DURHAM, N.C. — It may be called the American Dance Festival, but it is no longer strictly an American affair. In its first incarnation in 1934, more than 100 students flocked to the festival school to learn about a uniquely American art form known as modern dance from early icons such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Since then, artists from countries including China, Egypt, Iraq, and Mozambique have become important building blocks.

“The challenge is how to keep the school present, growing, changing, open,” the school’s dean, Donna Faye Burchfield, said. “I want this to be a system that is flexible, that we can rethink, reimagine, redefine, and reinvent year after year.”

Since 1984, the festival has hosted the International Choreographers Residency Program. Each year choreographers from diverse cultural backgrounds come to work on their own projects or, through an international commissioning program, create new works with ADF dancers. Many of these international artists take daily classes alongside younger students. Ms. Burchfield was one such young student more than 20 years ago and still remembers the impact of mingling with multiple cultures.

“After watching rehearsals or performances by people from 30 countries, you couldn’t look at things the same way,” Ms. Burchfield said. “Once you looked at those dances, you carried those experiences with you. The images became part of the conversation, and were in the visual, emotional, and kinesthetic landscape of the festival. They resonated into the evenings and back into the classrooms.”

In addition to these activities in Durham, the ADF has taken its vision of dance abroad. International mini-ADFs and individual teaching engagements for ADF faculty have introduced young students in cities such as Moscow, Shanghai, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to a more American approach to movement. In these exchanges, cultures and customs inform one another.

“It was always very clear — and it was relief to know — that we were not going abroad with the idea that we had the truth and light and knowledge of what dance should be,” a teacher at the ADF since 1981, Gerri Houlihan, said. Ms. Houlihan has taught in countries as diverse as Paraguay, Poland, Korea, and Mongolia. “We were interested in sharing. And we were also interested in their cultures, their dance, their music — and in maybe cross-pollinating.”

Not surprisingly, these encounters are never delimited to dance alone, and teachers say they learn as much as they teach.

“Working in Korea with women in 1990 or ’91, I felt their placement was slightly back and behind themselves,” Ms. Houlihan said. “I kept trying to get them over their center. I’d get them up one day, and they’d fall back the next. I couldn’t understand why, until I realized I was looking at hundreds of years of women walking behind their men, slightly subservient. I was trying to change the way these women thought about themselves in two weeks — it wasn’t going to happen overnight.”

An informal choreographers’ showing this past Saturday displayed the diversity of this year’s program. Three Argentinean women crossed paths in staccato steps to a nuevo tango by the Gotan Project. And Andrey Zakharov from Russia brought a seemingly detached, yet profoundly grounded sense of humor to the auditorium. He tweaked expectations, twisted spectators’ heads, partnered the stage, feigned jumping rope through audience aisles, and marveled at the building’s domed ceiling.