Drawing a big and energetic crowd to a small Pettengill classroom, two majors in Chinese studies took the occasion of the 2019 Mount David Summit to share senior thesis research into China’s uneasy adoption of two pop-culture prime movers: video games and hip-hop music.

From left, Nathan Faries, assistant professor of Asian studies, introduces Mount David Summit presenters Chelsea Anglin ’19 and George Fiske ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Chelsea Anglin of Dayton, N.J., looked at video games and esports — competitive video gaming — in China and how they relate to that nation’s image among its Asian peers. George Fiske of West Hartford, Conn., examined hip-hop in China, focusing on a Voice-style reality show and two of its winners.

Though domestically oriented and, because of language and other factors, quite inaccessible to Westerners, China’s video game industry was the world’s largest in 2017, with 583 million participants. But, as Anglin explained, China arrived late to the party. Its first rudimentary games appeared only in the 1990s and various government interventions, including a 15-year ban on console games that ended in 2015, interrupted industry progress.

“I grounded my Chinese studies in something I’m passionate about,” Anglin said. A dedicated gamer herself, she spent many hours of her year abroad in internet cafes exploring the genre called wuxia (woo-shia) — “martial heroes.”

Senior Chinese studies major Chelsea Anglin presents research on video gaming in China during the 2019 Mount David Summit. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A historically based genre widespread in opera, literature, and movies as well as games, wuxia depicts an ancient era in China populated with honorable, chivalrous men and women who wield swords in the defense of what’s good and right. (A clip of game play that Anglin showed also demonstrated how the games can mirror Chinese culture more broadly, as the “weapons” included acupuncture needles and a stringed musical instrument.)

If what Anglin called the “ancient Chinese feeling” of wuxia can exist happily embedded in game technology, the booming field of esports generates sharp tensions between moral and financial interests in China.

A lucrative industry based on multi-player gaming, “it’s very much something the Chinese government is trying to capitalize on,” Anglin said, and courses in esports are offered at the high school and college levels. Esports, she argued, “create a positive correlation between the Chinese and video game prowess,” an emerging cultural characteristic analogous to the pairings of Japan and animé art or Korea and K-Pop music.

But despite that prestige and the economic benefits of video gaming, Anglin pointed out, Chinese perspectives on the games remain in conflict. In China as elsewhere, they are seen as a distraction from studies and other more “wholesome” activities. Some compare the games to “spiritual opium,” a deeply pejorative label given opium’s role in the British exploitation of China.

An image from the character-design function of the game Jian Wang San.

Both personal gaming and esports, Anglin concluded, have the potential to extend China’s “soft power,” its cultural and social influence. She’s convinced, she said, that the wuxia aesthetic has the potential to “disrupt the current medieval European trope” that exists in today’s open-world video games, “if they can localize it well.”

Anglin’s presentation was rooted in a �ֲ���ý-funded summer research grant that took her to Japan for research into pop culture and especially video games, a focus that she expanded while spending junior year in China. Her adviser was China specialist Nathan Faries, assistant professor of Asian studies, who also hosted the summit session.

Fiske traced the growth of hip-hop in China from its introduction through so-called saw-gash CDs, discs remaindered out of Western markets and sold underground in China. Today, he explained, hip-hop is thriving but polarized: On the one hand, artists like Jay Chou represent a safe, mainstream approach to the music. “He integrates just enough Western style to make the music unique and interesting on the Chinese market, without really challenging or threatening any social taboo.”

George Fiske offers a look into the world of hip-hop music in China. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On the other hand, there’s a much more feisty, vernacular, and authentic hip-hop scene that until 2017 was exclusively an underground phenomenon. And what happened that year to bring hip-hop into daylight was the debut of The Rap of China, a thoroughly commercial television competition credited with establishing hip-hop as a mainstream force in mainland China.

“I’m here today to argue that this wasn’t selling out on the part of the rappers, and it wasn’t just exploitation on the part of advertisers,” Fiske said. Despite the heavy doses of vitamin-water advertising, the show nevertheless represented “an alternative pathway into mainstream venues” for rap — a breakthrough Fiske later described as “monumental.”

