In the final week of the Bates Dance Festival, the annual Different Voices concert showcases the internationalism of contemporary dance, with choreographers from the United States, Africa and Mexico bringing compelling styles and perspectives to the stage at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Aug. 5 and 6, in Bates College’s Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Tickets are $24 for the general public and $12 for students and seniors, and may be purchased by calling 207-786-6161 or visiting the website.

On the program are new works by choreographers Claudia Lavista and Omar Carrum of Mexico’s Delfos Danza Contemporanea; the sensational Middle Eastern performer Donna Mejia; Mozambican choreographer Paniabra Gabriel Canda; Ethiopian dancer Shiferaw Tarikou, in his first U.S. appearance; Connecticut-based company elephant JANE dance; emerging choreographer Deborah Goffe; and Quebecois choreographer Helen Simoneau, a recent winner of the first prize for choreography at the Internationales Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany.

In other festival news this week: Young Choreographers/New Works Showcase, an informal presentation of more than 20 new dances created by students and international artists during the festival, takes place from 1-5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 7, in Schaeffer Theatre. There is no charge for admission and audience members are welcome to come and go throughout the afternoon.

Later that evening, the Festival Finale features students performing a high-energy evening of modern, jazz and Middle Eastern dance created by faculty members Lavista, Carrum, Michael Foley ’89, Doug Varone and Cathy Young. This event culminates the festival’s three-week intensive training program and also showcases the talents of local youth, ages 6-17, enrolled in the Youth Arts Program.

One of today’s most important companies in Latin America, Delfos Danza Contemporanea is known for a fully articulated, high-energy style, fast and free of constraint. “If we want to talk of the great figures of Latin American contemporary dance, the name of Claudia Lavista is unavoidable,” said a writer for Spain’s Por La Danza Magazine. A dancer, choreographer and teacher, Lavista founded Delfos in 1992 with Victor Ruiz.

She has received many awards for her artistry, including the prestigious National Arts Creators Fellowship from the Mexican National Endowment for the Arts in 2008 and the title of Best Female Dancer in Mexico’s National Dance Awards. She was named one of the 10 best Mexican dancers of the 20th century by a critics organization in 2001. Lavista has appeared in more than 70 works of dance, theater, video and opera, working with choreographers from around the globe and performing in some of the world’s most prestigious theaters.

An artist known for multilayered, deeply personal work, Carrum is a founding member of Delfos. He has been featured in more than 60 works of dance, theater and opera. In 2000 he was named Best Male Dancer at the 21st Annual INBA-UAM National Choreographic Competition. He has received numerous awards from Mexico’s national fund for culture and art, and in 2009 became the first Mexican choreographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship.

A central figure in Mozambique’s dance landscape, choreographer Canda has made his mark with a powerful and imaginative choreographic response to the ravages of war. He began his career as a traditional dancer but was soon lured to modern dance through a series of collaborative research projects with Dancas na Cidade in Lisbon, Portugal.

Canda is the founder of CulturArte, a Maputo-based producing and training program for performers with and without disabilities. He directs the program in cooperation with artists Ariry Andriamoratsiresy of Madagascar and Boyzie Cekwana of South Africa.

Rhode Island choreographer-performer Heidi Henderson presents a new work with her company, elephant JANE dance, which has performed at the South Bank Centre in London; the International Festival of Dance in Taegu, Korea; and Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Festival, among other venues. Henderson has received three choreography fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Emerging artists in residence at the Bates Dance Festival showcase recent works to round out the Different Voices program. Choreographer, performer and video artist Goffe creates daring interdisciplinary work with her company, Scapegoat Garden, a collaborative dance theater troupe based in Hartford, Conn. She has received artist’s fellowships for her choreography from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Greater Hartford Arts Council and the Surdna Foundation.

Quebec native Simoneau has presented her work across Canada, the U.S. and in Germany and Greece.

The annual “Different Voices” concert features a wide range of dance from around the globe as visiting artists from the United States, Mexico, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Africa bring new works to the Bates Dance Festival stage. The festival presents “Different Voices” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 10, and Friday, Aug. 11, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Tickets are $18/$12 (students and seniors) and may be purchased by calling 207-786-6161 after July 8.

Rani Khanam is one of India’s foremost Kathak dancer/choreographers. For 15 years, she was groomed under Birju Maharaj and Reba Vidyarthi, gurus at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi, where she graduated with top honors in Kathak-Lucknow, a traditional style of Indian dance. The Kathak Kendra experience widened her horizons and enriched her repertoire so that her innovative choreographies are simultaneously traditional and contemporary.

Alicia Sanchez is the artistic director of El Teatro de Movimiento, a Mexico City-based contemporary dance company. She has received numerous choreographic awards at home and abroad and has preformed in the United States, Canada and the Czech Republic. Her most recent commission was for the Ririe Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City.

Po Lin Tso is an independent choreographer who danced for 12 years with the Hong Kong Dance Company, performing a repertoire of modern and traditional Chinese dance. In 1997 she was named “Artist of the Year” by the Hong Kong Artist’s Guild. Her interpretation of leading roles has won her critical acclaim in the local cultural community.

