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Street to Stage

Penn Live Arts presented Rennie Harris’s “Losing My Religion” last week as part of its America Unfinished Series, marking the country’s semiquincentennial. The finale to his three-year residency, it opens with earsplitting whistles, the kind you hear at an ICE protest. Its dark and mercurial essence is an emphatic and passionate statement fit for our times.

Performance

Rennie Harris Puremovement: “Losing My Religion” by Rennie Harris

Place

Zellerbach Theater, Penn Live Arts, Philadelphia, PA, March 19, 2026

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Taylor Madgett (screaming), Tyreis Hunte, and Miyeko Harris in “Losing my Religion” by Rennie Harris. Photograph by Mark Garvin, courtesy of Penn Live Arts

As the audience found their seats, the screen lit up in white on black: I WRITE THESE MEMOIRS FOR MY WOES, and dancers scud out onstage to freeze in place. The lyrics are from South African rapper, Moglera Doe Boy and throughout Darren M. Ross’s thundering soundscape, Harris’ melodious voice drifted over it, almost like an obbligato line. Not high soprano, but low and haunting, Harris narrates Doe Boy’s lines you have to listen for: “This is Basquiat, Picasso,” or “This is Phantom of the Opera.” Quoting a South African rapper underscores not only Harris’s awareness of his fellow artists globally, but just how international the hip hop/breaking genre of dance has become. And Harris’s references to Doe Boy’s lyrics, emphasize the genre’s influences on culture worldwide.

Sound designer, composer and engineer, Ross has long collaborated with Harris. Following the whistles and sirens, gunshots brought dancer after dancer down, only to rise slowly to dance again. As if saying “kill us, we’ll keep coming back and back again.” In the first two chapters, both called “Killing,” Zakhele Grabowski’s solos were seismic as he and other soloists levitated with breakneck speed. The repetition of a move by a shadow dancer shows moves can be taught, but artistry comes from within. A dancer in dreds slow walks behind the ensemble, hands splayed like an incarnation of the ghastly cartoon Escape, about freedom-seeking enslaved African Americans in the Mobile, AL, Commercial Register in the 1830s.

I write, these memoirs for my soul
I write, these memoirs for my woes

I fight, my demons and my foes
That’s why my eyes, impure from blood and gold

From Memoirs by Moglera Doe Boy

Zakhele Grabowski in “Losing my Religion” by Rennie Harris. Photograph by Mark Garvin, courtesy of Penn Live Arts

Zakhele Grabowski in “Losing my Religion” by Rennie Harris. Photograph by Mark Garvin, courtesy of Penn Live Arts

The work encapsulates much of what Harris has done to bring “street” dance to the stage over three decades. In “Losing My Religion,” I saw motifs from shows I’ve seen over a quarter century. I’ve written thousands of words on him and his choreographies, watching it expand to include humor and a deeper sense of ensemble work, becoming more intellectual and coherent with each new work, and even, take criticism. For one, not having women breakers in his early shows. He’s remedied that many times over. His current troupe includes at least six women, including his daughter Miyeko Urvashi Rennie Harris. A quartet by Rachel Snider, Taylor Madgett, Marguerite Waller (principal Dancer and company Manager,) and Miyeko Harris is a ferocious display of breaking skills.

I noted motifs from the ‘90s “March of the Antmen,” a protest against military and gang warfare. As with then, projected images loom on the back scrim. Now it’s grainy photos of ICE protests, people being arrested, pepper-sprayed, or beaten. With just 14 dancers listed, it looked more like an army, alternately defiant or falling dead.

There were progressions and distinctions visible between groups of dancers racing headlong on and off stage after displays of robotics, capoeira, and the most Asian-influenced eel-arm undulations I ever seen on this company. Variations in footwork, upper body gestures, and hand and head shakes were entrancing, suggesting old movie numbers, though with furious energy.

The trilogy began with a reprise of Harris’s world-renowned “Rome & Jewels,” bridged by last year’s brilliant “American Street Dancer,” where he made connections with street dance all around the country and which he’s called pure entertainment.

Rachel Snider, Taylor Madgett, Marguerite Waller, and Miyeko Harris in “Losing my Religion” by Rennie Harris. Photograph by Mark Garvin, courtesy of Penn Live Arts

Rachel Snider, Taylor Madgett, Marguerite Waller, and Miyeko Harris in “Losing my Religion” by Rennie Harris. Photograph by Mark Garvin, courtesy of Penn Live Arts

“Losing My Religion” does not merely entertain but edifies as well. It was only a little over an hour long, but the visceral tension of watching the dancers’ ceaselessly blistering pace felt exhausting. It became an unrelenting superhuman display of reality and for this mixed-race company. But by its end, our communal exhaustion turned to a mindful exhilaration.

Throughout this residency, and over the years, production videographer James Clotfelter has created imagistic references, suggesting a sense of historical figures and events; an aesthetic of perceiving the world. Julie Ballard kept his lighting dark and smoky. As no costumer was listed, I’d guess each dancer just brought their own street clothes to the stage as they veered into terrific house dance. But in “Chapter 3: The Revolution,” they gradually began appearing back onstage all in black, fists raised, reminding me of the Black Panthers. 

Once the dancers lined up for curtain bows in silhouette, a spotlight showed Zakhele Grabowski in a tuxedo slow walking behind them in white mask and gloves. Once again, an eerie cartoon figure, this time maybe Sambo as Trickster.   

In a 2002 interview for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he told me he was nowhere ready to retire from dance. “There is something else I know I’m gonna do. I just don’t know what it is yet.”  I didn’t either, but I’m sure Losing My Religion, isn’t an ending. I’m looking forward to the next chapters.

Merilyn Jackson


Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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