The show found a way to guard both the underground rappers’ own aesthetic and the moral concerns of government and society, Fiske explained. That way was solidarity: As long as everyone on stage respected both hip-hop culture and prevailing Chinese culture, they were all one big happy family.

Fiske used the co-winners of the first season of The Rap of China, GAI and PG One, to show what happened to Chinese hip-hop in the wake of the show’s tremendous success. Among the underground vanguard when they arrived on the show, both artists challenged traditional taboos and norms with their music, style, and image.

Proud of his local dialect and adopting a roaming gangster-cum-ascetic monk persona — “a poetic bandit, almost,” Fiske said — GAI used traditional poetic and historic archetypes to tweak the assumed hegemony of “Chinese-ness.” Meanwhile, PG One’s provocative, nimble, and dynamic music was rooted in an unparalleled expressive command of the Chinese language.

All told, Fiske’s presentation amounted to action, reaction, and ultimately a synthesis emerging from the two. Winning 1.3 billion online views in the summer of 2017, The Rap of China was “a rocket ship aimed at the heart of Chinese popular consciousness.“

Presentations of senior thesis research into pop culture in China filled a Pettengill Hall classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It put rap on the map — but it may have been too much too soon for the powers that be, especially given a scandal, involving PG One lyrics about cocaine use, that emerged in the wake of the series’ first season.

In January 2018, the Chinese government “banned” hip-hop — an action that was actually more a “filtration” of the more egregious performers and not outright suppression. “China doesn’t necessarily have any problems with hip-hop style of music, so long as it promotes the right values,” Fiske explained.

“This is very much indicative of the obstacles that hip-hop has faced in the past [in China] and will continue to face in the future,” he concluded, noting that PG One has dropped out of sight, while GAI is still in the game but has become much more mainstream.

And the rocket ship is now more of a Roman candle: Renamed China’s New Rap, Fiske said, the show returned in 2018 with the stated mission of promoting “positive energy and socialist values.”

Fiske’s thesis adviser was Professor of Chinese Yang Shuhui.

Postell Pringle ’98 (left, as Othello) and GQ (Iago) face off as Iago’s plot unfolds in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello: The Remix.” Photograph by Michael Brosilow.

Rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 is winning rave reviews for his star turn this spring in the title role of Othello: The Remix at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

In March, Time Out Chicago named Pringle its Performer of the Week. In a Time Out Q-and-A , he discussed how working in theater at �ֲ���ý sharpened his delivery as a rapper:

“My approach to the actual attack of the line and getting punchlines and the arc of the storytelling within the song was all different. I realized that it had to do with the fact that I had just been working on acting, working on playing characters. … I wouldn’t be as good of a rapper if I hadn’t spent all that time working on just acting and just theater.”

Othello: The Remix was adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy by the Q Brothers — aka GQ and JQ, who with Pringle and a fourth member are also members of the rap group the Retar Crew. The entire Crew performs in The Remix.

The Q’s modus operandi, previously exercised on such works as The Bomb-itty of Errors, is to render Shakespeare’s entire text as rhyming couplets suitable for rap delivery. The Remix re-imagines the title character as “a hip-hop mogul whose life falls apart when he makes Iago the opener’s opener on a new tour,” writes Time Out blogger Oliver Sava.

“To cut to the chase: Othello: The Remix — the 90-minute, lightning-fast, hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of jealousy and self-doubt — is absolutely brilliant, and immense fun,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss.

With �ֲ���ý classmate Erin Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, Pringle returns to campus this spring to lead the longstanding Short Term unit Tour Teach Perform, in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools.

• .

Rennie Harris Puremovement image by Brian Mengini.

Rennie Harris, proclaimed “hip hop’s grandmaster” by Dance Magazine, brings his company, Puremovement, to launch the 30th annual �ֲ���ý Dance Festival with greatest hits and new dances.

Performances are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, July 13 and 14, in �ֲ���ý College’s Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Tickets cost $24 for the general public, $18 for seniors and $12 for students. .

Tickets may also be purchased by phone at 207-786-6161 or by mail or in person. .

