How does a boy from Weaverville, North Carolina, land of cattle ranchers and tobacco farmers, grow up to be a dancer?

Award-winning choreographer Mark Dendy, appearing with his troupe at the Yard this Saturday, says his first flicker of fascination for the medium arose when he watched tap dancers on the Lawrence Welk Show. Then when Mark was 13, his family moved to Nashville where he attended an afternoon movement class. The teacher played a recording of Harry Bellafonte singing the old spiritual Ezekiel Saw a Wheel A-Rollin’ and told the kids to “dance whatever you feel.” Young Dendy must have felt Ezekiel’s wheel a-rolling within himself, because he leapt, swirled, zigged and zagged with a passion that surprised him and the teacher.

“I just took off!” he recalls with a shake of his head. The next thing he knew, under the teacher’s express orders, and to his own delight, he was taking three dance classes a week.

Mark Dendy’s own coming of age meant a lickety-split move to New York in 1983, where he studied with teachers from Juilliard — some modern, some classical, some ballet. He felt a strong impulse to connect with the “godmother of modern dance,” Martha Graham, by then in her nineties. “I just loved to hear her talk, and she had a great sense of humor.”

In the long trajectory of Martha Graham’s fame and influence, Mr. Dendy describes her priestess quality: “When she walked into the studio, the crowds parted, and she would nod at each person murmuring, ‘So kind, so kind.’”

Between studies with the grande dame, he “snuck downtown,” in his own words, to observe and work on shows with other artists such as Pooh Kaye, Alvin Nikolai and JoséLimón. He also began attending the American Dance Festival (which would later present him with the Scripps Humphrey WeidmanLimón Award for the creation of new work), where he learned how movement explodes from deep inside the body: “Where the organs are, how the ribs connect to the spine and wrap around the organs to protect them.”

When he speaks of his awe of the physiological process, he brings to mind the dancer’s version of Michelangelo dissecting bodies to learn sculpture from the inside out.

Mr. Dendy’s credits include receipt of the prestigious Albert Award in the Arts, an Obie, numerous NEA, NYSCA and Jerome Foundation grants and the Bessie for career achievement. He has choreographed on and off Broadway, and been commissioned by a great number of dance companies to develop new works. He choreographed the Evolution Dances for the Emmy Award-winning Tales of the Human Dawn episode of the PBS series Smithsonian World.

This past week, Mr. Dendy and his dance company have been in residence at the Yard in Chilmark to create and expand existing work, including Afternoon of the Faunes, inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune, which premiered in Paris on May 29, 1912 and set the dance world on its head, putting Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes on the map.

On Tuesday, Dendy’s Faune, set to Debussy (as was Nijinsky’s) and involving dancers Alex Dean Speedie and Lonnie Poupard Jr., had its first complete run-through in rehearsal at the Yard. Before the young men began, the choreographer asked jovially, “Did you guys try on those pants? Did they fall off?” Apparently the pants remained in place, so the yet-unseen costumes were good to go.

On the seat beside Mr. Dendy rested a copy of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky by Joan Acocella. Mr. Dendy approaches his choreography with the passion of a scholar: for his work entitled Dream Analysis he collaborated with a psychiatrist and read up on Freud, Jung and Adler.

On the floor of the Yard’s barn-like theatre, the two dancers’ hand gestures evoked the dancing fauns on ancient Greek and Etruscan vases. Mr. Speedie and Mr. Poupard kept up a relentless pace of jumps and jogs-in-place, arms and legs akimbo, for most of the production perfectly mirroring one another, their synchronized movements interspersed with languid tumbles down one another’s backs, impossible contortions and twists, at one point spinning with heads pressed together. Every bit of the dance displayed the originality that led Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice to write, “If anyone could pull this off [a reworking of L’apres-midi], it would be Mr. Dendy, a blithe spirit with a varied, solid career . . . his achievement here is something of a miracle.”

The Saturday evening performance, starting at 8 p.m., will include a discussion of process with Mark Dendy and Yard artistic director and choreographer Wendy Taucher. In addition, during the morning, from 9 to 11 a.m., Mr. Dendy will conduct a master class. The price for the class is $15, and no preregistration is necessary.

For more information and for tickets for the evening performance, call 508-645-9662.