August 05, 2026
Osamu Inoue/Rennie Harris American Street Dance Archive
Philly-based choreographer and educator Rennie Harris has created a digital archive that details the history of hip-hop and street dance.
Rennie Harris has spent decades traveling the world as a choreographer, performer and educator of American hip-hop and street dance forms. After a five-year design and planning process, he has compiled his breadth of knowledge into a free online resource.
The Rennie Harris American Street Dance Archive pulls information from hundreds of articles, studies, books, theses and videos related to the art form and organizes them by theme and regional background. Harris said his hope is for the project to act as a one-stop-shop for understanding the state of hip-hop as a culture and to make the information as accessible as possible.MORE: Netflix docuseries revisits 2022 slayings of four University of Idaho students
"The idea is just to use this as a conduit to get to everything else," the Philadelphia native said. "It could be a source to find out almost anything regarding community dances globally. … This can be a way that people in the community can get to know about other people."
The site organizes information about street dances — which Harris, 62, defines as an array of dance styles that originated within community spaces — into geographic regions. People can learn about the history of styles like Jersey Club, G.Q. and Wu Tang, which have East Coast roots, or learn about the popping, whacking and robot movements that got their start on the West Coast.
"A lot of people don't understand the legacy of hip-hop, and how you have different styles of street dance that develop in its own little pockets with different types of music, from the East Coast to the West Coast," Harris said.
The site also includes an anthology of research, reviews, dissertations and videos dating back to the 1940s that relate to different hip-hop-related subject areas. The anthology is customizable and links to books, articles and YouTube channels that can help researchers or inform anyone curious about hip-hop. More than 430 articles, books, programs, dissertations and videos about hip-hop and street dance are available on the site.
The site's "Cypher Series" allows artists in the street dance world to highlight topics, private collections, histories or dance styles that are regional to them. People also can share their own stories about particular movements, make submissions to the archive and suggest corrections.
"This is a great source for you where you can just research all the stuff that you want to research, but you (also) get a chance to represent yourself, your own expressions and what all that means to you," Harris said.
The Rennie Harris American Street Dance Archive website provides decades of historical and anecdotal information about the history of hip-hop and street dance.
The idea to create an interactive catalog of hip-hop and street dance history came to Harris in the late 1990s and 2000s, when his dance troupe toured with artists like Salt-N-Pepa, Grandmaster Flash and Madonna.
"Even though I was dancing, I really started as an educator in many ways," he said. "We had an interactive chat on our website that connected to different street dance websites, so that was the beginning."
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Harris said he began to revisit the idea by using his private collection of research and enlisting the help of his students in online classes that he teaches at University of Colorado, Miami Dade College and Columbia College in Chicago. The project received a grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2022 to "broaden public understanding of hip-hop aesthetics and street dance culture."
The archival work reflected in the website is, in many ways, an extension of Harris' career as a choreographer and educator. Growing up in North Philly, he said he was inspired to take up dancing by watching the Campbellock Dancers on the Carol Burnett Show in elementary school. He spent his adolescence entering dance contests and performing at local restaurants and venues.
In 1992, Harris formed the Rennie Harris Puremovement troupe, the first and longest-running street dance theater company in the country. It performed across the globe as part of President Barack Obama's cultural exchange program.
Harris said his work as a researcher, choreographer and educator has placed an emphasis on expanding hip-hop as a cultural and musical movement. Harris has spent much of his life reviving otherwise obsolete dance forms, like the Philadelphia-born G.Q. dance, and tracing their origins to more contemporary styles like tap and cha-cha.
His work has been performed during his residencies in Philadelphia's Penn Live Arts Program and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. Harris also has received numerous accolades, including two honorary doctorates and a lifetime achievement award from Dance Magazine.
Despite these recognitions, Harris said he's not usually an excitable person, but the American Street Dance Archive is beginning to change that. Harris said he hopes to cement the legacies of himself and his peers in the hip-hop and street dancing world by expanding the site's reach globally and exploring future collaborations with universities and research organizations.
"So many different people have been able to take advantage of hip-hop and Black culture," he said. "We never really have full ownership of that. … So it's important that we create this around hip-hop culture from the very beginning so it's not erased."