The company offers a free lecture-demonstration at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 10, in Schaeffer Theatre. A discussion with the artists immediately follows the July 13 performance. The following evening, dance writer Debra Cash offers an Inside Dance: Understanding Contemporary Performance lecture at 7:15 p.m. in Schaeffer Theatre.

The �ֲ���ý Dance Festival, a summer series of renowned contemporary dance, celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2012 by highlighting choreographers whose creative development has been nurtured by the festival.

Founded in 1982, the acclaimed festival brings together an international community of contemporary dance choreographers, performers, educators and students in a cooperative community to study, perform and create new work.

Marking its 20th anniversary, Rennie Harris Puremovement has established itself as a premier hip hop dance company, redefining the genre and transcending such divisive boundaries as race and class with universal themes. (This program is suitable for audiences of all ages.)

At the festival, RHPM will showcase both new works — “Breath,” “Nina” and “Four B-Boys and a Girl” — and three Harris classics, “P-Funk,” “Students of the Asphalt Jungle” and “Rome and Jewels.”

“Rome and Jewels,” developed during a 1999 residency at the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival, was Harris’ first major work and toured internationally for more than eight years. The solo excerpt performed at �ֲ���ý will feature a member of the original “Rome & Jewels” company.

In a society where hip hop is often portrayed as a violent, undisciplined counterculture, Harris and Puremovement both deconstruct popular perceptions of the medium and challenge its established boundaries, focusing on its essential spirit.

RHPM performances are complex, fluid and pioneering. “While deftly capable of entertaining the masses, Mr. Harris is also sly,” wrote a New York Times reviewer. “In his skillful hands you see the roots of hip hop and not just its commercial veneer.”

Harris received an honorary degree from �ֲ���ý College in 2010. He has been recognized with a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a medal from the Kennedy Center as a master of African American choreography.

In 2010 Rennie Harris Puremovement was chosen by the U.S. State Department’s DanceMotion USA program as one of four companies to serve as cultural ambassadors in Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories and, this year, Jordan.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, shown at center during the “Life is Living” festival, Chicago, 2009. Photo by Bethanie Hines.

“The movements for social change and environmental accountability are one and the same,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “And focusing on steps to sustain the planet will ultimately force us to envision a pathway to sustaining humanity.”

Finding that focus is the goal of the stage show red, black & GREEN: a blues, which Joseph and a host of collaborators present in performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 27-28, at the Lewiston Memorial Armory, 65 Central Ave.

�ֲ���ý College and the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival present this widely acclaimed multimedia production that brings to life personal stories about the impacts of a deteriorating environment. Doors will open at 8 p.m., and the piece begins with a 20-minute immersive audience experience on stage.

Tickets cost $20 for the general public and $10 for students, and are available at batestickets.com. .

Called “as smart and provocative as it is breathtakingly beautiful” by the San Francisco Chronicle, rbGb combines spoken word, music, dance and a stunningly dynamic stage design. Such eclecticism reflects Joseph himself — a true Renaissance man equally talented as a poet, a dancer, educator and activist.

.

This full-length performance piece is designed to jumpstart a conversation about environmental justice, social ecology and collective responsibility in the climate-change era. Joseph, one of America’s vital voices in performance and arts education, brings the piece to Lewiston as part of an ongoing relationship with �ֲ���ý.

“rbGb breaks new artistic ground and delivers a powerful message,” says Laura Faure, director of the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival. “We’re honored to have had a sustained relationship with the brilliant Marc Bamuthi Joseph over the past nine years, and are thrilled to bring this remarkable work to Maine.”

rbGb reunites seven artists from the acclaimed 2008 work the break/s: a mixtape for stage: writer-performer Joseph; director Michael John Garcés; choreographer Stacey Printz; turntablist/percussionist Tommy Shepherd; documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi; lighting designer James Clotfelter; and media designer David Szlasa.

Joseph will be joined onstage in the Lewiston performances by Shepherd, dancer-actor Traci Tolmaire and vocalist Yaw.

Stories for rbGb were developed from material gathered at a series of festivals, held in four cities across the U.S., that use participatory arts and action to advance social and environmental justice in diverse and underserved communities. Under Joseph’s artistic direction, these Life is Living events in Oakland, Calif., Harlem, Chicago and Houston have yielded residents’ testimony as dramatic source material — specifically, the voices of people often left out of discussions about “living green.”

