Rennie Harris Puremovement (RHPM) the world’s first and longest running Street Dance company, proudly announces the launch of the Rennie Harris American Street Dance Archive (RHASDA) — the first inclusive, collaborative digital archive dedicated entirely to the history of Hip-hop and Street Dance in America. RHASDA was developed by a team of artists, archivists, and scholars, headed by the pioneer of Street Dance Theater Rennie Harris and his company RHPM.

RHASDA is a groundbreaking community-driven digital archive created and run by dancers, choreographers, deejays, emcees, scholars, and the Pioneers and Legends of the Hip-hop and Street Dance communities. The archive weaves together academic articles, first person narratives, rare dance footage and many more resources contributed by a wide range of creators and contributors to Hip-hop and Street Dance culture.

At the heart of the archive is 5E Knowledge, or the Rennie Harris Library, a resource rooted in the 5th element of Hip-hop: Knowledge. The four elements of Hip-hop are Deejay, Emcee, Graffiti, and Dance. The fifth element – Knowledge – grounds the other four, as an intrinsic value to the dissemination and preservation of the culture. 5E Knowledge features first person, oral and embodied narratives which are vital to public understanding of the enduring American art forms of Hip-hop and Street Dance. With support from a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the RHASDA team has been hard at work unearthing, archiving, digitizing and sharing Mr. Harris’s large collection of papers and audiovisual materials to populate the archive and make items easily searchable by (for example) date, dance style, author, etc.

In addition to materials from Rennie Harris’s personal collections, the team has been working on items from other Legends, culture bearers and Rhasda artists in residence such as Princess Mhoon, Larry Love, Fayzo, Akim Funk Buddha, Versa-Style Dance Company, and more. The site also features the Vault, which houses never-before-seen content from Harris’ personal collection of choreography, works set on other companies, book recommendations, rehearsal footage, interviews, personal history, vintage footage, appearances, tv shows, movies, and much much more.

With the launch of RHASDA, RHPM invites educators, practitioners, researchers, students, and cultural institutions to explore this living archive and deepen their understanding of Hip-hop’s legacy. You can visit the digital archive at https://rennieharrisamericanstreetdancearchive.org and on Instagram @rhasda.

If you have any papers, photos, articles, videos etc that are important to the history of Hip-hop and Street Dance to contribute to the archive, please contact rhasdainfo@gmail.com and check out the Wall of Fame to share your story.