DESTINATION: NEW ZEALAND

The scene is familiar: young men on a city street, dancing. They spin on the axis formed between head and shoulder, flex their arms in sinuous undulations and perform other feats of acrobatics for the crowd. Some people might call it break-dancing, although the correct term for this dance style, we learn, is b-boying. Whatever it is, it focuses on movement, with the body supporting itself on the ground through other means than the feet.

In the 1980s, such groups of dancers were a common enough sight in the inner cities of America. But there’s something different about these particular dancers: Their movement is cleaner, more choreographed. They move from b-boying into another dance style, a form of straight hip-hop, portraying two gangs--the Caps and the Monster Qs. Their stage is more tangible, and the story line is eminently familiar. For these dancers are in a theater, and the piece they’re staging is an evening-length hip-hop dance called “Rome and Jewels,” a new take, in hip-hop idiom, on “Romeo and Juliet,” masterminded by choreographer-dancer Rennie Harris and coming to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall Oct. 27.

“Hip-hop is an almost exact twin of the way Shakespeare was perceived in his day,” says Harris, whom Dance magazine calls the “high priest of hip-hop.” No poet or journalist today, he says by phone from his home in Philadelphia, had the kind of broad appeal of Shakespeare--or of hip-hop.

It’s a long way from Shakespeare to inner-city Philadelphia, where Harris was raised and where, as he puts it in his official program biography, he “watched friends join gangs, deal drugs and ruin their lives.” But the 35-year-old Harris took a different route. Having started dancing at 8, he had his first professional gig at 14 and continued experimenting with and performing different forms of dance until he founded his current company, PureMovement, in 1991.

In 1993, PureMovement gained wider attention with such works as the solo “Endangered Species,” acknowledged as his breakthrough piece. A virtuoso tour de force, it illustrated not only the complexities of growing up in the inner city, but the choreographic and artistic possibilities of a dance form that was virgin territory for most conventional choreographers and audiences.

“People have limited hip-hop dance,” says Harris, meaning that they’ve reduced it to what they think it’s about. “It’s bigoted, what most people think.”

Harris has succeeded in crossing a divide, bringing hip-hop into the spotlight of what one might term “high culture.” Still based in Philadelphia, PureMovement has performed throughout the United States and Europe, holding residencies and workshops as well as performing its repertory of Harris’ works. Harris, meanwhile, has received fellowships and awards ranging from a Pew fellowship to a Rockefeller Foundation grant to a commission to choreograph for the Pennsylvania Ballet. Rather than dismissing hip-hop as an informal and commercial vernacular, dance critics are comparing the head spins of b-boys to a ballet dancer’s fouettes.

“Bigoted” thinkers might assume that Harris, with his mass of dreadlocks and his devotion to every aspect of hip-hop culture, is seeking to legitimize a major aspect of the black experience. However, his mission is better summed up in the name of his company: PureMovement. His work is less about a political agenda than a deep love and interest in all the manifestations of hip-hop: b-boying, popping, cracking, house.

“The very essence of hip-hop,” he says, “is about the celebration of life, energy and a higher spirit.” Dance clears a space for a more purely spiritual expression. “I don’t know if I have a message--just to tell people to get out there and dance.”

And he doesn’t want to claim hip-hop as uniquely black territory, either. “This theory of the melting pot has not been thought out properly,” he says. “Imagine America as a big pot of boiling water whose ultimate goal is to become the best soup known to mankind. In order to make the best soup, you must have the best individual ingredients, such as carrots, peas, celery, etc. Once the ingredients become a part of this soup, it is hard to appreciate the individual tastes of the carrots or onions. Hip-hop culture is now comprised of every suppressed culture here in America that has lost its purpose.”

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For those who aren’t up on the distinctions between the various forms of hip-hop dance, the lecture-demonstrations of Harris and company come as a welcome education. “B-boys” (and “b-girls”) “are more traditional breaking; there’s a lot more slow movement,” Harris explains. “Hip-hop is more about machismo aggression. It’s strong dancing, but not as acrobatic as b-boying.” It also tends to be more verbal, more political.

