In Philadelphia this weekend, spring was in the air, and the local dance scene had reasons to feel blessed. Not just one but two of its best hometown choreographers — Matthew Neenan and Rennie Harris — presented premieres. The works were signs of health in two of the city’s most important dance institutions, the companies BalletX and Rennie Harris Puremovement.
Harris is a Philadelphia native. Before he founded his company in 1992 and greatly expanded the expressive range of street dance on concert stages, he considered becoming a Jesuit priest. His premiere at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, “Losing My Religion,” is the culmination of a three-year residency at Penn Live Arts.
While not autobiographical, it is a work of profound disillusionment. The first two of its three chapters are called “The Killing.” Chapter Three is “Revolt.” It ends with massed protesters falling, one by one, at the sound of gunshots. A wailing woman approaches the body of the last dancer to go down and cradles it as in a Pietà.
But the disillusionment spreads further than that sadly familiar story. “Losing My Religion” begins with one dancer asking another if he’s ready for the revolution, yet the dance doesn’t profess much faith in the power of the people. It questions masculinity, with female dancers sending up macho posturing. The clapping fervor of the church appears not to provide salvation either.
The dancers run and run, across the stage or in place. They inch along the floor on their backs or sides, their hands behind them as if bound. It is a dance of crossing, of coming and going but not arriving. Much of it seems to take place in limbo or underwater, with broken bodies shaking or moving marionette-like, limbs hanging from pinned-up joints.
In one of the most disturbing moments, a woman calmly walks up to a man, arranges her fingers in the shape of a gun, aims and shoots. He keels over sideways, like a target in a shooting gallery, but after a while he rises, reinflating like a tube figure in front of a car dealership. Dispassionately, she fires again, and again he tilts down and right back up, ready to be shot.
If there’s a counterforce to despair, it’s dance. When Harris wants to, he supplies the performers with some of the most kinesthetically stirring footwork around, sampling Philly GQ and West African styles. In these sections, without escaping the darkness, the dancers move with a near-frictionless looseness. When Harris and his brilliant longtime sound designer, Darrin Ross, grant the withheld pleasure of a beat drop, the dancers get down with evangelical force.
Neenan, who grew up in Boston and New York, got his choreographic start with Pennsylvania Ballet in the late 1990s. He is more polished than Harris but less profound. BalletX, which he founded with Christine Cox in 2005, grew along with his gift. Since he left the group in 2015 to freelance, BalletX has often seemed aesthetically adrift, but an all-Neenan program at the Suzanne Roberts Theater over the weekend brought some focus.
As a Neenan sampler, the selected works don’t show him at his most distinctive. But “Broke Apart” (2006) is a good reminder of how freshly inventive he was from the outset: cleverly moving around ballet barres, matching the tone of music like Cyndi Lauper’s version of “La Vie en Rose.” The tenderly playful “Show Me” (created for Vail Dance Festival in 2015) is an example of the tasteful, skillful but less individual work he’s often made elsewhere.
“Squares,” the premiere, is a return to the large-scale patterning of his earliest pieces. The angular shapes made by one dancer are mirrored in unpredictable flashes by ranks behind her; color-coded groups assemble, disperse and reassemble in kaleidoscopic formulations. The ingenuity is, alas, repeatedly deflated by Scott Ordway’s dully formulaic electronic dance music. But here and throughout the program, the effect of Neenan’s choreography on the BalletX dancers is relaxing, clarifying, freeing.
Harris’s work is of another order, but also comparatively inchoate. Even more than usual, the sound score for “Losing My Religion” is dense with language: the writer Taiye Selasi insisting upon the right to be multiple; the megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes sermonizing about changing your mind before the blessing can come; Jill Scott singing her revision of the national anthem, which begins, “Oh say can you see by the blood in the streets.”
This density gives much of “Losing My Religion” a turgid quality. (The projected video is more lazily obvious, visually equating images of Trump and Hitler.) In tone and in specific images — floor-bound dancers undulating their arms, silent screams that rotate like lights in a lighthouse — the piece borrows from recent Harris dances like “Lazarus” and “Jim Has Crowed.” He’s still working something out.
In the words of the R.E.M. song that gives “Losing My Religion” its title, Harris has said too much and hasn’t said enough. But in the work, a poem by Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor, bitterly asks for “something that represents us” and “something American.” Harris’s work does that, is that.
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