“Why do they fall down?”

       This was the question that Yang Meiqi, a Chinese dance educator, asked about the students in a modern dance class she watched in Durham, N.C., in 1986.

       The person she asked was Charles Reinhart, the longtime director of the American Dance Festival, the event she was attending. His answer: “Why not?”

       After a few days, Yang had another question: Could Reinhart help her start a modern dance training program in China? He could.

       With funding from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States State Department, Reinhart sent American teachers to the Guangdong Dance Academy, where Yang was the principal. After four years, this program gave birth to the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, often called (not quite accurately) the first modern dance troupe in China. From this experiment much would bloom, including figures like the choreographer Shen Wei.

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       Reinhart, 94, has told this story many times. But not long ago, he added a coda. A little later in that summer of 1986, while Yang and Reinhart were watching a performance of the avant-garde duo Eiko and Koma, she leaned over to him and began to ask “Why do they…?” Then she stopped and answered her own question: “Why not?” The educator was already learning.

       Reinhart recounted this extra anecdote during an interview for “Planting Seeds: ADF and Modern Dance in China,” an oral-history project that the festival put online in November. In video interviews in Chinese and English with bilingual captions, 16 people associated with Yang’s undertaking flesh out its history and continuing impact. Even relatively familiar parts of the story, like the origin moment, acquire fresh detail and depth.

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