Indonesian drummer-composer Wahyu Roche.

Exemplifying the robust cross-cultural conversations that happen all the time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, guest artists from Indonesia, an Indonesian-style dancer from the U.S. and a Maine composer all have a part in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 31, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is free, although tickets are required because of limited seating. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Joining the orchestra, which uses traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments to play music from that nation as well as by Western composers, are drummer-composer Wahyu Roche and dancer Achmad Farmis, both from Indonesia, and California-based dancer Ben Arcangel.

The program includes “Tango Tanggung,” a piece for gamelan instruments and cello by Philip Carlsen, professor of music at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Achmad Farmis performs an Indonesian dance style influenced by martial arts.

Directed by associate professor of music Gina Fatone, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra makes music with percussion — drums, tuned gongs and polyphonic instruments like xylophones and metallophones — as well as bamboo flutes, stringed instruments and occasionally voice. The orchestra plays music from West Java (Sunda) and Central Java. Participation in the orchestra is open to students of all levels of musical experience.

Farmis, visiting ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for the first time, specializes in “pencak silat,” an Indonesian dance style influenced by martial arts. Fatone explains that her musicians will have to respond on their instruments to Farmis’ dance steps — a new challenge for them.

“Accompanying dance is a dramatically different way of interfacing with the music, and requires the development of more highly nuanced skills,” she says.

“For the student audience, as well as the audience from the community, the ability to showcase the intimate relationship between drumming and dance within traditional West Javanese arts enhances both the aesthetic and teaching power of the gamelan ensemble.”

Farmis will perform with Arcangel in “Hanuman’s Revenge,” a scene from the ancient Hindu epic “Ramayana.” In a solo performance, Arcangel, who has also performed at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ previously, will perform a traditional, masked dance from the genre “topeng cirebon.”

Farmis has received numerous awards for his work in performance and composition, and represents Indonesia in cultural delegations throughout the world. He has performed and taught regularly in the U.S. for years, and is associated with the California-based Indonesian ensemble Harsonari.

Dancer Ben Arcangel returns to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Roche has been at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ twice, including a guest residency in 2008. He is classically trained in gamelan drumming and singing. As a performer and teacher, Roche has performed in the United States, Australia, Singapore and Germany. As a member of the influential group Jugala, he opened for Mick Jagger during a 1989 concert in Jakarta.

As a dancer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Arcangel was awarded “Outstanding Performer” at the 10th National American College Dance Festival held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The award, presented by Dance Magazine, represents the highest honor among college and university dance students.

The Indonesian guests will work with students at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ March 21-31 as Johnson Learning Associates. Farmis’ teaching will include training in a traditional West Javanese folk dancing that incorporates tuned bamboo rattles called “angklung.” ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ acquired a set of angklung several years ago, but the group has yet to perform with these instruments and learn the dancing traditionally associated with them.

Farmis will also teach pencak silat in a beginning modern dance course.

In the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ curriculum the gamelan orchestra plays an important role in creating dialogue across disciplines. Besides music and dance, the group is a great resource for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students studying anthropology, cultural psychology and Asian studies.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra in March 2011.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by Indonesian puppeteer Apep Sobani and by composer Wahyu Roche, performs in concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 13, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The program includes listening music, featuring compositions written for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ ensemble by Roche, and a performance of the Indonesian puppetry style called “wayang golek,” which employs three-dimensional figures controlled with wooden rods. A wayang golek workshop, open to the public at no cost, takes place a few days prior to the concert, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 8, in the Olin Arts Center, Room 105.

Admission to the concert is free but reservations are required. Any leftover tickets will be available at the door. For reservations or more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

“Gamelan” refers to a traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra composed mainly of tuned gongs, metal-keyed instruments and drums, and which sometimes features voice and string instruments. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra, conducted by Gina Fatone, performs traditional and contemporary music of West Java and Central Java, as well as new music by North American composers.

A composer and master drummer who has been at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since Jan. 15 as a member of the Learning Associates Program, Roche is a member of the Sundanese people of western Java. He has performed as a freelance musician, written music for the influential workshop theater founded by the playwright Rendra and recently released his debut album as a vocalist. He and Sobani will form an artistic directing team for the puppetry performance.

Wayang golek is a Sundanese specialty in West Java, where performances typically begin in the evening and last all night. Similar to other types of puppet theater in Java, a single puppeteer manipulates the puppets, provides all narration and dialogue, and directs the accompaniment provided by the gamelan orchestra.