Harris’ own specialty is popping, in which the dancer interrupts the flow of movement and “creates illusions with the body”--”internal pantomime” as he calls it--in a blend of sinuous fluidity and stop-action, strobe-like freeze-frame movement. Then there’s house, which some people claim is merely a hybrid form of popping.

“I think that house began as a freestyle dance and appropriated moves from hip-hop, b-boying and a Brazilian martial art,” capoeira, Harris says. “House, by way of New York, has come to evolve into its own unique style. I think it is the prettiest hip-hop dance style,” although “some may argue that b-boy, when truly mastered, is prettier.”

Forging these dance styles into ensemble presentations while maintaining their exuberant informality is the challenge that PureMovement faces in any presentation. And that challenge is magnified many times over with “Rome and Jewels,” which is by far the longest piece Harris has undertaken. The process of creating it was unfamiliar and daunting. “This is the first time that I have not allowed improvisation in a piece,” Harris says. “It’s too hard. In rehearsal, I’d be like, ‘Chill out, don’t do your thing yet; I don’t know what I’m doing yet.’ ”

The initial idea for an evening-length piece wasn’t his own, Harris says. Laura Faure, director of the Bates College Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine, suggested the choreographer seek funding for a larger project. “I was like, ‘OK, sure,’ and then I got the money for it,” Harris says. “It was someone else’s idea.”

And it took some time for him to find his feet in the mass of material, and influences, that faced him. Based as much on “West Side Story” as Shakespeare’s play, “Rome and Jewels” also reflects such disparate sources as Walter Hill’s 1979 movie “The Warriors” and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film of “Romeo and Juliet.”

“I don’t want to project something onto” a piece, Harris says. “I want to be inspired to do it.” Inspiration, when it came, hit hard. ‘I was doing all this choreography and I said, ‘Wow, I’m choreographing five different pieces for this work.’ ”

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Far from being “pure movement,” “Rome and Jewels” has been termed a hip-hop opera. The performers speak, or rather, rap, texts in ebonics. The texts, however, are Shakespeare’s, truly brought into a modern vernacular. Weaving through the music are snippets of Bernstein’s score. The result is a collage, juxtaposing street culture and “high” culture, past and present, in ways that are sometimes striking, sometimes poignant, sometimes dissonant.

“Rome and Jewels” is as bleak as any of its models. Jewels, the beloved, doesn’t even have a physical presence. Like an ethereal symbol of hope, or dream or imagining, she’s represented solely by a beam of light, floating through a terrain of gang warfare, beatings and death.

“Rome and Jewels” premiered in Philadelphia in June, the crowning event of a weeklong hip-hop festival, Illadelph, that is the seed of Harris’s next project. Bringing in “master teachers who came out to teach classes for a week,” he says, “I didn’t expect more than 30 people to turn up. The event, however, was mobbed. The workshops culminated in a performance at the end of the week with all of the teachers showing their various forms of dance. Illadelph will be repeated next year, and “I’m fixing it to go to tour in 2001-2002,” Harris says. That will bring the choreographer back into his more accustomed touring model, performing shorter pieces and leading workshops.

“Rome and Jewels” is an ambitious attempt to fuse the languages of hip-hop and traditional forms of Western performing arts. To date, what Harris has achieved is to give hip-hop’s language a voice that new audiences, hungry to know more about this art, can understand.

For Harris himself, learning more about aspects of American culture is an eminently worthy goal. “I contend,” he says, “that it is virtually impossible to be unified in the true sense of the word unless we: (1) know our history as it adheres to us; (2) research our historical relationships with other cultures.” He’s talking about the relationship of the black community to other cultures; but it’s true of any community, including the American one.

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“Rome and Jewels.” Friday, Oct. 27, and Saturday, Oct. 28, at 8 p.m. UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall. $30. (310) 825-2101