In ‘Mekka,’ the apotheosis of hip-hop

In the same way that “Tango Argentino” gave audiences an authentic immersion in an idiom too often trivialized or debased in commercial entertainment, Rennie Harris’ “Facing Mekka” offers a redemptive and ultimately inspiring vision of hip-hop music and dance.

At UCLA’s Freud Playhouse through Sunday, it is the hip-hop breakthrough that Harris’ “Rome and Jewels” wanted to be three years ago and never was: a complex, deeply intuitive dance experience that takes the vocabulary of this galvanic African American street form into the realm of the spiritual.

Just as Darrin Ross’ richly layered and sometimes overwhelmingly forceful score gives hip-hop rhythm a global context -- with influences from Africa, India, Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere seasoning the mix -- so Harris’ choreography for his Philadelphia-based Puremovement ensemble and guests makes you see the most familiar and flamboyant moves in radical new ways.

When Ivan Velez spins on his head, for example, his arms and legs forming quick-change sculptural images without disturbing his amazing speed and balance, this feat and the others throughout the evening become connected to an ancient tradition of losing oneself in engulfing, repetitive, out-of-body motion rituals.

The Turkish sect popularly known as the Whirling Dervishes came into being from one man’s despair and his attempt to physically transcend it, and this is exactly where “Facing Mekka” takes you in its 90 plotless minutes. All the hip-hop virtuosity on view becomes a battle against darkness, a way out of an agonizing reality: contemporary dervish dancing.

Tobin Rothlein’s video projections are often nearly subliminal, but they not only support the moods and rhythms of the performance but also periodically offer graphic reminders of the life that drove young African Americans onto the street and led to the creation of hip-hop and other forms of escape. The mood is somber. This is no energy circus.

Structurally, Harris sets the gymnastic fireworks of his male soloists against the solidarity of a five-woman corps: Afaliah Afelyone, Erica Bowen, Nina Flagg, Makeda Thomas and Tania Isaac. Initially they seem to belong to the earth and the men to the air, but ultimately their weight, versatility and power give them pride of place and help make “Facing Mekka” arguably the greatest tribute to black womanhood since Alvin Ailey’s “Cry” in 1971.

At the center of the work comes a dramatic passage in which Isaac slowly emerges from a net cubicle -- a narrow, cell-like enclosure that will eventually trap Harris himself. Steadily rising and conquering her pain, she soon manages to stand upright and dominate the whole company (bent double as she had been through most of the solo), at last free to dance as she needs or chooses.

In a work that includes the projected image of Martin Luther King Jr. and an Arabic prayer for peace, the passage represents an expressive statement with profound social implications. In “Rome and Jewels,” Harris used an overload of spoken texts to make his thematic points. But here he finds everything he needs in the resources of contemporary dance theater and, most of all, in his own imagination.

That’s why it’s a breakthrough. Hip-hop isn’t being talked to death anymore; it’s suddenly become an idiom that can tell the story of its people with blazing eloquence.

Although “Facing Mekka” triumphs as a group endeavor, fabulous solos punctuate its second half: Ron Wood, for instance, vaulting majestically in slow motion, or Lenny Seidman in a display of Indian percussion complete with chanted rhythm syllables. But nobody outclasses Kenny Muhammad in a sustained, bravura exploration of the vocal technique known as “beat-boxing” (something like scat-singing pared down to raw, explosive tones).

Unfortunately, the weakest solo is Harris’ own at the very end: a deliberately disjointed, mournful coda with lots of fascinating muscular isolations and unpredictable eruptions of energy, but with diminishing impact.

Like just about everything else in “Facing Mekka,” it’s heroic -- an attempt to pull into one dancing body all the dark emotions previously expressed by the full company. But it goes on too long and becomes a kind of choreographic black hole, never taking us back to that sense of metaphysical transcendence that makes “Facing Mekka” as a whole so innovative and unforgettable.

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‘Facing Mekka’

Who: Rennie Harris Puremovement and guests

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood

When: Tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.

Ends: Sunday

Price: $15 to $35

Contact: (310) 825-2101