“While most people in our part of the world associate puppetry with children and children’s programming, wayang golek is a highly sophisticated, nuanced art of the Sundanese,” says Fatone. Walang golek requires considerable skill and some Javanese believe the puppeteers (“dalang”) to possess supernatural powers. What makes the Sundanese style unique is the use of three-dimensional puppets.

Sobani, known onstage as Apep Hudaya, is renowned for his performances in Indonesia and abroad, and represents a younger generation of performers in West Java. With both familial training and formal education, he has performed throughout Europe and Asia. Sobani’s residency at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is supported by a grant from the Freeman Foundation.

Performances of wayang golek in the United States by West Javanese artists are rare. Most wayang performances outside of Indonesia come from the Central Javanese culture and highlight shadow puppetry, as opposed to the West Javanese form. Wayang golek performances require intense collaboration among ensemble members and are one of the most common contexts for live gamelan music in West Java.

An original composition by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior from West Virginia is featured in a concert by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

“Gamelan” refers to a broad genre of traditional Indonesian music played primarily on percussion instruments. Barbara Byers, an interdisciplinary major in music and dance from Elkins, W.Va., composed and will dance a piece titled “Monkey” that’s included on the program. Byers studied various traditional performance disciplines, including gamelan, while in Indonesia last summer on a Phillips Fellowship from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The concert is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The program comprises a variety of instrumental and vocal music, including a contemporary arrangement of a traditional lullaby. Also included is a solo masked dance that originates in Cirebon, a city on the north coast of West Java, and portrays a character from the Hindu epic “Ramayana.”

Assistant Professor of Music Gina Fatone directs the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra. The ensemble is composed of students and faculty members Carol Dilley, associate professor of dance, and Jennifer Woodruff, visiting assistant professor of music. The concert will also feature the vocals of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumna, Lisa McClellan ’09.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College has gamelan instruments from Central Java and West Java, Indonesia. The instrument set named Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“Blossom of Inspiration”), acquired by the College in 2001, is composed of iron and brass pieces and was made in Central Java in 1997.

A smaller bronze chamber ensemble from West Java, of a type called gamelan degung, was donated to the college in 2007. The concert will feature both sets.

In addition to its public performances, the orchestra makes a distinctive contribution to ceremonial events at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and is increasingly integrated into the arts and cultural curriculum.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by professional guest artists from Indonesia, performs in concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

A few days earlier, a public workshop in Indonesian dance featuring two guest artists from Saturday’s program takes place at noon Wednesday, March 11, in the Olin concert hall.

Both events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The March 14 program is dedicated entirely to West Javan, or Sundanese, music. Guest artists include Wahyu Roche, a virtuosic drummer, and Ening Rumbini, a dancer who specializes in “jaipongan,” a popular Sundanese dance. Roche and Rumbini will perform both by themselves and with the orchestra. They will also lead the March 11 dance workshop.

The concert also features singer Rina Oesman, who performs in a classical Indonesian style, and her accompanist, Andrew Bouchard, who plays the “kacapi,” a stringed instrument similar to the zither. All four artists live in Bandung, West Java.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ orchestra will perform music from a variety of Indonesian genres including “tembang Sunda,” a formal style of sung Sundanese poetry, and “degung kawih,” an ornamented style of singing accompanied by the “gamelan degung,” a smaller chamber ensemble used in traditional music of the aristocracy.

Roche is a member of Jugala, a pioneering jaipongan group in Indonesia. The group opened for Mick Jagger in Jakarta in 1989. Roche currently performs as a freelance musician for several groups, has written music for the influential workshop theater founded by the playwright Rendra, and recently released his debut album as a vocalist.

Rumbini is a leading dancer of jaipongan, a modern popular style based on martial arts and village forms of dance. She has performed throughout Southeast Asia.

Unusually for a woman, Oesman studied with several master musicians and began performing when she was young. After winning first place in a prestigious vocal contest, she became a member of Jugala and began to tour internationally.

Bouchard began playing gamelan in 1984 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of master drummer Undang Sumarna. From 1995 to 1998 Bouchard studied a variety of traditional instruments in West Java. He received a master’s in ethnomusicology from UCSC.

In addition to public performances, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra makes a distinctive contribution to ceremonial events and is increasingly integrated into the arts and cultural curriculum.

