A Duet of Right and Wrong : Their art is not the same, but their concerns are. Choreographer Winifred R. Harris and pop artist Me’Shell NdegeOcello are collaborating on a project fueled by their frustration with today’s world.

Choreographer Winifred R. Harris and recording artist Me’Shell NdegeOcello are seated on the hardwood floor of a Cal State Los Angeles rehearsal room, chatting about their work as dancers dress to leave. Five-year-old Askia NdegeOcello wanders nearby, exploring the space and scoring the proceedings with periodic sharp toots on his plastic flute.

Harris’ long wild locks and delicate gold nose-ring contrast with NdegeOcello’s Spartan shaved head and wire-rimmed specs. The dancer is as animated as her partner is laconic. But the yin-yang works surprisingly well, and it’s more than surface deep.

The two women, who share an L.A. home, are making their debut as professional collaborators. And it’s a potentially explosive artistic combination.

Harris has been riding a fast track in local modern dance circles with choreography marked by a vibrant mix of balletic and Afrocentric movement vocabularies.

NdegeOcello (pronounced: N-day-gay-O-chello)--whose album “Plantation Lullabies” was released to acclaim last year on Maverick, Madonna’s record label--has broken through with energetic, assertive music that weaves together funk, jazz and hip-hop. This is her first time scoring concert dance.

Yet as stylistically individualistic as these two artists are, they also share a passionate concern for social ills. “For me, the project started out of my frustration at watching what’s going on,” says Harris, referring to society’s and pop culture’s saturation with violence as well as other problems.

Harris’ company, Between Lines, performs “What’s Behind Door 1” as the kickoff to Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, the fifth annual festival of African American dance, on Thursday. The festival’s two programs also feature Philadanco, New York’s Reggie Wilson, Dwight Rhoden and more--all of whom will be offering West Coast premieres--and will be presented through next Sunday as part of the inaugural season at Cal State L.A.’s new Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex.

This piece marks a new direction for Harris. “It’s experimental in a way,” she says of the project that the two women initiated themselves, as a result of their affinity for each other’s work. “I feel a need to reach more people and sometimes through language we do that. Part of moving into words with this piece was we feel bombarded with all that’s going on.”

“What’s Behind Door 1” includes scenarios evoking oppressive situations, from enslavement to prostitution. “Some of us turn our heads away and some of us just quietly sit back,” Harris says. “There’s so much going on that we have not taken time to look at it and say ‘does this matter to me?’ And that’s what’s going on in the piece for me.”

Harris and NdegeOcello may be a team, but they have pointedly different takes on what they do. “Dance to me--and we fight about this all the time--is like a dead art,” says the soft-spoken but blunt NdegeOcello. “I’m sorry, no one gets it. I just don’t think people come to dance concerts.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m spewing off rhetoric, but it’s the MTV generation,” NdegeOcello continues. “They want something quickly and easily digestible. No one has an attention span past a good five minutes of raunchiness.”

Still, NdegeOcello finds the medium liberating. “I’m trying to have experiences and write about them, but they aren’t necessarily falling into an eight-bar chorus, an eight-bar verse and then an eight-bar chorus again, that’s all,” she says.

Meanwhile, Harris plays the idealist to her partner’s realist. “I’m the woman who lives in the fairy-tale land of ‘they’ll get it one day, somebody will get it,’ ” she says.

But the two women are right in sync when it comes to a sense of outrage at the current state of affairs.

Seeing the movie “Pulp Fiction,” for instance, only confirmed Harris and NdegeOcello’s feelings. “They made such lightness of all this killing that’s going on and it just really bothers me,” says Harris. “I’ve been seeing a lot of this (violent) element thrown into dance lately too, and it seems to me that it’s done just for shock value.”

And the artists have turned such outrage into grist for the mill. “I know violence is a part of everyday life, but I find it appalling,” says NdegeOcello. “You become somewhat numb to it. You kind of move on. That (sense of shock) is what’s inspiring the music.”

It is, for both, a rejection of the contemporary tendency to turn the other cheek. “I believe in a lot of ways that there are no shades of gray, there just are right and wrong,” says NdegeOcello. “It’s so funny that that (kind of value system) is nonexistent in these times. What’s in style is I can sit through a film and watch people die senselessly.”

Harris is no stranger to addressing problems onstage, although she hasn’t previously done so as explicitly.

“There’re few dances that I’ve choreographed that I didn’t hope would awaken something within people,” she says. “I don’t want to say all my pieces mean this or that. Sometimes the issues come out. My goal is to have people feel.”

It’s a desire that Harris has long been searching to express. Born and raised in Denver, she spent most of her professional life dancing with the Colorado-based Cleo Parker-Robinson Dance Ensemble.

In the late 1980s, Harris began to branch out, moving first to New York, before spending the 1987-88 season with the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. She also began to choreograph during this period.

Harris didn’t really begin to get up steam as a choreographer, though, until she went to teach in Iceland.

“While I was there, there was all this hunger for performance,” she says. “They have this ballet company that’s so greatly supported by the state, but there was no modern happening. I went for the summer and ended up going back for the fall and winter, and that’s when I started really creating.”

After Iceland, Harris returned to Colorado and Cleo Parker-Robinson to decompress. In 1990, she made the move to L.A., encouraged by an aunt who lives here and such others as the Inner City Cultural Center’s C. Bernard Jackson. She did, however, continue to dance with the Colorado company for a while after relocating.

Harris came to critical attention here as a choreographer only last year, at the May, 1993, edition of the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century festival at the Japan America Theatre. Her “When Wet Came to Paper,” which she will present at this year’s edition of the festival as well, uses some text but mostly pure movement to portray both groups and individuals enduring and ultimately transcending tough situations.

