Artists Gesel Mason and Onye Ozuzu are both performing this month at the Bates Dance Festival, having nurtured relationships with the festival dating back more than a decade.

This year, they arrived in Lewiston not knowing exactly what the projects would look like — or if they would ever look like that again.

Every summer, the Bates Dance Festival presents shows ranging from celebrated classics to works in progress. Sometimes, those events are touring acts that don’t change much on the road.

But Shoni Currier, director of the Bates Dance Festival, said both Mason and Ozuzu are developing new material during their residencies in Lewiston that will be incorporated into their performances. Both projects are less about what happens in a single night and more about a continuum.

“That means the shows here won’t ever happen anywhere else in the same form,” Currier said. “You get to watch artists do what they do best. It’s making decisions.”

Both artists have taught here over the years, and Mason even came as a student early in her career. The festival has supported these particular projects with grants or residencies over the years.

“For us, we really put a lot of trust in the artists to lead the process,” Currier said.

And the artists, in turn, put trust in Bates to give them space to develop their work.

“Bates functions in the field as a gathering place, an incubation site, a retreat,” Ozuzu said.

“SPACE CARCASSES”

Onye Ozuzu describes her work as “improvisational.”

“My work has always been an ongoing, evolving experiment,” she said.

“Space Carcasses” began while Ozuzu was on a Black history tour in Savannah, Georgia. She walked into vaults by the river, and the hairs on her arms stood on end. She immediately recalled a monument she visited in Senegal that commemorates the people forced into the transatlantic slave trade. The tour guide told her that the vaults where they stood once held people who had been enslaved and taken to Savannah on ships.

“The impetus for making the piece was really my body’s response to the shape of the building,” she said. “It was like the building touched me.”

She started reading about the relationship between brains and buildings, thinking about the neuroscience of it. She started improvising in the corners of rooms, traveling to different places on both ends of the transatlantic slave trade, exploring those spaces through movement.

The creative team (composer and cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, filmmaker and visual artist Simon Rouby, conceptual designer and artist Native Maqari and dancer Joshua Akubo Gabriel) have been working in these historically significant sites for several years. They’ve shaped it through residencies and performance studies in Cape Verde, France, Nigeria and the United States.

And in every location, they have been filming. At Bates, they will bring the footage from those places to bear on the performance in a new way, and Rouby’s footage will also be installed at the new Immersive Media Studio at the college from July 23 to Aug. 1.

Even though the work is improvisational, Ozuzu had a huge storyboard with dozens of Post-It notes on her table in Florida before she left for Lewiston.

“I used to make dance that was more choreography focused,” she said. “The amount of prep that goes into an improvised performance is way, way more.”

“YES, AND”

Gesel Mason started with a question.

“Who would you be, and what would you do, if as a Black woman, you had nothing to worry about?”

The answer is “Yes, And.”

“It’s an invitation for us to consider who we are at our most authentic selves, who we are when we are able to arrive and be in community with each other uninterrupted,” Mason said.

The project has evolved over five years online and outside, in conversation and dance. It has also been transformed by time spent in the old mills on the Androscoggin River and research about the Portland Freedom Trail.

“We now have these chapters in different places, not just in Austin and D.C. where it premiered, but now in St. Maarten and Maine,” said Mason, an associate professor of dance and choreography at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s been really interesting to bring that question to different communities. The answer is totally different.”

Mason and others have been in residence at the festival for several summers running and did a work-in-progress performance in Lewiston last year. They worked with students at Bates College during the school year and built relationships with community organizations such as Collectively Brave, which focuses on mental health support for people of color.

“There’s a relationship that has evolved, that has allowed the conversation to continue when we come back,” said Yunina Barbour-Payne, a scholar, performer and artist who is involved in “Yes, And” as a dramaturg. “It’s a continuation of a conversation that started two years ago.”

This year will be totally different — again. “Yes, And” will be an installation at L/A Arts in Lewiston from Saturday to Aug. 2. Mason will give an artist talk there at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. And during the ArtWalk on July 25, she will perform in the gallery with artists from the festival and members of the Lewiston community. Visitors can stop in anytime between 5-8 p.m. to hear stories and experience movement. The project will include video footage of interviews and previous iterations of the project, as well as space to rest and reflect.

“The rest is going to be a surprise for all of us,” Mason said.

IF YOU GO

For additional details and a full schedule of performances at the Bates Dance Festival, visit batesdancefestival.org or call 207-786-6381.

“Space Carcasses” presented by OzuzuDances

July 18 and 19, Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St., Lewiston. Tickets range from $5 to $35 and are available at batesdancefestival.org.

“Yes, And” presented by Gesel Mason Performance Projects

July 25, L/A Arts, 168 Lisbon St., Lewiston. Free and open to the public.