When Rennie Harris and Megan Bridge get together, ideas take flight and philosophy peppers the conversation. Two Philadelphians from opposite reaches of the dance world, they share a constellation of commonalities—being Aquarians, parents, each one equally ready to embrace and expand on the other’s concepts.
This unlikely pairing’s first iteration was in 1999 when Bridge, graduating from the dance conservatory at SUNY Purchase, asked rising street-dance artist Harris to choreograph a seven-minute solo for her thesis concert. The work had its professional debut in 2000 at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Twenty-five years later, at Bridge’s request, the seed of that short work has generated an evening-length solo, to be premiered at the 2025 Philly Fringe.
Harris’ background rests firmly in “Philly Style” urban street dance. He grew up in a hardscrabble, working-class city neighborhood and learned to dance and compete in a group by performing in public spaces, where the practice, itself, was the teacher. He knows many styles of street dance and is quick to explain that hip hop is not breaking, and both come under the larger rubric of street dance. Harris is 61 years old.
Bridge was raised in a Philadelphia suburb and began ballet classes at age 3, adding modern dance at a city studio during her teen years. Ballet took a back seat from there, though she continued through her conservatory years. She has performed and taught internationally. Bridge is 46 years old.
Seasoned by the shifting landscapes of their lives, the new work, Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4, is a mature questioning of the American dancing body and its dreadlocked relationships, tentacled around Black/white, male/female, and social/somatic binaries. Harris’ quirky title takes its name from several dances he choreographed that center on what he describes as “issues around intercultural concerns.” The original work in that series was for dancers with master tablaist Zakir Hussain during the musician’s Philadelphia residency in 1993. Next was the 1999 work for Bridge as her student thesis. The third iteration was for a short-lived ensemble Harris led in Colorado, The Grass Roots Project. Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4 is the choreographer’s latest reach across sociocultural and racial borders.
Since the fall of 2023 Harris and Bridge have scheduled rehearsal sessions, usually coupled with work-in-progress showings, in Philadelphia (FringeArts; the Kimmel Center), Boulder (during Harris’ annual teaching semester at the University of Colorado, Boulder), and Corning, New York (courtesy of American Dance Asylum), figuring out suitable times to collaborate while ongoing individual projects and commissions continued. Each block of together-time involved wide-ranging conversations about life and work, and Harris’ creation of new material for Bridge to try out, based on the feel of the present moment of truth, which he calls “vibing on the environment.”
Harris contends he wasn’t choreographing a hip-hop dance: He’s a choreographer who made a solo for a dancer. He candidly admits that, choreographically, he’s “not a collaborator, so the movement comes from me. The production aesthetic is more her contribution—bringing her thoughts and life into this abstract movement narrative based on where she is now—as an artist, white woman, mother, in relationships.”
“With Megan I start with the movement,” Harris continues. “Most white dancers doing hip hop don’t know how to contextualize the feeling of the moves, so then [it’s about] ‘How do I get her to be herself, to find the real in the learned movement?’ ”
Likewise, Bridge reflects on how deeply personal this work is for her, then and now. Perhaps shaped by the intensity of meeting for periods ranging from two to 10 days, their time together took on a special gravity. “Talking to him was like a mirror to me,” Bridge says. “He laughs and says it’s because we’re both Aquarians that we are oversharers! We really want to talk and talk and talk about our lives, to plumb the depths. I was doing a lot of soul searching. I knew I was going to do this piece with Rennie, and I was excited about it and had no idea where it was going to go. And then, when I got into the studio with him, I realized this is the autobiographical piece I needed to make. He really helped pull out things in me that I had been afraid to confront.”
After conversation—an essential element in their creative process—Harris would direct Bridge to get on her feet. “He would choreograph, like, tell me exactly what to do—‘Now put your right foot back; now step over, bend your knee, go to the floor,’ ” she explains. “Then we’d talk more, until he’d say, ‘Okay, get up: Next section.’ ”
Movements weren’t worried over if they didn’t work. Instead, Harris offered alternative somatic avenues, searching for the right fit. As Bridge says, “He throws out a bunch of stuff, and then what sticks and works he’ll continue to work with.” Harris explains his methods as a process of creating, framing, and editing, or “curating,” segments to craft smooth transitions “to get it as tight as possible.”
As Bridge gave herself over to Harris’ choreography, unforeseen intercultural and aesthetic harmonies sprang to life. Harris spoke with Bridge about butoh and expressionist qualities that emerged earlier in his own dystopic 1992 solo, Endangered Species. Bridge likens his solo and hers to “personal shadow work,” dredging up old ghosts and creating a raw performance quality that she feels she shares with Rennie the dancer. “I know how to be ‘pretty,’ to look good onstage. I know how to do well as a performer, and I think there’s something that needs to be explored about being ugly,” Bridge says.
