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Now the region's growing field of contemporary dance hopes to join the tide of popularity. American audiences — most for the first time — will have the chance to see the most prominent exports from these countries in a festival that will present three major companies at the Joyce Theater in New York, starting on Wednesday: Danish Dance Theater, Carte Blanche from Norway and the choreographer Tero Saarinen's troupe from Finland.

The companies appear under the auspices of Ice Hot, a platform as well as an organizing force created to allow the modern-dance groups in these countries to work and collaborate, both at home and on tour. After the Joyce, the dancers will head to Nordic Cool 2013 — a broader celebration of the arts from northern countries, also coordinated with Ice Hot — at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, where modern-dance troupes from Iceland and Sweden will also appear.

National ballet companies have enjoyed support in the region for centuries, but the contemporary-dance scene, relative to that of the rest of Europe, is young.

"I worked without any funding for nine years," Mr. Saarinen, who founded his company in 1996, said in a phone conversation. The government funding he eventually received required lobbying not only for himself, but also for his art form as a whole.

"You had to talk about all the ingredients of contemporary dance," Mr. Saarinen recalled. "How there was already political support from the '60s and '70s for it in France and in Britain — that we'd started late making noise for this art form. That was the only way we could change something."

With Ice Hot, Mr. Saarinen and others, including Virve Sutinen, artistic director of the Dansens Hus performance space in Stockholm, are hoping to make contemporary dance from their region better known abroad. "We are such small countries, so remote, we felt it would be much more worthwhile to show through a platform together," Ms. Sutinen said by phone.

She and her colleagues throughout the region founded Ice Hot hoping to learn, she added, "How do other people look at what we do? It's a way to develop our dance and increase the visibility of Nordic dance, globally." Martin Wexler, the director of programming at the Joyce, attended one of the group's events, the first Ice Hot biennial, in Stockholm in December of 2010. He called the gamut of performances there "illuminating." He was familiar with contemporary dance in the region, "but seeing it all at once, I was impressed by the diversity, range and creativity of these companies," he said. "Basically, their strategy worked. I got very excited by what I was seeing."

Ms. Sutinen calls the three companies Mr. Wexler chose for the Joyce the effective "flagships of our countries." Danish Dance Theater and Carte Blanche are the official contemporary companies of Denmark and Norway, while Mr. Saarinen, who operates independently, "is one of a kind — he has his company but he's also choreographing for others, and there's not that many people who have that privilege," she said.

Both choreographers and other artistic figures in the region tend to agree on a few connecting aesthetic threads in Nordic contemporary dance. The Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman, whose work has been performed in New York City by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, pointed to "this kind of dry, weird Scandinavian humor" and, alternately, a sense of melancholy beneath the surface. Subtlety tends to win over daring feats of physicality onstage.

Bruno Heynderickx, the artistic director of Carte Blanche, said in a telephone interview, "When I think of Norway or Scandinavia, I think of purity, design, and I think you find that in the choreographic language of the dance creators here."

Ms. Sutinen also noted that a keen awareness of the natural world pervades much of the work. "We live up here in this kind of severe place," she said. "People are very sensitive to light, and it is usually a very big part of the process and concept."

And Johan Inger, a choreographer and former director of Cullberg Ballet in Sweden, said by phone, "There's something about solitude, something lonely and poetic."

Sweden, with a longer contemporary tradition, stands apart, thanks to two pioneers: Birgit Cullberg, who founded her company in 1967 (Mats Ek, her son, is now one of Scandinavia's most acclaimed choreographic exports), and the impresario Bengt Hager, an early champion of American modern choreographers like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and the founder of the country's national dance museum.

Sweden's neighbors have had a harder time. In Denmark the Royal Danish Ballet and August Bournonville's legacy still loom large. "It's been rather uphill for modern dance to get its feet firmly planted in the ground," Tim Rushton, the artistic director of Danish Dance Theater said by phone. "But I think what the company and I have done in the past 10 years has really put it on the landscape in Denmark."

Now the company makes an annual appearance at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen, "which was totally unheard-of before," and a few years ago the country's cultural ministry officially put the troupe on its budget.

"That was a very, very big step for us," Mr. Rushton, who is originally from England, said. "To me, that really proves there's been some sort of shift in the public and cultural interest."

The variety of work to be presented at the Joyce hints at the more recent openness of artists in the region to international influences, and Mr. Wexler said he purposely chose three companies with very different aesthetics. Mr. Rushton described his work as usually "sort of serious" and driven very much by classical or electronic music; at the Joyce he'll show an accessible work set to American jazz standards.

Mr. Heynderickx, whose Carte Blanche is not a single-choreographer company, will dance in the eerie "Corps de Walk," by the Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, in which the dancers, wearing nude unitards and colored contact lenses intended to partly obscure their vision, are transformed into a spookily asexual army.

Mr. Saarinen will present two works: "Scheme of Things," a dark, abstract piece featuring a glittering panel of lights; and "Hunt," set to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," a raw, haunting solo Mr. Saarinen performs, bathed in smoky light.

If those two pieces do sound oddly Nordic, don't expect Mr. Saarinen to agree. "The movement I've created is the outcome of all these experiences, and of course it carries the flavor of Finland because I was brought up here," he allows. "But whether it is Finnish dance or Nordic dance, I kind of don't know. It is just the way I see the world."