MONTPELLIER.- “But is he really leaving?”

Even after Jean-Paul Montanari announced in March that he would retire as director of Montpellier Danse, the summer festival, which he has led for 41 years, the question persisted, half-humorously, in dance circles.

Montanari has been threatening to retire forever — “this is perhaps my last festival,” he would often say in melancholy tones — but he is so closely identified with Montpellier Danse that it’s hard to imagine the festival without his monklike silhouette, his half-amused smile and occasional caustic asides.

But he really is leaving.

“I’ve come to the end of that road,” Montanari, 76, said, speaking in French in an interview in his small, spare apartment near the Montpellier railway station. “I have done everything I wanted, and it is the right moment to find a new history for Montpellier Danse.”

Montanari’s career has been entwined with the explosion of contemporary dance into a major art form in France. The Montpellier festival was founded in 1981 by choreographer Dominique Bagouet, who asked Montanari, then working in theater, to come and help him. (Bagouet died of AIDS in 1992, at 41.) It was the year of François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party victory in national elections, and the beginnings of a new cultural policy of decentralization, presided over by the culture minister Jack Lang. The effect on dance would be enormous.

Regional choreographic centers were established all over France, the first in Montpellier, presided over by Bagouet. Each was headed by a choreographer, benefiting from a permanent company, rehearsal space, technical support and ample funding. The result was a burst of movement languages and aesthetics, a vibrant touring network and a new legitimacy for a formerly marginalized form.

“Montanari obviously benefited from the explosion of dance in the 1980s, but dance also benefited from him,” said Philippe Noisette, the dance critic of Les Echos. “He understood dance was a young art, alive and cool, that could give a youthful, dynamic image to the city, and was able to convince the politicians, particularly the mayor of Montpellier, Georges Freche, of that and keep that support for decades.

“And he got the city to create a permanent home for the festival and choreographic center in the Agora de la Danse.”

Through the festival, Montanari has also had the money and power to commission and take risks on work, noted by the journalists and international programmers who make an annual pilgrimage to Montpellier, said Alistair Spalding, the director of Sadler’s Wells in London. “Forty years is a long time to dominate in that way.”

Montanari, slim and dark-eyed, was born in Boufarek, a small town outside Algiers, to a Corsican father and a Jewish Berber mother, and grew up during the Algerian war of independence. The family moved to France in 1962, settling in Lyon, where Montanari studied literature at university, then worked in theater before beginning to program dance. Ever since, he said, “dance has been my whole life.”

In a long conversation on a hot Montpellier summer afternoon, Montanari talked about the dramatic increase of French dance in the 1980s, the changes he has seen over the decades, and why the current structures for dance need reinvention in France. Candid, wry and prone to thoughtful self-analysis, he detailed a career that is also a portrait of dance history in France and beyond. Here are edited extracts from the conversation.

Q: How did you discover dance?

A: I think the first dance piece I saw was Maurice Béjart’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in Avignon, in 1967. The way dance spoke of the beauty and the desires of the body transported me. It was so different to theater, full of texts and ideologies of heterosexual men.

I began to go to dance when I could, encountered Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown — she was really the reason I decided to dedicate myself to dance. Without those artists, I wouldn’t have understood it was possible to speak of the world through the body.

Q: When Dominique Bagouet asked you to come work with him, were you conscious of the big shift in cultural politics happening in France?

A: Yes, in the sense that the left had come to power, and they thought culture was important. But Dominique met Georges Freche before Jack Lang’s official decentralization policy was established. Dominique suggested the festival and Freche realized that culture could be a powerful way to promote and develop the city. He was very insistent that he wanted a festival for a local public that would be the equal of any in Paris or New York.

There was also a shift in culture in a broader sense. I was an activist for the place of homosexuals in society, you can’t imagine what France was like in the ’60s and ’70s. When Mitterrand came in, that repression disappeared. People don’t understand the enormous advances that came with the arrival of the Socialists

Q: Was your vision for the festival international from the outset?

A: For the first years, it was very important to show all the work that was part of the new blossoming of French dance. But aesthetically it was the American postmodernists who captivated me. The public had to learn about all this. You have to have courage in the face of the public. If people don’t understand at first, that doesn’t matter. When Merce Cunningham first came here in 1985, people were shouting, “go learn to dance from Bejart.” But when we presented Cunningham’s “Ocean” in a 6,000-seat theater in 1998, it was packed, and a summit in my career.

Q: The festival programming has often reflected your life. You focused strongly over the years on Arab and Middle Eastern cultures, for example.

A: Between 1990 and 1992, I really took the festival in my own hands. The 1992 festival, “The Mediterranean, My Mother,” was based on the idea of the exclusion of both Jews and Arabs from Spain in 1492. It was about exile, identity, exclusion, immigration, the rise of nationalisms, all these things that concern us so deeply still.

It was a huge moment for me. Later, there were many other strong links to my own life in the festival; I think that was part of its vitality. When you look around you (he gestured at his spartan apartment), you can see my real life is in the festival office.

Q: What changes have you seen in contemporary dance over the decades?

A: Everything is accepted and mixed up now. You can have krump in Rameau’s “Les Indes Galantes” and it works brilliantly, or (Mourad) Merzouki doing choreography for synchronized swimming. Millions of people will watch breaking during the Olympics.

It’s the other side of the coin from the difficulties of American postmodernism and the French artists of the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s partly good because dance is everywhere: It has been absorbed by the world, the market.

Q: You have talked about contemporary dance as analogous to the nouveau roman, an experimental moment in literature that didn’t last very long. Do you really think there is no impulse to experiment today?

A: Of course there are still people who invent original things. But there isn’t a generation of choreographers inventing a new language. And in tandem, do theaters today house artists whose work is challenging? I think they aren’t welcoming enough, because they have to balance the books and there is a desire to please, to popularize, which is always an error. You should give the public the best, the difficult, not the most pleasant or easy.

Q: You are leaving Montpellier Danse, and Christian Rizzo, who heads the Choreographic Center here, is leaving, too. Is this an opportunity to invent that new form?

A: This was a major reason for leaving now. In Montpellier we have a dance festival, a year-round season and a choreographic center with studios, residencies, lodgings and a theater. Does that correspond to the needs of choreographers now? Perhaps the two structures — the festival and the choreographic center — need to be dissolved and replaced by a single one.

France is not the same great nation it was 40 years ago, and there is less and less money for culture. The world has changed; there is digitization, social media, artificial intelligence, the prevalence of the image. We need to create a new history, find new structures to show us the unknown.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.