Nigerian master dancer King Baba James (pictured above) is the centerpiece in a cross-cultural summit this Saturday, bringing together a scintillating array of talents in a variety of dance and movement styles—from ballet to hip hop, from African tribal dance to mime. Buffalo Contemporary Dance’s Amy Taravella is one participant in this experiment in fluid communication; renowned street performer Aaron Piepszny is another. Ten-year-old break dancer Kyle Nichter—like Piepszny familiar to Thursday in the Square crowds—will be on hand, along with musician, artist and break dancer Solomon Dixon and drummer, dancer and photographer Wise Mecca. Other participants include Odell Northington, Katie Ashwill, Laura Jean Casteluzzo, Kelly Cornelius and Sophia Roberts. Come, watch, participate—there’s a workshop on African dance in the afternoon and a performance at night. King Baba James, a long-time member of the National Theatre of Nigeria, has been performing since age seven. He is currently part of the Malcolm X Drummers and Dancers, based in Washington, DC. He alone is worth the price of admission—which, for the workshop at least, is as fluid as the event itself.

Internationally acclaimed percussionist, composer and educator Kahil El’Zabar grew up on Chicago’s south side, in an era when, he says, “African-Americans, as a large group, finally started addressing our roots. With African drums there was such an appeal in the way of playing with the hands and the sense of the entire body being involved in the playing of the instrument.” Thus, in 1973 while attending Wake Forest College, he passed on the opportunity to study mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau and instead used the money to study African music firsthand at the University of Ghana. Now a successful composer who’s scored three feature films and worked with artists ranging from Dizzy Gillespie to Stevie Wonder to Poi Dog Pondering, El’Zabar continues to perform around the world in addition to his teaching gigs at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is joined by violin virtuoso Billy Bang, whose influences include John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Bang also continues to play around the world and has worked with everyone from Arlo Guthrie to Bootsy Collins to Sun Ra. This special performance finds Bang continuing a collaboration with El’Zabar that originated in 1996 and has yielded albums recorded both as a duo and as a guest with El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio.

Studio Arena, an icon in the Western New York theater scene, hosts its first ever dance concert this weekend. The director and co-founder of Configuration Dance, Joseph Cipolla, says that he looks forward to “…expanding the diversity of artistic expression welcomed to that stage.” The program is packed with high-energy dancing, blending classical ballet technique with contemporary styles to produce a repertory concert that will please many audiences. Among the pieces is Michael Shannon’s Transfiguration, a one-act contemporary ballet that expresses the emotional vicissitudes of terminally ill cancer patients. High Heel Blues, choreographed by Daniela Kurz, is a sultry yet funny piece dramatizing a woman’s infatuation with an ill-fitting pair of new shoes. Local gypsy jazz band Babik rejoins Configuration Dance for a new ballet created by Yuri Zhukov of the Kirov Ballet called No Time Jazz. Rounding out the program will be a piece created specifically for Studio Arena’s stage.

Not really fitting into any established genre, ambient experimentalist Cages has spent the last few years developing a totally original form of deconstructed dream pop. The solo project of Nola Ann Ranallo (formerly of Elad Love Affair), with contributions from working partner David Bailey, Cages explores eerily constructed sonic universes that morph between narrative song and avant-garde tone poem. Eschewing traditional instrumentation, Ranallo sings, plays a variety of unusual strummed instruments and manipulates field recordings (of wind chimes, bells, waves, running water) to create brittle soundtracks draped in shadowy romanticism. Most distinctive are Ranallo’s vocals, which deliberately resist functioning as a seamless harmonic element, exhibiting an organic elasticity that goes far over the top. Typical Cages melodies explode from precocious, singsong intimacy into hyper expressive atonality, like the private musings of a teenage girl who has been locked alone in her bedroom for the last five years. Live, the experience is mesmerizing. Cages is performing in support of the new CD Folding Space. Rounding out this eclectic bill are heavy rockers Sonorous Gale and free improv duo Steve Baczkowski and Ravi Padmanabha.