Ubungen dance company embroiled in hip-hop war.

SAN FRANCISCO--It was a case of the best intentions gone wrong.

Pearl Ubungen has been teaching Southeast Asian youngsters living in San Francisco's Tenderloin district for the last five years. The inner-city neighborhood was for many years the city's seediest district, home to prostitutes, drug dealers, and drug addicts. In the early 1980s Southeast Asian immigrants started to move into the neighborhood and revitalize the area, and the two communities have lived side by side ever since. So it's not surprising that Ubungen's work has always had a strong social component, addressing resentment against immigrants in Refugee, and the abuse of Asian women in Bamboo Women.

However, with Ubungen's newest work, Take Me to the Tenderloin, NOW!--premiering April 3 to 13 at Theater Artaud--her social concerns ran smack into those of some of the very people to whom she was trying to pay tribute.

Take Me is based on a remark by a little girl who, on an outing to another neighborhood, in no uncertain terms demanded to be taken back to the Tenderloin. "For me the Tenderloin is quite a magical place," Ubungen explains. "That little girl [also] has a strong sense of home for the area, and I wanted to honor and reveal that face of the Tenderloin in my piece."

Based on and incorporating a series of photographs by Ken Miller of places and people in the Tenderloin, Take Me was developed last year. What provoked the ire of some residents was Ubungen's use of photographs--particularly in a poster advertising previews of the show last year--of children supposedly displaying gang signs. The most offending image shows two young boys, their right hands entwined in a brothers' salute, the fingers of their left hands forming a "W."

In hip-hop parlance, the "W" stands for Westside/West Coast, as opposed to Eastside/East Coast. In recent years, a rivalry has developed between rappers on both coasts. While this battle was initially confined to braggadocio on vinyl, in the last year the battle has turned lethally real; when West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur was gunned down last year, he was widely viewed as a casualty of the West Coast/East Coast war.

Ubungen believed the children in the photo to be innocently mimicking the "W" gesture. Some parents and social workers said it was clearly a gang sign, and some accused the choreographer of promoting gang violence, exposing the children to retaliation by gangs and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Southeast Asians. There were complaints in the community that Ubungen had not received the parents' permission.

After several community meetings and sometimes acrimonious debate, Ubungen withdrew the poster and agreed to remove the offending images. During the winter Miller reshot much of the photography, Ubungen rechoreographed the piece so that it would match the new photography, parents were consulted and one of the original parents, who at first had refused his child's participation in any photos, changed his mind. Ubungen clearly had convinced him of her honorable intentions. Whether the final piece will fully heal the breach and achieve what Ubungen initially set out to do--pay homage to a neighborhood and its people--remains to be seen.