Rennie Harris Solo Project

Internationally renowned choreographer Rennie Harris hails from Philadelphia, currently works bi-coastally, and is credited throughout the dance field as essential to putting Hip Hop dance on the concert stage for the first time. Fidget is commissioning Harris to create a new solo dance work for Fidget’s co-director, Megan Bridge.

Work began on this new solo project–Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4 –at University of Colorado, Boulder, in December 2023, and continued in Philadelphia in a week-long residency at the Kimmel Center, March 11-15, 2024. A premiere is planned in Philadelphia in 2026.

This new work will use the figure of the white woman as a foil to create conversation around race, cultural appropriation, and privilege. The project tells a familiar coming-of-age story of an artist’s process of self-discovery. While she is sitting in her room, journaling, discovering herself, banging on a drum and meditating, the US sees a Trump presidency, the world experiences a pandemic, our country sees more and more Black people being shot at the hands of the law, Roe V. Wade is overturned, there are more mass shootings, a ramp up to war, economic turmoil, and the massive oppression and violent atrocities that we continue to see play out around the world today. This project takes one woman’s story and embeds it in a multi-media landscape that confronts these issues, and puts on display the intense dissonance between personal actualization and who, what kinds of people, are allowed to experience that kind of journey, and at what cost.

This project has a long history. In the spring of 2000, when Bridge graduated with her BFA from The Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase, Harris choreographed her solo thesis performance. It was a 7-minute dance that mashed up Hip-hop and modern dance, and the sound score included a recorded conversation between the two artists, talking reflexively about the project. Since then the world has changed in profound ways--it was 1999 when Harris and Bridge began work on the original project, which was called Beautiful Human Lies.  

Returning to work on this project now, twenty-three years later, marks changes not only in our culture and in our dancing communities, but in these two artists’ lives and in their physically inhabited bodies. In 1999, Rennie was 35; now he is 60 and has two new hips. Megan turned 20 in the year 1999: now she is 45 and has given birth twice. This project engages the many ways that artistic collaboration can be generative and can mark the passage of time not only for the artists involved, but for all those who touch or witness the project.

Participating scholar and writer Brenda Dixon Gottschild is an American cultural historian, performer, choreographer, and anti-racist cultural worker. Dr. Dixon-Gottschild will write program notes and lead an audience conversation after the work’s premiere; she will also publish a research article on the project in Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts.