When ODC Artistic Director Brenda Way initially envisioned a dance piece that would invoke global warming, she saw dancers moving about a stage blissfully unaware of a melting, 800-pound ice block suspended above their heads.

“It’s a metaphor for America’s distraction from disaster,” she says. “It’s dripping on us from above and we’re not paying attention.”

However, it was too visceral a metaphor. When she described the idea to her set designer, he told her that an 800-pound block of ice would probably fall and kill the dancers and it just wasn’t a good idea.

Consequently, Way settled for 12 smaller blocks of melting ice in “On A Train Heading South,” the inventive political dance piece ODC/San Francisco will perform at the World Theater tonight.

The political piece, co-commissioned by the World Theater, explores inevitable environmental change, our current government’s refusal to face the danger and do something about it, human complacency and mass distraction in the face of natural disaster.

As the ice, which is lit up like jewels overhead, drips, the dancers cavort and frolic heedlessly while a Cassandra character wails and vents and pleads with them to notice that the sky is literally falling. The dancers begin on safe, dry area downstage from the melt, but the performance becomes progressively wetter and the dancing correspondingly more risky and dangerous.

Much of the on-stage imagery and sound score addresses what Way calls “weapons of mass distraction.”

“While the polar ice caps melt, the media is focused on trivial stuff like legislation against baggy pants. We’re completely distracted from the important issues by lurid, meaningless tidbits,” Way says in a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. “If there was a way to work Cheney’s shot in the face into the piece in the last minute, I would.”

Accordingly, Jack Perla’s commissioned score is interspersed with snippets of George W. Bush ranting about his administration’s record on the environment.

Way, who co-founded ODC/Dance, bucked convention when she moved the seminal company out to San Francisco in 1976. At the time, it was generally believed that no serious dance company could survive outside of New York. But for the past 30 years, ODC/Dance has proven naysayers wrong with its consistent and critically acclaimed blend of athleticism, passion and intellectual depth.

Way says that her work hasn’t always been political.

“I have been making work for 35 years so I’ve had plenty of time to do a lot of different things.” Way says. “I’ve done work that’s abstract and internally reflective as well. That said, I have a family and my four kids have made me more concerned with the world.”

Ways says that, right now, her call to political response is louder than it has ever been throughout her life.

“[It’s] because we have a really unfortunate, narrow-minded government that is working to destroy all the issues that make life worth living…justice, health and the environment,” Way says.

Although tonight’s performances won’t conclude with a panel discussion, Way says that “On a Train Heading South” has elicited a lot of “lively, heated discussions” after its performance. She believes that interest has spiked in the last year due to extreme weather and other unignorable events which may be linked to global warming.

“When I initially wrote the piece, global warming was a story on page 25, it got minor coverage,” Way says. “Katrina had a huge impact on that. It got people wondering. Now it’s front page news. As a result, people are not just interested in weather patterns and global warming, but the piece itself.”

Next, Way is working on a piece titled “Time Remaining.”

“As in, the time remaining before the Rapture,” she says. “I’m really concerned with what we’re doing in the name of religion. Killing people in the name of a book and a perspective. That’s this year’s obsession.”

In addition to the public performance, the World Theater will host a four-day artist residency with the dance troupe. Outreach activities will include free performances for local elementary school children (grades 3–5) and a free 60-minute lecture/demonstration at Gavilan College in Gilroy, Calif.

ODC/San Francisco performs “On a Train Heading South” Thursday at 7:30pm at CSUMB’s World Theater. $25/general public; $22/groups of 20 or more; $10/CSUMB students. 582-4580 or csumb.edu/worldtheater.