By ROSLYN SULCAS

GRAHAMSTOWN, South Africa - In a municipal hall in the township of Joza, close to 100 children and teenagers stood looking apprehensively at Ronald K. Brown, the artistic director of the Evidence Dance Company of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. As seven of the Evidence dancers gently organized the children into rough lines, another dancer, Joel Sule Adams, beat out a rhythm on drums while Mr. Brown started to swing his arms in simple circles.

The children, many of whom spoke little English, followed intently, losing their initial shyness as the music took hold. As Mr. Brown slowly built more complex rhythmic sequences, they began to smile and infuse the dance with energy and joy . Afterward they sat on rows of chairs before Mr. Brown and raised their hands eagerly, bombarding him with questions. “How did you all come together?” “How does it feel to be in South Africa?” “What do you call your kind of dance?” “How can we learn more dance like this?”

It was Day 1 of the company’s visit to South Africa for a State Departmentsponsored tour, the first major dance initiative of this kind in more than 20 years. Along with two other dance companies from the United States, ODC/ Dance (which went to Burma, Indonesia and Thailand) and Urban Bush Women (which is currently touring Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela), Evidence was a newly official instrument of cultural exchange. As such, during its month-long tour - which also included stops in Senegal and Nigeria - it would discover both the exhilarating potential and sobering limitations of such a role.

Joza , is a 10-minute drive and a world away from Grahamstown, where the company was staying in a comfortable guesthouse. Grahamstown - with its wide, tree-lined streets, restaurants and cultural facilities - stands in vivid contrast to the simple houses and shacks of Joza.

That day the Evidence company ate a lunch of tripe stew, soya mince in tomato sauce and stiff cornmeal porridge in one of those houses: a government-issued, one-room concrete structure with a toilet but no separate wash facilities. Containing only a bed, some rickety shelves and two large drums, it is home to Vuyo Booi, a slight man with a broad grin who is the founder of Sakhuluntu, an informal community arts group that he started in 1998 with a handful of children. It is also an unlikely cultural oasis in Joza, a place where around 45 children take free weekday music, dance, drama and literature classes taught by Mr. Booi, Merran Marr (who runs Sakhuluntu with him) and a handful of teenage volunteers.

But the afternoon discussion revealed that breaching fundamental cultural and social differences is not just a matter of good intentions and good will.

“How should we deal with the lack of interest from parents who are alcoholic or drug addicts?” Mr. Booi asked. “How do you keep the children away from friends who will influence them to use drink and drugs? How do we keep these young people, who get no pay, motivated?”

Mr. Brown did his best, responding with anecdotes from his own life and youth in Brooklyn and speaking of issues in his own community.

After the two-hour meeting Ms. Marr said, slightly wistfully, that perhaps just sitting in a room with American dancers was motivation in itself for the young people. “Even if their problems can’t be solved by a talk like this, it connects them to something bigger,” she said.

No one from any of the tours reported any anti-American sentiment.

“When Americans think about Colombia, they think about drug cartels and kidnappings,” said Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the artistic director of Urban Bush Women, speaking from Cali, in western Colombia on the second leg of the company’s South American tour.

“In fact it’s an amazing dancing culture, and it’s been a revelation to see how dancing and singing and music are part of daily life. On a one-to-one level, you learn so much more about the breadth and depth of these cultures.”

In Burma, the members of ODC/Dance experienced some anxiety about whether a concert would be allowed to go ahead.

“We never felt threatened,” said Brenda Way, the artistic director of ODC/Dance. “There was just a lot of anxiety about whether we had the right permits and so on. The political control is actually very subtle. Our students were profoundly curious and somewhat apprehensive. It was profound to experience a need for artistic expression at that level, and really moving to me. It felt fantastic that the young people were seeing our young people and that would be the image that they carried: This is what America is like.”