I noticed something heartening last Friday at a performance by Backhausdance at the Irvine Barclay Theatre: an almost full house. The 750-seat Barclay hosted a healthy turnout for a challenging, evening-length piece of modern dance choreography by company founder Jennifer Backhaus, someone whose name isn’t exaclty a household word. A couple of weeks before that I dropped by Huntington Beach High School to see Synergy 2010, an annual student dance concert. It was an ambitious evening with 16 choreographies, all original, and a stage full of talented student dancers. Yes, there was a load of ballet, jazz and hip-hop on display, and a lot of ricocheting hormones (always popular with this crowd), but several of the works were unapologetically modern, even post-modern. Some were choreographed by Synergy director and HBHS faculty member Marie Hoffman. Again, I was surrounded by a full house crammed with loud, lusty dance supporters. I’m sure they were the families and friends of the dancers, for the most part. Still, every work was met with huge ovations — including the modern stuff. The scene at the community level contrasts sharply with what I’ve seen recently at the Center and other venues where modern dance is presented professionally in Orange County. It’s no secret that the Center papered the house for the appearance of Nacho Duato’s Compañía Nacional de Danza de España earlier this month. From what I’ve seen and heard anecdotally, the Center’s disappointing modern-dance numbers aren’t an isolated event. The Laguna Dance Festival has struggled to attract audiences in the last few years. Glorya Kaufman’s Dance at the Music Center series, when I attend, is often sparsely populated. Dance as a concert event has definitely lost a lot of its fizz since the boom days of the 1980s. And a recent study by the NEA confirmed that dance, like all the performing arts, has seen significant drop-off in attendance over the course of this decade. But there are audiences out there for modern dance — I’ve seen them with my own eyes. Why the disconnect between the giddy buzz I witness at the grassroots level and the half-empty houses at the big dance events? Is it just a matter of money? Or is dance less adept than other art forms at exploiting the kind of passionate interest in younger viewers that can last a lifetime? The answer is elusive. But here’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thought: perhaps all this grassroots dance crowd needs is some creative marketing to pull them into the Center and other places where professional modern dance is happening. Maybe the Center could include a local school dance group or two in its next Fall for Dance series, the way it did with Backhausdance a couple of years ago. It’s always a huge thrill when student dancers share the same stage with world-class dancers. And it would be a golden opportunity for the Center to get young dance fans (and their parents) to see an event that otherwise would never enter their orbit.