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When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins “The Ampersand” podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk

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Late last year, New York Times arts critic Brian Seibert, in wrote that “Harris has done more than any other choreographer to reveal and develop the metaphorical and narrative expressivity of American street dance.”

In the world of dance, he’s a legend—named a “Living Legend” by Dance magazine, in fact—yet he’s also the guy you might occasionally see tooling around the University of Colorado Boulder campus on a skateboard.��

Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways, and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ dance program.��

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Rennie Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ dance program. (Photo: Osamu Inoue)

He��host��Erika Randall, ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on����a College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about ANDing��as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

For Harris, that experience and possibility starts with showing up. Hip-hop is a participatory culture, he says, and for those who show up? Well, that’s when the divine happens.

RENNIE HARRIS: My first skateboard was made by a cat, his name is Lewis Bailey. He is part of the younger kids, siblings, of Bill Bailey.��

ERIKA RANDALL: Stop it.��

HARRIS: Yes, he was my classmate and …

RANDALL: And he built boards? Tell me the story.��

HARRIS: We were friends since middle school, parochial school. I went to Roman Catholic, he went to a public school. So, he built boards, and that was how I got my first board.��

RANDALL: Did you know who … so, who was Bill Bailey?��

HARRIS: Bill Bailey is his father. Bill was a tapper. Pearl Bailey, his aunt. I used to hang out at their house all the time. He's also the first person I saw do the backslide.��

We were in recess, and he was gliding across the gravel and everyone stopped. He looked like he was walking, but he was gliding. He was moving backwards, but his feet …

RANDALL: First time you've ever seen it.��

HARRIS: Yeah. Knees going foom, like what the heck is that? And he says, oh, my father taught me.��

RANDALL: Stop it.��

HARRIS: And that's all he said. Later on, we became really close friends.��

RANDALL: But he didn't call it moonwalk.��

HARRIS: No, no, the original, it's called the backslide. The moonwalk actually goes forward, and it looks like you're walking on the moon.��

RANDALL: Yeah, that's moonwalk in hip hop.��

HARRIS: That's why it's called the moonwalk in street dance, yeah.��

RANDALL: But Earl Snakehips Tucker was doing the backslide …��

HARRIS: I saw Bill Bailey in 1933 do it, do the backslide. And he was known for that.��

RANDALL: In tap shoes.��

HARRIS: So, that's the first time I see it. I meet with—his name was Johnny, Lewis Bailey, but they call him Johnny, Johnny Bailey. Yeah, so he made me a board. And then he started teaching me 360s, spacewalk, walk the dog, helicopter, doing planks …

RANDALL: So, you were breaking on your board.��

HARRIS: Yeah, doing handstands and planks on the board. I was like, oh, snap. Yeah, so we should do all that. I said do 360s with two boards.��

RANDALL: And you were dancing at the same time��

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For Rennie Harris, hip-hop is a participatory culture. (Photo: Bob Emmott)

HARRIS: Yeah, all this was happening at the same time.��

RANDALL: You were always doing all the things.��

HARRIS: Yeah, especially in the summer we would get up and be out of the house by 8 in the morning. We were just out. We were out. And, of course, this is when landlines were …

RANDALL: For people listening at home, that's when there's a phone in the wall and a cord that's attached.��

HARRIS: So, at that time we would go out, never went back home until like 11 at night.��

RANDALL: So, it wasn't even, ‘It starts to get dark, I want you home, Lorenzo.’

HARRIS: When I was younger, it had to be when the streetlights came on. That was always like 6, 7. You had to be on the block.

RANDALL: Within yelling distance.��

HARRIS: ‘I need to be able to see you,’ that kind of thing. And so we would go out 8, 9 in the morning. I'd be across the city three or four times already by the time I got back. We were just walking and doing all kinds of stuff.

RANDALL: And you had a crew.

HARRIS: Yeah. We were skateboard. We played basketball. We'd go to the park. We used to play army man because we all thought we were going to go into the military after high school.��

RANDALL: You did?��

HARRIS: Oh, that was the plan ...��

RANDALL: So, your first performance, can you take us back as a dancer, the first time you made money and when you had the entrepreneurialism, the moxie to say, ‘I'm going to make money on this thing that we've been doing in the community but now I'm going to figure out how to make a living?’��

HARRIS: The first time I ever got paid was not performance. I was teaching. And I did this little lecture, Brenda Dixon Gottschild brought me in. I was about 14 or something.��

RANDALL: BDG brought you in at 14?��

HARRIS: She was at Temple. Yeah.��

RANDALL: How did you know her?��

HARRIS: I didn't at the time.��

RANDALL: How'd she find you?��

HARRIS: I have no clue.��

RANDALL: That is bizarre. She's one of the greatest dance scholars of all time, and she's bringing in 14-year-old not yet Sir Rennie Harris.��

HARRIS: We had become very popular in Philadelphia as a street dance crew. We were poppers, we weren't breakers.��

RANDALL: What was your crew's name?��

HARRIS: . And we became so popular that our name was at city hall. All the programs and all the things, any time there was an event ...��

RANDALL: Let's get the Scanner Boys.��

HARRIS: They called the Scanner Boys to be the entertainment. You know what I mean.��

RANDALL: So, you brought hip hop to the university at 14.��

HARRIS: Possibly, yeah.��

RANDALL: That's wild.��

HARRIS: Because everyone wanted to know what I did.��

RANDALL: Yeah, so what did you say? What does 14-year-old Rennie say about popping?��

HARRIS: I was just explaining what pop is, we're street dancers, blah blah blah blah.��

RANDALL: Did you demo?��

HARRIS: Yeah, I demoed. I demoed, I remember that. And I remember sitting in her office at Temple.��

RANDALL: She saw a gap, though, in dance studies. She saw that this was not in the books, that this was not in the classroom. This was not in the literature. And you were the first guest then. I'm going to say you were the first.��

HARRIS: Yeah, I was a kid.��

RANDALL: And you did not have designs yet to be in the Academy or bring hip hop to the …

HARRIS: Oh, no. I will tell you this, because you mentioned something about money earlier. I will tell you this. It was all economics. If you paid me, I'd dance. I was like Tina Turner, your private dancer. That was one of my favorite songs, too.��

RANDALL: Oh my God, Tina.��

HARRIS: But do you know what I'm saying? So, we would go to different bars, go to lounges, and try to get money from the old people because we knew the old people would be drinking and they would be drunk.��

RANDALL: Would you put out a jar or a hat?��

HARRIS: We would have a hat, and say we go to the door of the bar and be like, ‘Hey, can we come in and dance?’ And dude was like, ‘Quick, make it quick.’ All right, all right. So, we'll go in and they'll put some music on, and we'll play off the jukebox, play something. And we would dance, and then we'd pass the hat around.��

RANDALL: And you would take turns improvising? Or would you run it like a cipher?

HARRIS: It was always an improvisation, and it was always what I would call traditional hip hop busking. We would all stand in a line, do what they call the Soul Clap or the Soul Step, just a two-step to the left. And then we would do a solo, and then sometimes we'd do a routine to break it up. You know what I mean? And really, any kind of choreography was just a means to get to the solo for everyone. And so that's what we did, and then we would put out the hat.

Click play to hear the rest of the conversation!����

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