For this work, The Times’ Lewis Segal called Harris “the discovery of the evening: a choreographer with an intriguing hybrid style that looked strongest in its inventive development of Africanisms but especially in its exciting pull or drive through the spine.”

On the Prime Moves program at Cal State L.A. in October, 1993, Harris premiered the trio “Like a Deer in Headlights.” Beginning with a dramatic scene behind a scrim, three female dancers segue first into a pop interlude, and from there into emotional choreography that deconstructs that ostensibly “all-American” idiom.

“Like a Deer in Headlights” also marked Harris first collaboration with an L.A. musician, in this case Steve Moshier, a familiar talent in local avant-garde and experimental circles. Because their work together had to be completed in 10 days, though, the process wasn’t as involved as Harris’ current effort with NdegeOcello. “He came, he listened to the 16 counts that I had, he took it, brought it back . . . that’s how we did it,” says Harris. “It was wonderful that it worked in that quick way.”

Harris formed Between Lines in 1991, largely as a way to facilitate her choreography. “I always knew I wanted to choreograph, but I never thought the responsibility of a company would come to me until four years from now,” she says.

“But if I was going to live here in Los Angeles, I had to do something that felt right to me.”

Admittedly, it hasn’t been easy. For instance, Harris found herself somewhat at odds with the tryout circuit. “I didn’t feel like I was one to fit into the big cattle-call audition,” she says. “I didn’t know if I moved like that. I go to class and I look like a modern dancer. I don’t have all the glitz and glamour about myself.”

Yet Harris also found problems when it came to having a company of her own. Armed with rehearsal space provided by the Inner City Cultural Center, she put up audition notices, but the response was disappointing. “The people who come and audition are the people who just moved to L.A.,” says Harris. “Or they’re just like die-hard modern dancers who maybe at the time didn’t have the oomph to go out somewhere else.”

As she was searching for capable dancers, Harris was also learning the ropes of running a troupe. “The first six months was ‘I’ve never run a company before and you’ve never danced in one, so let’s put it together,’ ” she recalls. “A lot of people stayed with me through two or three seasons and then left to do other things.”

Harris was increasingly less willing to settle for dancers who weren’t at her level. “It got to the point where artistically I didn’t want to sacrifice anymore, so I couldn’t use people in certain shows,” she says. “I wanted to push for what I wanted, the caliber of the dancers.

“It became stressful and people decided they had to depart for those reasons, and of course financial reasons: They didn’t get any money.”

Harris is now able to compensate her dancers, although not as much as she’d like. “It became a challenge in a lot of different ways, so it became hard for them to stay around.”

Finally, though, she has an ensemble she can live with. Company members who will perform at the Luckman complex include Harris, Michelle Beauchamp, Kim T. Clark, Monica Dalsasso, Miko Doi-Smith, Philein Wang, Darrel Wright and Catherine Ybarra.

The security of a competent company--as well as her first commission, from the festival’s co-producer First Impressions Performances--has given Harris the courage to try new things. So far, it has been a 24-hour-a-day gambit. “We live together, so it’s like, ‘Wake up, I have a thought,’ ” says NdegeOcello.

Consequently perhaps, the piece--which will feature a live onstage combo of four musicians, as well as interpolations of poetry read by NdegeOcello--is ending up more theatrically complex than Harris’ previous works. “The plain simple thing is, it has more props, more stuff, and I’ve never (used) a lot of stuff,” says Harris.

It also has turned up other new challenges, especially in the collaborative process. “Part of it is that I’m used to working with just the dancers and myself, with whatever is going on in my head,” says Harris.

There is the matter, too, of artists from two different mediums striving to find a common language. “You want to show all this, and your medium is dance and my medium is my voice, and that’s where we can’t critique each other,” says NdegeOcello. “When you’re working with somebody, the last thing you want to do is critique. To me, she’s all the support I have in this piece.”

Yet NdegeOcello also finds the venture freeing, especially compared to the strictures of songwriting and record-making. “I try to learn the choreography myself, so it’s in my body,” explains NdegeOcello. “Then I go home and try to bring the thought into tangible music and the dance into a tangible listening experience.”

The other advantages are also clear. “Doing this is better than making a record because you see people actually being influenced and driven by the music, or you’re creating music that was inspired by the dance,” says NdegeOcello. “It’s interesting trying to write a different bar for each dance step.

“It’s just more of an appreciative process,” she continues. “It’s probably the best thing you could do as a writer.”

For Harris too, “What’s Behind Door 1” could be the start of something more than a single new dance. “The couple of projects that I want to do right now, I am moving in that (theatrical) direction,” she says.

“I don’t think it’s something that I’m ready to stay in. When I say I’m moving in that direction, it’s because I am starting to open my mouth. But I don’t want to replace movement with words.

Harris is also set to appear at UCLA in March, where she is the only L.A.-based modern dance artist this season. “I have another piece that I have a proposal to do at UCLA called ‘One Race Woman,’ ” she says. “I started working on it long ago, and I always wanted to enhance it in (the direction of) theater-dance, but never taking out the real dance.”

Meanwhile, both Harris and NdegeOcello are concerned with the immediate reception of their first joint venture.

“I have a fear that people will come see this piece and they’ll be like ‘Well, what are you trying to say?’ ” the songwriter confesses. “I’m afraid they’re going to lambaste it because it’s grappling with this stuff--semi-performance, semi-dance and live music.”

“There’s a fine line between art and bull----,” she says. “As an artist, you’re always (asking), ‘OK, am I crossing that line?’ ”

* Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 p.m. $18-$20 (both programs, $30). (213) 466-1767.