SpectorDance’s new inspiration is its most daring and difficult – gangs.

Over the years, SpectorDance has stared into Monterey County’s most pressing issues and translated them into dance. Common Ground was about agriculture, immigration and work. Oceans dealt with the welfare of our oceans. But as heady – and meaningful, and artistic – as those efforts were, the latest issue the Marina-based dance company is turning into choreography is darker and more difficult: gangs.

East West is SpectorDance’s multimedia dance performance based on gang life. Director Fran Spector Atkins has been here before, 14 years ago, through a project with the Boys & Girls Club called Real Life, which examined youth and violence. But she felt compelled to come back.

“These were real life stories, based on dance workshops and interviews,” she says. “It never felt complete. I needed to delve into this issue again.”

Further inspiration came with a visit to second chance education and job training hub Rancho Cielo. There, she says, she felt like she had “a guide, support and connection” into gang culture.

“Rancho Cielo’s such a beautiful place, and doing such extraordinary work in prevention and intervention,” she says. “And gangs are such a complex problem.”

She began putting together the elements that would become East West, including interviews she conducted with former gang bangers, victims and criminal justice experts – 20 hours total, edited down to 15 minutes and interspersed throughout. One is of a mother whose 18-year-old son was killed by gangs.

“Gang culture is an aspect of human behavior. It’s not about race.”

The interviews are being remixed by Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman, a lyrically astute nerdcore rapper whose projects include The Rap Guide to Evolutionand The Canterbury Tales Remixed.

“We created a tapestry of their voices that captured their gang experiences as best we could,” he says. “I’m writing rap songs stylized and mythologized about the attraction of that lifestyle. I’m using the tropes and language of hip-hop.”

He’ll be in the show, playing a narrator who raps the progression of a young person getting involved in gang life, “like the chorus in ancient Greek plays,” he says.

Like Spector Atkins, Brinkman’s worked on the subject before. His song “Survival of the Fittest” addresses gang violence: “But it’s not a virus; it’s a rational response/ To high risk environments and short time horizons/ With high stakes and highly visible prizes/ And you wonder why we’re criminal-minded.”

He’s talking about adaptation, evolutionary psychology and game theory.

“Gang culture is an aspect of human behavior,” he says. “It’s not about race, it’s not about California. Those circumstances feed gang behavior, but it’s bigger.”

His part will dovetail with original recorded music by Zoe Keating, who layers loops of cello tracks into a one-woman string ensemble. Spector Atkins is also using music from Ethel, a string quartet who specialize, like Kronos Quartet, in collaboration and new music premieres.

William Roden has integrated multimedia content to be interjected, including film clips, sound and art, as well as photographs by Robert Yager, who’s spent 10 years documenting gang life. Yager’s works are powerful, high-contrast black-and-white pieces that capture the strange juxtapositions and nihilistic reality of gang life with real intensity.

Then there is the dance. The featured performers are Jones Welch, director of Not Man Apart, and Annie Talmadge of Diavolo Physical Theater Company, both from Los Angeles. Part of the dance will be choreographed by Jahnna Biddle, directing five hip-hop dancers, also from Los Angeles. Everything fits into 12 sections.

A section about how gangs are organized in prison is done with a dancer bound in chains. “It’s really powerful imagery,” Spector Atkins says.

The title is a rumination on the geographical boundaries that gangs adopt, but also an allusion to an earlier and classic work of gang violence, West Side Story. Spector Atkins hopes to take the show on tour. A lot of work and resources have gone into the dance company’s big new work, and expectations come with them.

But there is ambivalence. Gang life is tangled up with powerful motivations like belonging, strength and family. Just addressing the subject is risky – Spector Atkins said that she didn’t want to disclose everyone’s names for their own protection. Despite the use of extensive reporting, none of the creators come from the culture. Spector Atkins still isn’t sure she is the right person to tell this story.

“It doesn’t look like anything I’ve done before,” she says.

But that stated uncertainty can be reassuring. Some of the biggest artistic mistakes happen because there isn’t enough self-scrutiny. Not here.

“What is the role of dance in this issue?” Spector Atkins muses. “I don’t want to overstate it. I can’t change this issue. But my interviews, the workshops at Rancho Cielo, gave me the sense that I was affirming something very positive in the people I worked with. I was saying, ‘Your stories are important and I would like to present them on stage in a respectful way.’”

EAST WEST premiers 7:30pm Friday at Sherwood Hall, 940 N. Main St., Salinas. $20/general; $10/senior, military, children under 12. 758-7351; 8pm Saturday, 3343 Paul Davis Drive, Marina. $30. 384-1050. www.SpectorDance.org