Charles Reinhart, who as the longtime director of the American Dance Festival popularized modern and avant-garde dance in the United States and worldwide, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter, Ariane Malia Reinhart, said.
“Modern dance was pretty unknown in the 1950s,” he recalled in an interview with Dance Teacher magazine in 2011. “Even my own family had no idea who Paul Taylor was,” referring to the American choreographer whose dance company was founded in 1954 and whose pioneering work remains in repertory globally.
Mr. Reinhart, who considered modern dance an “indigenous American art form,” would become a pivotal force in bringing it into the mainstream. But early on, even he knew little about the Paul Taylor Dance Company — until he sat in on a rehearsal — after being asked by the founder himself to serve as the company’s first manager.
“When they danced ‘Aureole,’” he said of seeing Mr. Taylor’s most-celebrated work, with its lyrical movement set to music by Handel, “it was so beautiful and different. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
The revelation persuaded Mr. Reinhart to accept the manager’s role, which he held for six years.
Under the banner of Charles Reinhart Management, he went on manage other influential artists, including Meredith Monk, Lucas Hoving and Donald McKayle, and produce some of the earliest modern dance festivals in New York City.
But it was as the director of American Dance Festival that Mr. Reinhart had an outlet commensurate with his ambitions. As he told Jack Anderson of The New York Times in 1978, the festival “is as holy a Mecca as one can find in the dance world.”
Founded in 1934 at Bennington College in Vermont but based at Connecticut College in New London when he took over in 1968, the six-week summer festival of classes and performances was then focused on established artists such as Martha Graham and José Limón. He immediately set about expanding its scope to include emerging and experimental choreographers.
He would continue to lead the festival in new directions for 43 years — even geographically: The festival later moved to the campus of Duke University, in Durham, N.C., mounting its first season there in 1978.
“I decided to come in with a bang,” he told Mr. Anderson, referring to that first season at Duke, which then became its permanent home. He commissioned a diverse set of works for that season, by Mr. Taylor as well as the choreographers Alvin Ailey, Yvonne Rainer, Twyla Tharp and Talley Beatty — artists who experimented, mixed forms and challenged traditional dance.
Future seasons brought reconstructions of lost choreography by Ms. Graham and Doris Humphrey; Hawaiian and Indian dance; and avant-garde work by Anna Halprin, Pina Bausch, Shen Wei, Eiko & Koma, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and Pilobolus. The festival has since presented more than 700 premieres, more than 400 commissions and more than 50 reconstructions.
In 1977, Mr. Reinhart married Stephanie Ackerman, who joined the festival administration and eventually became its co-director. They quickly set about revamping the festival: expanding the its range of dance classes (a 19-year-old Madonna, then largely unknown, attended on a scholarship in 1978); creating new incubator programs for early-career artists, among them Mark Morris, Molissa Fenley and Bill T. Jones; starting a dance critics conference; inaugurating a dance-film festival; and founding satellite festivals in Korea, India, Russia and China.
The Reinharts notably sought out artists working in dance styles still unknown in the United States, sometimes with memorable results. Dai Rakuda Kan, who appeared at the 1982 festival, marked the American debut of Butoh, a post-World War II Japanese dance-theater form characterized by slow movement, ashen body paint, contorted gestures and frequently nudity.
“Imagine a Japanese version of the Living Theater with a touch of Hieronymus Bosch,” the Times critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote. “Mothers fled out of the theater with their children.”
Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina was also taken aback. He proposed legislation in 1989 that would bar the National Endowment for the Arts from using federal funds to support “obscene or indecent materials.”
Mr. Reinhart fired back in a Times opinion piece titled “Caution: This Art May Offend.” He wrote that the bill “serves no positive purpose, except as a relief bill for this country’s unemployed lawyers” and that it would lead to ludicrous designations.
“Any dance containing same-sex partnering could be labeled homoerotic,” he wrote. “Would the tutu be viewed as too revealing? Would leotards be banned from our stages?”
A compromise version of the Helms bill was passed by Congress that year.
The Reinharts were dedicated to conserving the work of Black choreographers, few of whom, outside of Mr. Ailey, had permanent companies.
In 1987, the festival launched the program The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, which has reconstructed two dozen works by significant Black artists. The Reinharts also executive-produced “Free to Dance,” a three-part PBS documentary on the influence of Black artists on American modern dance. It received an Emmy Award.
Mr. Reinhart played an influential role in education as the national coordinator for the N.E.A.’s Artists-in-Schools Program. In fact, it was in the second grade that Mr. Reinhart experienced his first epiphany about the power of dance.
“The teacher taught us the Native American rain dance,” he said in 2003, in his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Duke University. “We performed for the other classes on a sunny afternoon. I could see a cloud forming in the distance. As we began to dance, it started sprinkling. I thought, ‘This dance is powerful stuff.’”
It would be many years, and many divergent pursuits later, however, before Mr. Reinhart would find his calling in the dance world.
Charles Lawrence Reinhart was born on Dec. 5, 1930, in Summit, N.J., to Albert, a greengrocer, and Rose (Goldstein) Reinhart. He was the youngest child of three siblings.
Charles attended Newark Rutgers on a basketball scholarship and graduated in 1952, then served as a military historian during the Korean War. Restless and adventurous, after leaving the Army, he coached basketball. In 1955, he enrolled in New York University’s law school, then dropped out after a year. The following year, he briefly enrolled in the University of Copenhagen, acted in Danish films and toured Europe by motorcycle.
While working as a typist in New York in the late 1950s, he found his calling on an assignment for Isadora Bennett, a modern-dance publicist whose clients included Ms. Graham, Mr. Limón and the Royal Danish Ballet, and her business partner, Richard Pleasant, a theatrical and dance agent and a co-founder of Ballet Theater, the precursor to American Ballet Theater.
Ms. Bennett hired him as a talent scout and earmarked a small closet in her office as his work space. One day, Mr. Taylor stopped by and asked if Ms. Bennett knew someone who could manage his young company. As Mr. Reinhart told it, “She said, ‘Check out the kid in the closet.’” Mr. Taylor invited him to the “Aureole” rehearsal and, Mr. Reinhart recalled, “My jaw dropped. My body was reacting like, ‘This is what I was born for.’”
Even as he steered the American Dance Festival, Mr. Reinhart lent his support wherever it was needed. In 1974, he stepped in as acting director of the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival during a difficult transition, and he and the Reinharts served as artistic directors for dance at the Kennedy Center in the late 1990s. Ms. Reinhart died in 2002.
Mr. Reinhart stepped down from American Dance Festival leadership in 2011, but he never stopped supporting dance and emerging artists. In 2015, he co-founded the 4A Arts service organization and was its executive director until age 91. “Dance was his religion,” Jodee Nimerichter, Mr. Reinhart’s friend and successor as the festival’s director, said.
Mr. Reinhart was previously married to Patricia Mohan; they had two sons, Richard, who died in 1994, and Scott. His second marriage, to Molly Moore, a dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, with whom he had two sons, Taylor and Adam, also ended in divorce. His daughter Ariane, with Stephanie Reinhart, is an actress and singer. In addition to his children, his survivors include seven grandchildren.
For his contributions to the field, Dance/USA presented him with lifetime achievement honors in 1994, the French government named him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2002, and he received a 2003 Dance Magazine Award jointly with his wife.
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