Incorporating the textures of Caribbean performance with African and American sensibilities, Cynthia Oliver’s COCo Dance Theatre performs its current evening-length work at this summer’s Bates Dance Festival.

Performances take place at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, July 23 and 24, in Bates College’s Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Tickets are $24 for the general public and $12 for students and seniors. For more ticket information and performance details, visit the festival website.

A discussion with the artists immediately follows the Friday concert. At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, also in Schaeffer, dance writer Debra Cash offers Inside Dance: Understanding Contemporary Performance, a pre-performance talk about COCo Dance Theatre.

Read about the festival’s Young Dancers Workshop.

In her festival performances, Oliver presents her newest work, Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso, a multidisciplinary work that takes calypso in and out of the carnival context and layers it with mythology.

A meditation on transnationalism, Rigidigidim features six women from the Caribbean diaspora. In Oliver’s signature repeating, overlapping style, Rigidigidim forces the performers to navigate their individual identities through their voices, stories, and bodies. They cut through calypso’s melodious innuendo to reveal its politically subversive truth-telling, delivered in raucous, downright unrespectable intensity.

Cynthia Oliver is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer whose work is a melange of dance, theater and the spoken word. She has presented work in New York at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre’s Haphazard Cabaret, the Pauline Oliveros Foundation’s Live Letters Festival, the 92nd Street Y, University Settlement, The Kitchen, Performance Space 122 and Dance Theater Workshop.

She was named Outstanding Young Choreographer by reviewer Frank Werner of the German magazine Ballet Tanz and had her film AfroSocialiteLifeDiva aired on European television. Oliver has received numerous awards and commissions from the Franklin Furnace, The Puffin Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund for Minority Artists, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Performance Network, the University of Illinois, the Illinois Arts Council and many others.

She holds a doctorate in performance studies from New York University and is an associate professor in the dance department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Learn more.

Amandla!, a Bates College organization addressing issues of people of black heritage, has launched a fund-raising drive to assist citizens of the Caribbean islands devastated by recent hurricanes and Sudanese refugees. All proceeds will go directly to the International Red Cross Emergency Relief Fund and Doctors Without Borders. For further information, call 207-795-5118.

Both the hurricanes in the Caribbean and the genocide perpetrated against the residents of Darfur, in eastern Sudan, “have placed millions of people in a situation of extreme hardship,” said Bates sophomore Lori-Anne Ramsay, an Amandla! student organizer from Brookline, Mass. “We need to do everything that we can right now to help.”

Two of the fund-raising events planned to date are suitable for both adults and children and open to the public.

A “Cultural Extravaganza” of songs, dances, storytelling, dub poetry, drumming and steel pans will be presented at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., Bates College. Dedicated to highlighting African and African diasporic heritage, the presentation will feature pieces from India, Latin America and the Caribbean performed by students, faculty and a New York-based group Songhai Djeli. No admission will be charged, but donations will be accepted.

A Bates student-vs.-staff and -faculty basketball game will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, in Alumni Gymnasium. The public is welcome and admission is $2 at the door.

The basketball fundraiser is co-sponsored by the programs in African American and American cultural studies.

Thomas, who was born and raised on the island of St. Vincent, is known for his use of Caribbean folklore in his work and his exploration of that region’s complex social and cultural dynamics. At Bates he will read from his newest novel, Behind the Face of Winter (Tasar, 2001) and from his poetry collection Moving Through Darkness (Afo Enterprises, 1999).

Thomas is a professor of literature at Université Laval, Québec. His novel Spirits in the Dark (House of Anansi, 1998) was a finalist for the QSPELL/Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award. He also wrote From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (Greenwood, 1988).

Thomas’ visit to Bates is sponsored by Amandla! and the departments of English, and theater and rhetoric.