The evening ended with Rennie Harris’s “Nuttin’ But a Word.” With the founding of his company in 1992, Harris ushered hip hop and street dance onto the concert stage, and has been championing the form in these spaces ever since. But, in addition to his choreographic and directorial work, Harris also has an immense passion and gift for educating. Central to his teachings is the cypher, a circle where dancers and musicians gather to improvise, perform, battle, and cheer one another on. The cypher is also a place where collective knowledge is passed from person to person and generation to generation. As Jacob’s Pillow scholar-in-residence Imani Kai Johnson noted in her pre-performance talk, “Nuttin’ But a Word” welcomes the audience into the cypher, sharing this knowledge with us, too.

During the work, Harris joins the dancers on stage (albeit not in person, but in a series of recorded video interviews). During his first segment, he talks about meeting a man who told him the company’s work saved his life, and the impact of this conversation. Next, Harris tells us about the evolution of street dance, the ways it—and the ways we view it—are always progressing. Finally, he talks about his own choreography‚and the importance of storytelling in his work.  

We’d seen Harris’ last comment play out on stage just moments before, as Joshua Culbreath performed a breathtaking solo full of almost superhuman stunts. But Culbreath’s movements were much more than just spectacles of awe—they were heartwrenching displays of emotion. Culbreath tells a story of deep human feeling as he tosses his body across the stage, transforming the vocabulary of breaking into one of sadness and anguish. And Culbreath’s story wasn’t the only one we saw on stage—throughout the piece the dancers shared narratives of friendship, loss, community, and joy, too.