The orchestra will perform on two sets of instruments, a complete Central Javanese set made by an artisan called Mulyadi, and a degung set acquired by the college in 2007 through the generosity of a private donor, Tony Lydgate, of Kaua’i, Hawaii. The degung instruments were made in Bandung, West Java, in 2006 by Asep Ahum.

With the theme Musical Legacies of South and Southeast Asia, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College students and faculty, as well as internationally esteemed performers, present the college’s World Music Week from March 5 through March 15.

Performers include the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra, Indian dancer Aniruddha Knight and Indonesian composer Nano S. (See the )

Sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music department, festival events are open to the public at no cost. Except as noted, performances take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. For more information, call 207-786-6135.

“This year’s concept pays tribute to the profound traditional artistic roots of these regions, but at the same time acknowledges the strong innovative spirit evident in this year’s artists,” says festival organizer Gina Fatone, assistant professor of music. “The artists hold a deep reverence for their heritages, yet are driven to push the boundaries of tradition, creating something vibrant and new.”

Workshops begin the series on March 5. In a concert at 8 p.m. March 7, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra offers a program reflecting influences from around the globe, as well as works inspired by music of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Hiroya Miura directs the orchestra.

Expert in the classical South Indian music and dance genre called “bharata natyam,” dancer Aniruddha Knight and his ensemble offer workshops on March 5 and 6, and a performance at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 8. On that occasion, Knight and the ensemble perform From the Heart of a Tradition, a new interpretation of this traditional form.

Knight’s dance reveals the profound musicality, mastery of technique and improvisational skill that distinguish his family’s hereditary style. But he also represents the face of young America: biracial, bicultural and, as an artist, completely contemporary. He and his ensemble were among 15 companies to receive production and touring support from the National Dance Project in 2007 and 2008, and their 2005 tour was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ residency of Knight and his ensemble is made possible by a grant from the National Dance Project, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Closing World Music Week is a performance by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by guest artists including Indonesian composer Nano S., at 8 p.m. March 15.

“Gamelan” refers to the large bronze percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, Indonesia. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra performs traditional and contemporary music of West and Central Java, as well as new music for gamelan by North American composers.

Nano S. is widely viewed as one of Indonesia’s most important and influential musicians. He has taught and toured extensively in Japan, Canada and the U.S. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he is a Mellon Learning Associate, supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Also performing are drummer Undang Sumarna, bamboo flute player Burhan Sukarma and dancer Ben Arcangel.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College presents a concert of Indonesian music featuring student musicians and a singer who is one of the Pacific nation’s leading classical recording artists at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 17, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music department, the concert is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6135 or 207-753-6968.

is considered one of the most talented, knowledgeable and versatile musicians from West Java. She and her accompanist Gangan Garmana, an award-winning virtuoso on a type of zither called a “,” will spend a 10-day residency at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the first stop in a teaching and performing tour that will bring them also to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and California.

The concert also features the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gamelan ensemble and the concert debut of the college’s new, built-to-order “gamelan degung” — a small, classical chamber ensemble of metallophones and gongs used in traditional music of the West Javanese (Sundanese) aristocracy.

“The degung ensemble has its own scale and repertoire that is distinct from other types of gamelan orchestras, making it uniquely West Javanese and a source of pride for the Sundanese people,” explains assistant professor of music Gina Fatone, who directs ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ gamelan orchestra. The new instruments, which arrived in February, were a gift from David Lydgate of Hawaii, a patron of the West Javanese arts who wishes to spread awareness of classical Indonesian music in the United States.

“We are doubly thrilled to be able to debut our new degung ensemble at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ with such prominent Indonesian performers,” Fatone says. “Opportunities for American gamelan students to study with Euis Komariah and her accompanist are very rare.”

Komariah has received critical acclaim as a vocalist in several Sundanese music genres, from popular to classical. Her specialty is the highly ornamented and technically virtuosic vocal style called “,” another aristocratic musical genre of West Java. She is also a star in the “gamelan salendro” and “degung” music scenes in Bandung, West Java.

Unlike other female vocalists of her generation, Komariah plays musical instruments, which is typically the domain of male musicians. She is the primary artist on more than 50 recordings, including some that are available in the United States.

“It’s always enlightening to experience the talents of stars in other musical cultures,” Fatone adds. “The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music department is extremely lucky to be able to host these musicians. We are very excited.”

Although her 40-year career has brought her around the world, the six-week U.S. tour is Komariah’s first extended teaching engagement in this country.

She and Garmana will be in residence at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as Mellon Learning Associates, a program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, March 9-18. They will work with members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gamelan orchestra in preparation for the joint performance on March 17.