Interviews, poems, films and murals from Life is Living have become words, dance and images that express the challenge of living green where violent crime and poor education are more of a threat than ecological crisis, and that reveal emerging definitions of environmentalism in these communities.

Set into designer Theaster Gates’ malleable stage installation of repurposed building materials and clay objects, and heightened by Jacobs-Fantauzzi’s vivid films and vibrant graffiti murals from Life is Living, rbGb is driven by the idea that valuing your own life, and the life of your community, is the first step to valuing planet Earth.

The production is composed of two sections. Titled “the colored museum” (inspired in part by the George C. Wolfe play of the same name), the first invites spectators on stage to look into the windows of installations that represent four urban regions, and stories and movements from these areas.

In “colors and muses,” audience members return to their seats and watch as the piece extends beyond conversation and focuses on central figures in Houston, New York, Chicago and Oakland.

Fresh from their triumphant national touring debut as headliners, Seattle rapper Macklemore and his DJ/producer, Ryan Lewis, visit �ֲ���ý College for an open-air performance on the Library Quad, accessed from Campus Avenue between Chase Hall and the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, at 8 p.m.Friday, Sept. 16.

Open to the public at no cost, this concert is sponsored by the Chase Hall Committee and WRBC. For more information, please call 207-795-7496 after Sept. 5.

Macklemore, the stage name for hip hop recording artist Benjamin Haggerty, is known for passionate, high-energy performances. During their spring 2011 U.S. tour, Macklemore and Lewis sold out most of their shows, including those in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and a three-night run at the Showbox at the Market, in Macklemore’s home town of Seattle, where more than 3,500 tickets sold out in less than 48 hours.

Fans find Macklemore refreshingly honest, even poetic. “Wings,” an ode to the perfect pair of basketball shoes, confronts consumerism and the childhood pressure to be “cool.” “My Oh My,” a tribute to Seattle Mariners broadcaster Dave Niehaus, received extensive airplay after the local announcer’s death.

Macklemore’s well-received freshman release, 2005’s “Language of My World” (Integral Music Group), featured production by Rhymesayer’s Budo and won praise for its fresh perspective and a striking balance of insight and levity. After a period of artistic stagnation and frustration due to substance abuse, Macklemore committed himself to sobriety and a new dedication to his music.

The catalyst to this change was establishing the partnership with Lewis, an accomplished artist in design, photography and production who also acts as Macklemore’s touring DJ. They self-released the EPs Vs. in 2009 and Vs. Redux in 2010, the latter reaching No. 7 on the iTunes Hip Hop charts.

The event concludes the undergraduate careers of some 456 members of the �ֲ���ý’ class of 2010, representing 33 states and 33 countries.

The 2010 �ֲ���ý honorands are:

• Rennie Harris, the choreographer who brought hip-hop to the mainstream world of dance
• James McCarthy, a scientist recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change
• Jane Pauley, the veteran television journalist
• Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and 1977 �ֲ���ý graduate
• Teresa Woodruff, a researcher responsible for pioneering work in the care of women who will become infertile due to cancer treatment

Dancer-choreographer Harris has taken hip-hop dance from inner-city streets to a mainstream audience. In so doing he has transformed both art form and audience, and has proven his own belief that hip-hop has the power to transcend boundaries of race, religion, gender and economic status.

With his company, Rennie Harris Puremovement, this North Philadelphia native has been a pioneer in choreographing, teaching and expanding the scope of hip-hop. The troupe is internationally known for such works as the autobiographical Prince ScareKrow’s Road to the Emerald City; the spiritually driven Facing Mekka; and the critically acclaimed Rome and Jewels, a hip-hop opera that transports Romeo and Juliet into the world of rival B-boys and street gangs. (Harris previewed the work at the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival in 1999.)

Harris began his performing career in the 1980s with the Scanner Boys, a group that he helped found, and in the mid-1980s he toured internationally with the Fresh Festival, the first hip-hop tour. He founded Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992, and the company gained national visibility in 1995 through performances with Dance Africa America.