She added that a lot of this element was cultivated in her work with the neo-expressionist Philadelphia-based dance collective Group Motion, headed by Brigitta Herrmann and the late Manfred Fischbeck. Both Harris and Bridge collaborated with the company at different times: Harris set a work on them in the 1990s, his first experience choreographing for a modern dance group, and from 2000 to 2005, Bridge performed with the ensemble and toured with them internationally. Group Motion was inspired by the 1960s American avant-garde dance movement and theater ensembles, like The Living Theater, to reach beyond its founders’ German-expressionist dance training and incorporate improvisation, spontaneous movement, breathwork, and sound into its process. Authenticity of expression remained a prime value, as it is for Bridge and Harris.
Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4, which includes music and audio editing by composer Peter Price as well as the original seven-minute track by sound designer and engineer Darrin Ross, is carefully constructed, seamlessly subtle, and achingly human. Bridge’s white female body is Harris’ palette, but both artist and “model” are painting a fresh canvas. Harris speaks of “emotional tracking,” and balances the punch of naked, gut-wrenching moves with relieving or letting-go actions—choosing “ebb and flow” or going for instantaneous shifts. Bridge’s aim is not to become a street dancer, but “to show up in the studio as who I am, my real, honest self, and engage in, as deeply as I can, the ideas in front of me, and the physical material—a heart place, a body place.” Harris points out that this work “culturally challenges appropriation and, in bringing that up, challenges Megan as well as the audience.”
“Emotional realness” is paramount for both Harris and Bridge. As in all of Harris’ choreography, the emotion—the realness—emanates from the kinesthetic power of the movement, without sentimentality. What that emotion is is up to the spectator to fill in. The story is an abstract narrative. Is a particular section about want, need, or loneliness? Grasping and gripping, or clinging and protecting? Seduction or sedition? Or all of the above, and more? The choreography stretches the viewer to stretch with it. Audiences familiar with Harris’ work may be caught off guard by the ways his somatic vocabulary becomes an expressive language for revealing subtexts of conflicted cultural assumptions. These are stories that can only be told through the dancing body.
Likewise, Bridge brings this choreography to life in her lithe-yet-taut, seasoned-yet-nubile, intelligent dancing body. In her mid-40s she is at the top of her game, declaring that she’s in the best physical and emotional shape of her two-plus-decade career. Bridge defies the old-school myth that the best dancer is in her 20s. “A lot of folks think that post-40, your dance career is over. What are you going to do next?” she says. “I’ve never ascribed to that philosophy. I intend to keep dancing professionally my whole life. I have such beautiful examples of that [in Philadelphia]—Hellmut [Gottschild], Brigitta and Manfred—all doing it so beautifully. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, working on this, and it’s deeply fulfilling to me.”
Harris is acutely aware of his position onstage, backstage, and in life, as a Black male. He explains that he learned a lot “working on my other pieces with women in hip hop. When I set work with women, I’m always mindful of my maleness and my innate misogyny, and I’m still processing this. Every work that I do, every person, every woman, every nonbinary person, is different.” Realness and respect temper his creativity. Nevertheless, Bridge says, “when it comes time to do the choreography, he is super-clear, he’s fast, he does it, he doesn’t ‘dance’ around. It’s really satisfying for me to be directed by somebody as sure as that.”
Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4 intentionally sets out to generate conversation, discussion, debate, particularly around the issues of appropriation and “demystifying the exoticism of racism,” as Harris says. Bridge says working with Harris has empowered her to embody her truth as well as her vulnerability in ways that feel relatable across boundaries of race, gender, and class.
The Philadelphia Fringe audience is probably not the same as those who attend Harris’ performances on larger concert stages. For his part Harris recognizes that personal viewpoints are always informed by cultural conditioning. He welcomes this opportunity to share new territory because, in his decades-long career, this is his first time choreographing an evening-length solo. Spectators will witness so-called hip hop as the vehicle driving Bridge to bare herself, which, according to Harris, “is a very proper way to do it, if we understand hip hop to mean ‘hip,’ coming from the word ‘hippie,’ which is derived from the Wolof [West African] word meaning ‘to open your eyes, to be aware.’ So hip hop is the proper way for her to do this!”
Both partners are learning a new language. This is an American story desperately needed right now—that we can all profit by becoming bilingual.
