Featuring the college gamelan orchestra and a Cambodian music and dance troupe, this year’s World Music Weekend at Bates College takes place Friday and Saturday, March 24 and 25, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. Titled “The Ramayana in Southeast Asia,” the weekend explores adaptations of the ancient, seminal epic from India titled “Ramayana.”

The Cambodian Classics Ensemble, a Washington, D.C.-based performance group, offers a dance demonstration and workshop at 1:30 p.m. Friday. At 8 p.m., the ensemble performs scenes from the “Raemker,” the Cambodian adaptation of the Hindu epic. A pre-concert lecture takes place at 7:30 p.m.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, the college gamelan orchestra, Bates dancers and guest artists perform “The Abduction of Sita,” an episode from an Indonesian version of “Ramayana.”

All events take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., and are open to the public at no cost. The festival is sponsored by the Freeman Foundation. For more information, please call 207-786-6135 or 207-753-6968.

The 2,000-year-old “Ramayana” is a long, complex tale exploring the conflict between good and evil. Its numerous plot twists include a dynastic struggle, a hero’s exile, the kidnapping of his wife and a grand-scale battle between demons and gods.

Though of Indian origin, “it’s a cultural icon for all of South and Southeast Asia,” says Gina Fatone, assistant professor of music and the program’s organizer. “It’s amazing how one epic poem can travel and have many different variants.”

The “Ramayana,” she says, is “often referred to as a story that has become indigenized everywhere it has gone. The characters’ names sometimes change and details of the performance sometimes change, but the core elements of the story remain the same.”

The Cambodian Classics Ensemble consists of professional musicians and dancers, most of whom came from Cambodia since the mid-1970s in response to civil strife there. Its members include music director Chum Ngek, a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow who has mastered more than 20 instruments and diverse traditional genres.

Performing with the ensemble is Sok Sokheun, a Cambodian dancer living in Portland.

Directed by Fatone, the Bates Gamelan Mawar Makar (“Blossom of Inspiration”) plays music from West and Central Java, in Indonesia. “Gamelan” refers to a traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra composed mainly of tuned gongs, metal-keyed instruments and drums, and sometimes featuring voice and stringed instruments.

Joining the gamelan for the Saturday performance are Undang Sumarna and dancer Ben Arcangel. Sumarna, a longtime mentor to Fatone and an Indonesian master drummer, has taught gamelan at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for nearly three decades. He is serving as guest director of the gamelan during a weeklong residency at Bates, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Also a Mellon Learning Associate, Ben Arcangel is a Filipino-American dancer expert in Indonesian dance. A performer and graduate student based in San Francisco, he will coach and perform with the Bates dancers.

Sagaree Sengupta, a member of the Asian studies faculty at Bates, gives an introductory talk for the Saturday program.

Bates College has received a $300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a learning-associates program that in the past has involved experts like author Carolyn Chute and film director István Szabó in work with senior thesis students.

The Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities and Social Sciences begins this fall and will continue for two years. With the addition of a social science component, the new initiative extends the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities that Bates established in 2001.

With more than 90 percent of Bates students completing a senior thesis — a significant research, service, performance or studio project — the Mellon Learning Associates program supports the participation of visiting experts and practitioners whose knowledge and experience can help illuminate new areas of inquiry.

“An important advantage of a small college like Bates is the opportunity for ongoing, in-depth faculty-student collaborations,” explains Jill Reich, dean of the faculty. “But these ideas and projects may expand to questions no longer encapsulated by the expertise on campus. This program allows us to reach out to relevant experts in a flexible and timely manner, driven by the excitement and integrity of the ideas.”

The program also expands the kinds of learning available to Bates students, Reich adds. “For example, learning associates might be practitioners who provide a real-world context for our students’ learning, and help expand that learning by linking theory to applied contexts. Or they might be experts in innovative techniques not yet available in the college setting.”

Like the previous Mellon program, the new initiative will support the participation of learning associates through long- and short-term residencies and distance learning. Author Chute, stage performer Avner Eisenberg and director Szabó (Being Julia) were among participants in the earlier program.

The Mellon Foundation has also supported the Bates environmental studies program through residential fellowships that have brought to campus such experts as nature photographer Will Richard, documentary filmmaker Melissa Paly and Brunswick, Maine, town planner Theo Holtwijk.

The latest Mellon grant continues a partnership that began in 1970, when the New York-based foundation awarded Bates a grant to enlarge the faculty and increase faculty pay. Since then, Mellon has supported Bates efforts to develop its curriculum, undertake collaborative programs with Bowdoin and Colby colleges and interact more closely with the Lewiston-Auburn community.

The founder of the Urban Arts Project and the Dark Souls Art Collective, two groups that serve as a network for African Diaspora artists, Flores refers to himself as “a Nuyorican, bilingual, Spanglish-speaking, AfroTaino, revolutionary and santero.” He is also the founder of the annual “Voices for the Voiceless” poetry concert that unites the most recognized black and Latino poets from throughout the United States.

Flores follows in the tradition of poets Arturo Schomburg and Louis Reyes Rivera and has performed with such poets as Sandra Maria Esteves, Tony Medina, Carl Hancock Rux, Steven Bonafide Rojas and Edward James Olmos.

Flores’ visit to Bates College is sponsored by the Johnson Foundation, the Mellon Learning Associates program, the English department and the African American studies program. For more information, call 207-786-6461.