Honors that Harris has received in recent years include, in 2007, one of 50 United States Artists Fellowships and the Artist of the Year Award from the governor of Pennsylvania. Harris has also created works for The Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He has been likened to such choreographers as Ailey and Bob Fosse, and was described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “Philadelphia’s greatest cultural export.”

McCarthy, a Harvard professor of biological oceanography, is recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change. In a 2008 profile describing his work, The Boston Globe said that McCarthy’s extensive, Arctic-to-Antarctic research experience made him a “first-person witness to the moment when a dangerous hypothetical became reality, and a gatherer of important evidence to support the theory that humanity is having a drastic impact on the Earth’s climate.”

A passionate public intellectual within the global climate discussion, McCarthy led the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability working group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. After the Nobel Peace Prize went to the IPCC in 2007, McCarthy said the prize acknowledges that “if we really internalize and act on this statement about climate change, the world will be a more peaceful place.”

McCarthy is Harvard’s Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and he has led many national and international committees and research programs relating to ocean and climate science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2008-09 served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

McCarthy researches the regulation of sea plankton productivity, focusing on regions around the world affected by seasonal and inter-annual climate variation. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Gonzaga University and a doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Veteran journalist and television anchor Pauley is known for her 13-year tenure as co-host of NBC’s Today show and for 12 years as co-host of Dateline NBC. One of the most influential members of a pioneering generation of female broadcasters, Pauley became the first woman to anchor the evening news in Chicago and a year later, in 1976, was named co-host of Today. She was 25.

During nearly three decades at NBC, Pauley covered events that have defined our time, from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the attacks of Sept. 11. At NBC, Pauley also anchored evening newscasts and hosted a weekly newsmagazine, Real Life with Jane Pauley, and MSNBC’s retrospective news program Time and Again.

Pauley has been honored with numerous awards including multiple Emmys, the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s prestigious Paul White Award and the Gracie Allen Award for outstanding achievement from American Women in Radio and Television.

She is widely admired for her openness about her personal struggle with bipolar disorder in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in the memoir Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue (Random House, 2004). In September 2009, she lent her name to the Jane Pauley Community Health Center in her home state of Indiana. Serving local residents regardless of insurance or income, the center emphasizes the integration of medical, dental and behavioral health.

Pauley received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University in 1972. A resident of New York City, she is married to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Strout, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1977, understood even as a child that writing would loom unusually large in her life. At home, writing “was just in the air,” Strout explained in an August 2009 Washington Post article, and her mother urged her to write down what she saw.

From this early introduction to the literary life, Strout has developed a career distinguished by three full-length fiction works (all published by Random House) nationally acclaimed for their power to conjure up captivating characters with complex emotional lives. 1998’s Amy and Isabelle won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and a Los Angeles Times award for a fiction debut, and was made into a movie for ABC television in 2001. Abide with Me (2006), the story of a small-town clergyman’s fall and redemption, was a national best seller and Book Sense pick. Olive Kitteridge, a “novel-in-stories,” won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction and became a New York Times Best Seller.

All these works are set in Maine. Strout was born in Portland and spent much of her youth in Maine, a state that means “just about everything” to her, as she told �ֲ���ý Magazine in 2006. Majoring in English at �ֲ���ý, Strout earned her first fiction byline in 1982 and since then has published short stories in The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine and various literary journals.

While paying her dues as a writer, Strout worked a variety of jobs including waitress, mattress salesperson and nightclub pianist. She holds a law degree from Syracuse University and teaches in a low-residency writing program at Queens University, Charlotte, N.C. She lives in New York City.

Woodruff is an obstetrics and gynecology researcher who coined a new word, “oncofertility,” to describe her groundbreaking work creating clinical care options for women who will lose their fertility due to cancer treatment. As co-editor of the first book on this topic, Oncofertility (Springer, 2007), she describes the field’s interdisciplinary technology and procedures — but also, importantly, collects and shares human stories.

The approach reflects Woodruff’s focus on the human condition in the context of research. “We’re trying to create a total shift in how we interact with female cancer patients to anticipate their lives as survivors and their ability to bear children,” she says of her work.

