Orange County Choreographer Chose to Be Out of Step : Dance: Rather than accept the lure of New York, Nannette Brodie opted to stay here and found her own modern dance troupe, which performs this weekend at Golden West College.

As a budding choreographer born and raised in Southern California, Nannette Brodie got some unusual advice: Stay West, young woman.

The counsel came from Murray Louis, a key figure in American modern dance, who worried about the way wannabes nationwide left home for New York, still the country’s dance capital, rarely to return.

Brodie met Louis during a 1965 summer workshop in Los Angeles. She was 18. “I didn’t have as much technique as some of the others in the workshop,” she recalls, “but what Murray recognized in me was a choreographer, and he encouraged me unbelievably.

“He was the one who told me he expected me to do my work in California. ‘Don’t come running to New York like everyone else,’ he said. ‘They need you out here.’ ”

Brodie took the tip. The result: the Nannette Brodie Dance Theatre, which she created in 1985, and which is scheduled to perform five of her works in identical programs today and Saturday at 8 p.m. at Golden West College’s Mainstage Theater.

Now a 44-year-old assistant professor of dance at Golden West, Brodie--whose eclectic work runs from lyrical to satiric--likes to let subject matter dictate movement vocabulary (early women aviators, cocktail party posturing and Turkish desert life prompted works in the upcoming show).

“Once I get an idea about something I want to do, it’s the idea that dominates and leads me into the choice of choreography,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m not concerned with continuing a particular style.”

Sometimes the desire to explore a mode of movement supplies inspiration, however. “Dream House Dash,” one of two works to be premiered this weekend, began that way, Brodie said. “I wanted to do a piece where the movement had a wacky, eccentric edge to it. It’s very non sequitur and unexpected. A person is up one second, then flat on their face the next.”

For the concert’s other debut, “La Reve Gotheque” (The Gothic Dream), music was Brodie’s muse. The work’s original score, by contemporary composer Wendy Carlos, is poignantly beautiful one moment, dark and menacing the next. Brodie chose to mirror the musical disparity by hiring Steve Rohmer, a professional mime, to interact--on stilts--with her most diminutive dancer, Malia Weinmann.

“Malia is just about five feet (tall), so the whole piece is built on this contrast between a fear and curiosity between the two and how they resolve this.” Brodie’s troupe currently has seven dancers from Orange and Los Angeles counties, all professionals, some former students.

Brodie, who danced with and choreographed for the defunct Los Angeles-based Moving Company and received her master’s degree in dance from Cal State Los Angeles, studied with local modern dance doyenne Bella Lewitzky, among others. She owes her greatest debt, however, for teaching style as well as encouragement, to Murray Louis. The choreographer, who has had his own company since 1953, is well known for analyzing and codifying elements of movement.

A passion for visual art, in which she minored in college, also was influential, said Brodie, who calls her dancers “pigments” and the stage a “canvas” and who eschews “movement for movement’s sake” without attention to costumes, scenery and lighting.

Brodie has presented her troupe throughout Orange County--at Orange Coast College, in the annual Imagination Celebration for children at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and the annual Arts on the Green festival in Costa Mesa, for example--and at other Southern California venues. “Orange County has been really, really good to us” in terms of bookings, she said.

But funding is a different matter. The troupe--whose members are paid for performances, but not for rehearsals--has received two grants from the Public Corp. for the Arts, an arts service agency in Long Beach, and one from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. But none from Orange County sources, public or private.

A chief problem, she believes, is the lack of a “centralized clearing house” in the sprawling, 29-city county for information on means of support. Grass-roots efforts are under way to establish a countywide agency that could fill these needs, efforts she strongly endorses. “There are a lot of dance companies and other arts organizations in the Orange County area that don’t know who to apply to for funding,” she said. “They feel lost and shut out.”

The Nannette Brodie Dance Theatre will perform today and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Golden West College Mainstage Theater, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach. Information: (714) 895-8378. Tickets, available from the college bookstore or at the door, are $8 for adults, $6 for students.