Featuring the college gamelan orchestra and a Cambodian music and dance troupe, this year’s World Music Weekend at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dancers.

Sagaree Sengupta, a member of the Asian studies faculty at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, gives an introductory talk for the Saturday program.

A shadow-puppet performance of an ancient Indonesian story and an orchestral concert featuring a setting of four poems by a noted Maine poet will distinguish ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ among local arts presenters this weekend.

At 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 12, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra presents a program including conductor Philip Carlsen’s setting of poems by renowned Maine writer Wesley McNair.

At 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13, Indonesian puppet master Joko Susilo will present a shadow-puppet performance of “The Abduction of Sinta,” a central story from the Hindu epic Ramayana. Susilo will be accompanied by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”), an Indonesian-style gamelan orchestra, and guest musicians from New Hampshire and Minnesota.

Both events take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 75 Russell St., and are open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The orchestral concert features Four Journeys in Maine, a 1989 composition by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty member and orchestral director Philip Carlsen. This piece is a setting of works by award-winning poet McNair, author of the collections My Brother Running and Fire. McNair and Carlsen are colleagues at the University of Maine at Farmington, where the poet directs the creative writing program and Carlsen is a professor of music.

Soprano Christina Astrachan, of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music faculty, is featured vocalist on the Carlsen work. Each movement of Four Journeys evokes a place, or a sense of place — a late-night drive in the country, a Farmington street in the snow, a decrepit building in the potato fields of Mars Hill, birdwatching on Monhegan Island.

The orchestra will also perform Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 in E-flat and Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia.

Joko Susilo belongs to the eighth generation of “dalangs” — shadow-puppet masters — in his family, and also composes and teaches gamelan music. Although Indonesia today is predominantly Muslim, a period of Hindu rule beginning in the seventh century left a cultural legacy that remains robust.

“Wayang kulit,” the puppet theater form practiced by Susilo, derives many of its stories from the Hindu epics Mahabarata and Ramayana. On Nov. 13 he will perform a central episode from the latter.

It’s the story of the battle between Rama, a semi-divine king, and the demon-king Rawana. Rawana, smitten by the beauty of Rama’s wife, Sinta, asks a servant to help him kidnap her.

The servant transforms himself into a golden deer, which Sinta asks Rama to catch for her. “This evil deer tricks Rama away from Sinta, far away in the middle of the forest, so then Rawana can take Sinta from Rama,” Susilo explains.

“Rama’s friend, the gigantic bird Jatayu, tries to save Sinta,” he continues, but Rawana kills the bird and reclaims Sinta. Finally, Rama enlists the aid of a monkey god and his followers to fight Rawana, and an epic battle ensues between the monkey army and the giant soldiers of Rawana.

“The story ends with the reunion between Sinta and her husband, Rama,” says Susilo. “Happy ending.”

More than mere fantasy, the story and the epic from which it’s derived are rich in moral lessons, Susilo says. “In the puppets we have a lot of philosophy. If you watch the puppets it’s like you’re watching yourself in the mirror. You will find yourself, because many, many characters appear on the screen — ‘Oh, that’s like me.’ ”

“Rama is the incarnation of wisdom, the god of law,” and exemplifies good leadership, he continues, and the play will offer lessons, about leadership and other subjects, that won’t be lost on observers of contemporary politics. “It’s for everybody — for children, adults, all people.”

The guest artists are Jody Diamond, a New-Hampshire-based singer and international expert on gamelan, and Nicole Erickson, a gamelan musician from Minnesota.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in Indonesian performing arts, especially its extensive collection of shadow puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

“Only a few schools in the United States have a complete set of puppets,” Susilo says. “There are more than 500 gamelan groups, but the complete puppets are very few.”

A lecturer in the music department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, he is teaching at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ through the college’s first-ever grant from the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program. He was born into a family of dalangs in a village in Central Java, Indonesia. At the age of 3, his father began taking him to performances, and at age 10 he performed his first all-night wayang kulit play.

He finished his doctorate at Otago in 2000. In the United States, Susilo has taught and performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, at Dartmouth and at the University of Virginia, among other venues. Internationally he has worked in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands, and brought his Padhang Moncar gamelan group from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, on tour in Indonesia.

The Memory of Salt, a play written by Lisa Maurizio, associate professor of classical and medieval studies at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 21 and 22, in the college’s Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on Tereus in Fragments, which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.