From Mekka with love (and beats).

Hiphop rarely brings to mind the world of nature—stony lizards stretched out in the sun, curling vines, sleepy chimpanzees resting on their haunches with heads lolling on their necks. But nothing in Rennie Harris’ somber, sensual dance, Facing Mekka, follows the usual course, either for him or for hiphop.

The 39-year-old choreographer’s last work—the acclaimed Rome and Jewels from 2000—was a hiphop Romeo and Juliet in which opposing crews fought for dominion over North Philadelphia streets (Harris’ home turf). Such an adaptation makes immediate sense: Outrageous bravado and cutthroat competition fuel not only the blistering feud between the two families in the Shakespeare play, but hiphop, too. Dancers duel, and the moves are rife with conflict as they put the body at odds with itself. The crisscrossing legs of ensemble numbers, for example, can pump so fast they trump the torso, which is left to ride stiffly above the action.

With Facing Mekka, Harris has uprooted hiphop from its native asphalt and transported it to less familiar terrain. He steps back from the turf wars and the internal strife to ask a larger, corollary question: How can a person maintain sufficient integrity when enclosed in a violent world? To answer, Harris stretches the texture and sense of his idiom. He infuses the usual moves—the speedy, twisting steps and the b-boy pyrotechnics—with an animal warmth and circumspection. In the course of the dance, a spirituality develops out of the steps, and it has nothing to do with abject devotion to a higher power.

Facing Mekka takes place in gloom; the lights never come up. Darrin M. Ross’ textured score runs in mood from dark to darker. (It is performed live by cellist and vocalist Grisha Coleman, human orchestra Kenny Muhammad, tabla player Lenny Seidman, singer and conga drummer Philip Hamilton and DJ Tracy Thomas.) A stampede of West African drums is feverish; passages of metallic echo and reverb are eerie; a long string of operatic ululations, by Coleman, is grief-stricken.

The video projections on vertical panels upstage, which slip by like a sludgy river, suggest that the causes for this darkness are real enough—you can just make out civil rights marchers and impoverished African children. But with these images barely visible, and so overfamiliar you wouldn’t really be able to see them even with the lights up, Facing Mekka invites you to supply your own real causes—phase one of our permanent war, perhaps, or the $350 billion tax cut for the rich. The dance is less intent on causes than on effects.

In devastating solos at both ends of Facing Mekka, Harris performs some possible effects. A bear-like man, he does a pop-lock wave to a machine-gun beat as if bullets were ripping through him—again and again, a new spasmodic rip for each new round. The music is the situation here, and the situation has gotten under his skin.

Harris’ solos are cautionary tales of the toll that calamity can take. The rest of the astounding 18-person ensemble are the tales‚ counterpoint. A cluster of women swivel their hips with such slow ease that I begin to think about the miracle of a sexy hip—how it is like good art, taking the roundabout way. Three men on the ground tilt-a-whirl their legs around their arms. It’s a typical b-boy floor maneuver, but they do it carefully, as if their bodies were a puzzle they were working out.

Whether pyrotechnical or plain, swift or slow, the dancers move with the detached curiosity of one animal come upon another that is neither predator nor prey. Facing Mekka says that when the world is shot through with senseless danger, don’t turn to God, far away and forbidding, but to the closest, quietest, oddest life in your life: the soft animal of your body. It is also mysterious—and more likely to make beautiful, bent-limbed sense.

Facing Mekka July 16-20 at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA, 413-243-0745.