Hip

Jul 25, 2023

BECKET — As Rennie Harris puts it, “The three laws of hip-hop are individuality, creativity, and improvisation.” All three will be seen in events spread out across Jacob’s Pillow this week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the music-dance form that has pervaded our culture. Beginning on the Bronx streets in the 1970s, hip-hop has become influential in every aspect of entertainment media, from music that tops the Billboard charts, to Broadway shows, to international concert tours, to winning a place in the Paris Summer Olympics 2024 where 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls will battle it out for the gold.

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Harris, a former performer, is the artistic director of the company that bears his name. The main program which opened on Wednesday night at the Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theatre, is shared by Rennie Harris Puremovement American Street Dance Theater, Kwikstep and Rokafella, and d. Sabela Grimes for the Ladies of Hip-Hop Dance Collective. Each of their works underscores Harris’s belief that you must view hip-hop as progressive to explain its changes over the past 50 years.

Kwikstep and Rokafella opened the show with a delightful interlude, “Thief of Hearts,” about a bumbling pair of crooks out to steal a diamond, centered in a laser light show — a throwback to silent film comedy, embellished by break dancing moves. “Parable of PassAge,” a Jacob’s Pillow, Joan B. Hunter New Work Commission, choreographed by Grimes and the Ladies of Hip-Hop, is an ambitious work in progress, performed by four women, led by Reyna Núñez. The work, an extension of the larger creative constellation, “Parable of Portals,” inspired by the work of author Octavia E. Butler, is danced against a backdrop of film and video projections in a fantasia of images, music, sound, and light.

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In the second half, Rennie Harris Puremovement provided much of the heart and heat of the evening with his work, ”Nuttin’ but a Word.” Harris reaches back to hip-hop’s origins by introducing the 10 members of his company, five men and five women, who enter in a solo apiece. Each of them is dressed in black pants and tops, with black gym shoes. After the solos, they leave the stage to re-enter, forming a circle, where more solos take center stage, as if the dancers were on a street corner, in a New York subway station, or at a block party. Three segments of a Harris interview on film is interspersed between the dancing.

The movement is innovative, yet familiar from the years we’ve been watching hip-hop develop, with arms and legs slicing into space, or sliding out in ripples, fluid torsos, bent knees, freezes and air-borne flights that land the dancers’ bodies in a splat on the ground, invented and improvised from a vocabulary of past steps such as locking, popping, house, freeze, and all their embellishments, arranged by Harris for theatrical presentation, presented by groups of varying size.

Harris believes in hip-hop as an agent of story-telling, interrupting the fast pacing with a poignant, heart-breaking duet (performed by Phillip Cuttino Jr. and Joshua Culbreath) about police violence against Black men, all too common in our society. The vignette provides a change in velocity and emotion, before the finale for the quintet of men, this time bare-chested and dressed in white pants in an unforgettable virtuoso, risk-taking performance of masculine strength, interwoven with humor — and danger. I cannot imagine a more thrilling male ensemble anywhere in the dance world.

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The sense of community, an underlying theme of hip-hop, both past and present, came at the joyous curtain call for all the evening’s dancers.

The Hip-Hop Across the Pillow festival within a festival continues through Aug. 6 at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket. Tickets start at $54. 413-243-0745, www.jacobspillow.org