Woodruff is a Thomas J. Watkins Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine as well as professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is chief of the newly created Division of Fertility Preservation and founder and director of the Institute for Women’s Health Research, and she helped to create and now runs the nation’s first Oncofertility Consortium, a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative that represents medical innovators from the oncology and fertility fields.

Her awards include the Endocrine Society’s Richard E. Weitzman Memorial Award for exceptionally promising young investigators, and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Woodruff, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology from Northwestern, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 40 editorials and book chapters.

Evans presented Speechless, a look at the history of hip-hop, at the 2001 �ֲ���ý Dance Festival. Started as an underground dance movment by African-American teenagers in the 1980s, hip-hop has grown into an international music, fashion, film and dance phenomenon. Since 1991, Evans has appeared in such major performances as the Q102 Monster Concert with recording artist TL; John Coltrane Project, commissioned by the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia; and Dance Africa America in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

Captivating audiences as a member of Rennie Harris’ dance company, Evans has performed and taught at major venues throughout the world. He co-developed and co-starred in the role of Mercutio in Rome and Jules, Harris’ dazzling spin-off of Romeo and Juliet. He has also appeared in feature films and dance videos. Evans has “something important to say,” said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Kimberly Roberts of The Philadelphia Tribune called him “exciting . . . with cat-like quickness and the stupefying hang time of Allen Iverson.”

Evans’ �ֲ���ý appearance is sponsored by �ֲ���ý College Modern Dance, Office of the Dean of Students, Amandla! and L/A Arts.

Tickets are $14/$8 (students and seniors) and may be purchased by calling 207-786-6161. A pre-performance lecture focused on Harris’ work will be given by Washington Post dance critic Suzanne Carbonneau at 7:15 p.m. July 26, in Schaeffer Theatre. Free and open to the public, the lecture is part an educational program of the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival, Inside Dance, funded in part by the Maine Humanities Council.

Rennie Harris PureMovement bridges the disparate worlds of street and theater in a synthesis of drama and dance-defying categorization. Blending African retentions with American improvisations, the company displays remarkable technique. The Philadelphia-based choreographer uses the various forms of hip-hop as a vehicle for tough messages about racism, street shootings and prison. Closely related to the complex and driving rhythms of “street” music, the company’s dance style challenges and uplifts as dancers tumble, spin, intertwine and hurl their bodies through space.

In “Fallen Crumbs from the Cake,” the opening piece in the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival, Harris blends experiences from his own residency in a Pennsylvania prison with projections, film, funk music and monologues. Harris’ solo performance “Endangered Species” offers a powerful lament about molestation, while the final work, “Students of the Asphalt Jungle,” is “virtuosity,” according to The Boston Globe, inspired by Harris’ travels in Africa. According to Harris, the piece is: “an affirmation of our African-American heritage through movement, which we believe has been handed down through spirit and instinct.”

Critics consider Rennie Harris a visionary pioneer in the evolution of hip-hop dance and well-versed in the vernacular of popping, step, break and house dance and other styles that have emerged spontaneously from the black community. “Harris bridges the usually disparate worlds of street and theater, self-empowerment and artistic inspiration. He is an exceptional artist,” The San Diego Inquirer said.

Self-taught, Harris has designed his own unique moves since he was eight years old. He and his group PureMovement have performed with Run DMC, Curtis Blow, and LL Cool J, and were featured in videos such as Ricky Scaggs’ “Country Boy.”

The recipient of many distinctive awards, Harris has received a Philadelphia Repertory Dance Initiative grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, a 1996 Pew fellowship in choreography and a 1996 Dance Projects Commission made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In addition to its critically acclaimed mainstage performance series of 17 concerts, the festival offers two intensive training programs, one for adults and one for younger dancers. For more information, or to request a brochure, call the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival at 207-786-6381.

The �ֲ���ý Dance Festival receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Maine Humanities Council, the Maine Arts Commission, Harkness Foundations for Dance, Capezio Ballet Makers Dance Foundation, the Bingham Betterment Fund, G.G. Monks Foundation, the Shapiro Family Foundation, the Sequoia Foundation, Tom’s of Maine, LEF Foundation, L.L. Bean, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Portland Newspapers, Androscoggin Savings Bank  and People’s Heritage Bank.