John and Carol Farrell of Freeport, founders of the acclaimed Figures of Speech Theatre, are working with Bates students in a theater production workshop that will culminate in performances of the Asian folk tale Dragon’s Daughter at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 20-22, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 23, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Performances are open to the general public for $6 and to seniors and students for $3. Tickets will be available from batestickets.com. For more information, please call 207-786-6161. The Farrells’ residency is made possible by the Freeman Foundation.

The Farrells are internationally renowned for adapting folk tales in productions that make imaginative use of masks, puppetry and other traditional stage devices. At Bates, they are conducting an intensive program in a variety of Asian performance genres including the “noh” style of musical theater and “bunraku” puppetry, both from Japan.

They will direct Bates students in Dragon’s Daughter, which Figures of Speech premiered in 1997. Set upon an altar in an ancient temple, the production combines carved puppets with dynamic masked dance and storytelling. It’s the story of a young girl’s experiences as she seeks a secret lake that will save her village from drought.

“A story for our time and all time, Dragon’s Daughter soars with humanity,” a reviewer for the Brunswick Times-Record wrote. “The work transcends the merely dramatic; its content and method achieve a spirituality worthy of its setting.”

Since its founding, in 1982, Figures of Speech has celebrated the value of all cultures through the interplay of puppets, actors, shadows, music and masks. The company explores personal, social and spiritual issues with projects that quietly but emphatically illuminate our relationship to the earth and the balance between individual vision and community obligation.

Figures of Speech has toured all over the world, from Bulgaria to Japan to Peru. Besides performing at venues such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the New Victory Theatre on Broadway, the company retains a strong commitment to teaching and performing in rural schools and theaters throughout its home state of Maine.

The company is a four-time recipient of the coveted UNIMA Citation of Excellence, the highest distinction in American puppet theater, as well as numerous grant awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jim Henson Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

At Bates for the college’s five-week spring Short Term, the Farrells are teaching the annual theater production workshop, this year titled “Cultural Fusion: Asian and Western Theater Styles in Performance.”

Though puppet theater is featured in theater history courses at Bates, this production workshop gives students “the chance to work with well-respected practitioners of the art in a concentrated way,” says Michael Reidy, lecturer and technical director for the theater department. “This course will broaden the students’ view of what makes theater a vital and fascinating form of expression.”

Otong Rasta and his son, Atik Rasta, give a performance using wooden-rod puppets at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. They will be accompanied by students studying gamelan, the traditional Indonesian gong-chime orchestra, in the springtime course “Performing Musical Art of Indonesia.”

The puppet-carving demonstration takes place at 10 a.m. Wednesday, May 5, in Olin Arts Center’s Room 243.

The Rastas’ visit is sponsored by the Freeman Foundation. For more information about the performance and demonstration, call 207-786-6135.

Otong Rasta is a leading musician, teacher and performer of “wayang golek,” a form of wooden-rod puppet theater. He specializes in a repertoire of stories that tell of Java’s conversion to Islam.

Atik Rasta is also a puppeteer and is a professional drummer in the traditional Sundanese style. The pair come to Bates as part of an educational tour also including the University of Pittsburgh, Kenyon College and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Sundanese performing arts are distinguished from Central Javanese and Balinese traditions by a style, sometimes described as “spicier” than the others, that involves a great deal of playfulness and humor.

Typically, wayang golek performances take place at night and last at least six hours. They are given for many different reasons including weddings and various anniversaries, giving thanks to the gods, or asking for a good harvest, good luck or protection from evil. The stories are often taken from the Hindu epics “The Ramayana” and “The Mahabharata.” The puppets are beautifully carved and painted, and adorned with lovely, colorful costumes. Typically around 60 puppets are used during a performance.

In addition to performing and teaching Bates students during their visit, the Rastas will demonstrate puppet theater to local schools including Lewiston’s Pettengill School.

With offices in New York City and Stowe, Vt., the Freeman Foundation was created by AIG Insurance Company co-founder Mansfield Freeman to promote better relationships and understanding between the United States and the countries of East Asia. In December 2001, the foundation gave Bates a four-year, $400,000 grant intended to enhance and energize the study of Asia and Asian culture across the curriculum.

Thanks to the college’s first-ever grant from the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program, an expert in traditional Indonesian forms of music and shadow puppetry is currently in residence at Bates College.

Joko Susilo comes to Bates from New Zealand, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago, Dunedin. He is both a “dhalang” — a master in the Indonesian shadow puppet tradition called “wayang” — and a composer of music for the percussion orchestra called gamelan, which is closely connected with the puppetry style.

Bates is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in these Indonesian performing arts. The college has its own gamelan instruments and a 4-year-old gamelan performing ensemble, the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”). It also has the use of an extensive collection of puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

The gamelan is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali that is most familiar to the rest of the world. Its gongs, drums and xylophones are played according to systems of pitch and timing very different from typical Western music. The players in the Bates ensemble include students and faculty, and work under the direction of visiting assistant professors of music Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma.

Bates audiences can hear and see the Gamelan Mawar Mekar in concert this spring. On Friday, March 19, the gamelan musicians will accompany a puppet performance by Susilo. The gamelan will also take center stage at Bates’ World Music Weekend, April 2-3, when the group will perform with the Bates Steel Pan Orchestra on Saturday, April 3, and will welcome MIT’s Balinese Gamelan Galak Tika for a concert on Sunday, April 4.

During the past three years Bates has welcomed visiting artists in a variety of Indonesian traditions, Pruiskma says. “In each instance, our ensemble became stronger and brought some outstanding performances to the whole Bates and the larger community.”

Live actors share the stage with puppets from a variety of puppetry traditions in the production of Marguerite Duras’ novel The Sea Wall. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 7-9, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 10, in Gannett Theater.

Ellen Seeling, assistant professor of theater, adapted Duras‘ novel for the stage and directs this production. Seeling, who calls The Sea Wall one of her favorite novels, says that this drama set in colonial Indochina is “full of metaphorical images that translate well to puppetry.”

The widow “Ma,” the protagonist, is depicted by a bunraku-style puppet — a lifesize figure directly manipulated by two people. The power of puppetry, Seeling says, is that the audience quickly stops noticing that it’s the puppeteers, not the puppet, who are acting. “It makes it magical that way,” she says.

Both sophomores, the puppeteers operating the widow are Saida Cooper, of St. Albans, Maine, and Mark Gaworecki, of Essex Junction, Vt.

Other puppetry techniques represented in the production include shadow puppets and hand puppets, which will be used to simulate a movie being shown. At the other extreme, 10 puppeteers will manipulate a 14-foot puppet. At some points in the action, Seeling says, nearly all 14 cast members are operating puppets.

Published in France in 1950 as Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the novel is substantially based on Duras’ own experiences growing up in Indochina, where she was born to French parents. It tells the story of a widow’s stubborn fight against poverty and the fading attachments of her children — a fight symbolized by the sea wall erected in vain to keep seawater out of the family’s rice paddies.

The novel, Duras’ third, was a hit with the French literary establishment. She went on to write 40 novels in all and several plays, and also wrote and directed films. Her best-known works are the 1984 novel The Lover and the screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Seeling explains that Duras herself wrote a version of The Sea Wall for the stage, titled The Eden Cinema. “It was an honor,” the director says, to obtain the rights from the Duras estate to adapt the novel. She adds that the company has been invited to present the production on March 14 in Vermont at Marlboro College, home of a summer puppetry institute offered by the acclaimed Sandglass Theater.

Admission for the event is $6 and $3 for Bates students. To purchase tickets, please call 207-786-6161.