Wei Ching-Ju is a young dancer and actor from Taiwan who currently performs with Legend Lin Dance Theatre, a repertory company devoted to large-scale dance dramas. She has acted with several well-known Taipei theater troupes, including Shakespeare’s Wild Sister, that were instrumental in establishing the highly acclaimed Taipei international Theater Festival.

Lucky Kele is an emerging choreographer from Johannesburg, South Africa. Despite having no formal dance training, he has been creating engaging small works over the past several years. His work has been presented annually at two major dance venues, the FNB Dance Umbrella and The Dance Factory in Johannesburg.

In addition to main stage performances, the festival offers a selection of free and low-cost events. Complete information is available at the festival’s website

At press time the Bates Dance Festival gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, Maine Arts Commission, Surdna Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Altria, Fisher Charitable Foundation, Sam L. Cohen Foundation, Androscoggin Bank, Cole Hahn, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Mechanics Savings Bank and TD Banknorth.

The annual Different Voices concert features an inspiring night of dance from around the globe as visiting artists from the United States, Mexico, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo bring new works to the Bates Dance Festival stage. The Different Voices concert will take place at 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12, in Schaeffer Theatre. Tickets are $18/$12 (students and seniors) and may be purchased by calling 207-786-6161 after July 9. (This performance is appropriate for an audience of all ages.)

Soweto-born dancer-choreographer Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe returns to the festival with work that fuses his ancestral traditions with an inspired blend of Asian and European dance elements. His work combines themes of cultural alienation and identity with an intense physicality and charisma that have won accolades and awards worldwide. Mantsoe has created works for Moving Into Dance, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Inbal Dance Company of Israel and Skanes Danse Teatre in Sweden. He recently completed a highly acclaimed U.S. tour.

Representing the vanguard of Japanese contemporary dance, internationally renowned choreographer Kota Yamazaki will showcase an excerpt from his latest work. A contemporary performer whose training includes butoh, classical ballet and modern dance, Yamazaki finds his originality by focusing on the art of his own body and not in any tradition or technique.

Award-winning choreographers Faustin Linyekula and Gregory Maqoma share new works infused with a contemporary African sensibility. Linyekula directs the Studios Kabako, a center dedicated to dance and visual theater training, research and creation based in the Congo’s Kinshasa. He has collaborated with artists across Europe in the development of multidisciplinary works. Maqoma has received many dance and choreography awards, including FNB Vita Choreographer of the Year in 2000, 2001 and 2002. He has created works for Moving Into Dance, The Dance Factory, Jazzart Dance Company and Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble in London.

Exceptional Javanese dancer Mugiyono Kasido was born to a dalang (wayang puppet master) family. He studied traditional dance at the Mangkunegaran Palace and ritual movement with Suprapto Suryodarmo. He has worked with contemporary master Sardono W. Kusumo for many years. Kasido creates contemporary work based on Javanese traditional arts.

Currently associated with Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, emerging choreographer Shani Collins has performed with Marlies Yearby’s Movin’ Spirits Dance Theater, Nathan Trice/Rituals and Urban Bush Women. Her work tells powerful stories with authenticity and truth.

In addition to main stage performances, the festival offers a selection of free and low-cost events. Complete information is available at the website: http://www.bates.edu/dancefest

The Bates Dance Festival presents its Different Voices concert at 8 p.m. Aug. 12 and 13 in Schaeffer Theatre, located on College Avenue, Bates College. The concert showcases artists from the United States, Vietnam, Mexico and Cape Verde.

Rosy Tavares and Bety Fernandes of Cape Verde’s dynamic troupe Rais di Polon present their acclaimed duet Duas Sem Très. Using voice, movement, rhythm and humor, they bridge contemporary performance with Cape Verdean traditions and ‘batuque’ (female song and dance chorus).

Mexican choreographer/actor Antonio Salinas brings his subtle, virtuosic and humorous solo work to the stage. Hanoi-based visual and performance artist Anh Khanh showcases a new work in progress with site choreographer Stephan Kopolowitz and composer Shamou.

Emerging choreographers Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder
of the Minneapolis-based company Hijack showcase their unconventional
sensibility in Mr. Krushchev and Fetish, excerpts from their latest work that plays on the absurdity of war.

All of the new work to be presented in the Different Voices concert is being developed by the artists while in residence at the Bates Dance Festival. The festival has developed a reputation as an initiator of authentic artistic collaborations by emphasizing its role as a dance laboratory for the development of contemporary dance works by U.S. and international artists. By providing creative residencies to emerging international and U.S. choreographers each year, the festival helps many of these artists go on to perform in nationally recognized venues. Highlighting the concert will be collaborative work by Vincent Mantsoe and renowned composer/vocalist Philip Hamilton, who is currently touring with Pat Metheny.

Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe was born in Soweto in 1971. His formative years were spent in the township during the height of the apartheid regime with little hope of a good education or career. Although he performed as a street dancer with a youth group, it was not until 1990, when he joined Moving into Dance as part of a scholarship program, that he received formal training as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Since then he has performed and taught in South Africa and abroad and has been recognized as an outstanding dancer and choreographer receiving numerous awards. In 1995, his piece Gula Matari won first prize at the First Contemporary African Dance Competition in Angola, which included a grant for a Pan African Tour.

Mantsoe was the winner of the 1996 and 1998 Independent Choreographers awards at the Recontres Choreographiques Internationales des Bagnolet (France). In 1996, he created “Sasanka” for Dance Theatre of Harlem, which premiered at the Kennedy Center. This year he was again nominated for the FNB Vita Award as most outstanding male dancer for his new work Mpheyane. Vincent is currently the assistant artistic director and resident choreographer of Moving Into Dance Company.

Philip Hamilton is a composer for dance, theater, film and television, who has been a featured artist at the Montreaux, Sans Sebastian and Montreal Jazz festivals, Brazil’s GloboFM Music Festival and Japan’s NHK Music Series. He has toured and performed with many recording artists, including Donald Fagan, Special EFX, Phoebe Snow and Ottmar Leibert. He is touring internationally as a vocalist/multi- instrumentalist with the Pat Metheny Group during the 1997-98 season. Hamilton composed the theme to the Emmy-award winning PBS series Say Brother and was the featured vocalist in the original motion picture soundtrack of Harriet the Spy. A graduate of Middlebury College, Hamilton studied with John Cage and Bobby McFerrin, among others, at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He has performed with John Cage, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

Sukarji Sriman was born in Fediri, East Java. He began dancing at a young age and continued his studies at the Vocational High School for Traditional Performing Arts in Central Java. He majored in choreography at the Jakarta Institute for the Arts. As a choreographer, he melds contemporary dance with a Javanese court dance idiom. His work is characterized by simplicity, power and clarity, even risk. Since 1990, he has participated in many choreographic workshops, among them the American Dance Festival, Durham, N.C.; Green Meel Dance Project, Melbourne, Australia; and the Young Asian International Choreographers Workshop, Taipei, Taiwan. He has performed at various dance festivals both in Indonesia and abroad. In the summer and fall of 1997 Sukarji participated in the Triangle Arts Project, a three-month cross-cultural collaboration among Asian and American artists that traveled throughout Indonesia, Japan and the United States.

Antonio Tavares began his dancing career in the Cape Verde Islands where he was born. In 1986, he performed in Holland, France, Senegal and Macau with Mindelo Stars group. In 1991, he founded the dance groups Critcheu and Compasso Pilon, while at the same time, he did research on African dance. Also in 1991, Antonio received a scholarship from Atelier Mar in Mindelo, Cape Verde, and came to Portugal to study at the Escola de Artes e Oficios do Espectculo, where he now teaches movement. Antonio has worked with a wide range of Portuguese choreographers, composers, videographers and filmmakers.

Kota Yamazaki is a dancer and choreographer who stands at the forefront of Japanese dance. A contemporary performer, whose training includes butoh, classical ballet and modern dance, he finds his originality by focusing on the art of his own body and not in any tradition or technique. In 1977, Yamazaki entered Tenshikan (a school of butoh) and was instructed by Akira Kasai until its closing in 1979. In 1981 he began to take classical ballet lessons with the late Hirofumi Inoue. He started choreographing in 1982.

In 1989, Yamazaki was invited by Daniel Larrieu, a French contemporary choreographer who performed and taught in Yokohama, to study at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, France’s leading contemporary dance institution. Returning to Japan in 1990, he began to make guest appearances in Pappa Tarahumara and Kuniko Kisanuki’s works in addition to creating his own pieces. His collaboration on Kisanuki’s successful duet “Another” commanded special attention, helping to make his reputation as a choreographer. In June 1994, he was nominated as one of 19 applicants, selected from a pool of 1,800, to enter the Choreographique Internationales de Bagnolet Seine-Saint- Denis, France, and presented his recent production “Inflection.” He formed his first dance company Rosy Co. in 1995. In 1996, he created “What’s Wrong,” performed at the Theater COCOON in Tokyo. In the summer and fall of 1997, Kota participated in the Triangle Arts Project, a three-month cross-cultural collaboration among Asian and American artists, which traveled throughout Indonesia, Japan and the United States.

Kota Yamazaki and Sukarji Sriman are participating in the 1998 Bates Dance Festival as a result the 1997 Triangle Arts Project (TAP), funded by the Asian Cultural Council and the New England Foundation for the Arts. TAP was developed to build capacity for inter-cultural exchange among Asian and American artists. The Bates Dance Festival was selected as a site for a visiting team of collaborators, and this exchange significantly broadened the festivalÕs reach as a producer of new, culturally diverse work. Last fall, Laura Faure, Bates Dance Festival director, joined this team on a two-month tour of Japan and Indonesia and allowed her to identify gifted Asian artists and develop new partnerships.

In addition to its critically acclaimed mainstage performance series of 13 concerts, the festival offers two intensive training programs, one for pre professionals and one for younger dancers. For more information, or to request a brochure, call the Bates Dance Festival at 207-786-6381.