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Rennie Harris’ award-winning dance company Puremovement returns to Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 3. The Footlights series performance is one of many activities included in the College’s celebration of Black History Month.Tickets are free for Lafayette students, $6 for students at LVAIC schools, $4 for faculty and staff, and $22 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
At 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, there will be an open rehearsal with the dance company in the Williams Center, followed by refreshments and a question and answer period with Harris and his dancers. At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 3, Harris will give a pre-performance talk on hip-hop dance in room 108 of the Williams Center. Both events are free and open to the public.
The last performance of the 2009-10 Footlights series will be Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, March 9, $22.
Harris’ Puremovement dancers will share the richness of their repertoire, from the gritty and riveting 1990s masterpiece Students of the Asphalt Jungle to more recent creations showcasing the diverse forms of hip-hop dance–popping, locking, electric boogaloo, and b-boying. The show was called “a jewel of choreographic invention and comic subtlety” and “ceaselessly brilliant and often hilarious” by The New York Times.
Harris first performed at the Williams Center in 1998, enriched by “on the road” apprenticeships as diverse as Chuck Davis’s African American Dance Ensemble and the pop world of Soul Train. Since that 1998 Lafayette debut with his Puremovement troupe, Harris has gone on to create major full-evening events–among them Rome & Jewels and Facing Mekka (both seen at the Williams Center)–that have toured the world and secured his reputation as the preeminent hip-hop choreographer of his generation.
This performance is supported by a National Endowment for the Arts American Masters touring grant, administered through the New England Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, a program developed and funded by The Heinz Endowments, the William Penn Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
The 2009-2010 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, the J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Special thanks to the F.M. Kirby Foundation for its extraordinary support.