As his nine dancers leap and glide across the floor, choreographer Todd Courage tracks their every move — each subtle flick of the wrist, each angle of the body. A small aqua blue notebook in his back pocket has the steps, but he only occasionally glances at it. When he has an idea for his dancers, he kicks off his shoes and socks.
Dah dah dah: He counts beats aloud as he springs across the room to demonstrate the motions in his head.
“It’s all à la minute. It’s all spontaneous. I walk in with a loose idea and some music,” Courage said of “The Dance of Listening,” which opens tonight at the ODC Theater and runs through February 6.
The overarching idea of the three dances in the program is connectedness. Despite being in one of San Francisco’s most wired neighborhoods — Foursquare and Posterous are only blocks away — Courage finds people missing the point of it all by neglecting face-to-face relationships.
“In our attempt to remain connected, the only thing missing is connection,” he said. “It’s humans and their relationship to technology…I feel this great disconnect.”
“I was thinking about my ability and inability to listen. I wanted to hear what people are really saying on a lot of levels,” said the 52-year-old, who danced for 30 years before founding the San Francisco-based Courage Group 11 years ago.
The evening of dance includes what Courage called “three separate, seemingly unrelated pieces.”
The first, “A Quiet Periphery,” deals with the coexistence of chaos and calm.
The second has two titles: “Sweet” and “John Lennon Used to Live Right Over There,” a dance about two friends daydreaming in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields.
“Their daydreams entangle and they’re sort of acting on pre-existing aggression in their relationship,” Courage said. “Then at the end of the piece, they’re snapped out of their dream…[and] in that part of Central Park is the Dakota, where John Lennon used to live.”
The final piece, “The Dance of Listening,” is centered on the importance of listening in human interaction. San Francisco composer Ryan Andersen crafted the original score.
“The sounds that the audience is hearing is as important as anything that they’re seeing,” Courage said.
Wendy Earl, a performer in “The Dance of Listening,” called Courage’s process organic. “He starts with music,” she said.
Earl, a five-year member of Courage Group, is deaf without the assistance of a hearing aid — which factored into Courage’s final piece.
“It went from an inquiry into deafness on sound to an abstraction of the meaning of sound and communication in today’s society,” Earl said.
Courage said his strongest influences include George Balanchine, Jiří Kylián and his mentor, Enrico Labayen.
“Those three people particularly have this way of translating movement vocabulary into a universal message.”
Year to year, Courage and his group continue to create expression through dance, in spite of running such a small company.
“I’ve always found support for the arts in the United States dismal,” Courage said.
“It’s always tough. It’s a tough gig if you take this on as your life’s work. But I will say that with a lot of determination and focus, supporters have come out of the woodwork for me in miraculous ways.”
Now, supporters tend to find him.
“I’m San Francisco’s best-kept secret,” he said with a laugh.
