifting and time displacement, parody and mimicry as codes of exchange and consumption, lots of consumption, but of goods that have no actual materiality to them, no physicality as of yet. Funky, indeed. Unlike the corps de ballet that is organized like a standard capitalist factory – corps/workers, prima/shop manager (costume, props and music all reside within the span of the shop manager), artistic director/mid-level management, and finally board of directors/capitalist – PureMovement is more akin to a collective, each dancer prized for his or her particular interpretation of the rhythm and the set-moves, not the ability to replicate a corpus of movements: that’s boring. However, in order to pull off Rome & Jewels, Harris had to force the issue of mastery, bringing into alignment the particularities of each dancer to match the vision. Be not mistaken. It is by no means his vision alone, and he is very clear about that. In classic hip hop style, the production is an ensemble effort. Instead of a conversation between the DJ, rapper and breakers and audiences in the cipher, Rome & Jewels owes its existence to a series of choreographies on film, a choreographer, six playwrights, a DJ, an MC, several dancers, a videographer, and the unfortunate settings/scenes of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, sworn microphone enemies. Though it toys with mass-produced items and idioms, even delving into Fordist choreographic strategies, Rome & Jewels, because of the alleged conflict between what’s in sight/site, a bunch of black men doing ‘urban dance’, and what’s in mind, an old white man writing a masterpiece of theatre, forces the question about reproduction: why y’all so hung up on cloning?1
