The theme is the diversity of music and dance throughout the Americas. But in truth, “Dancing Americas,” the University of Michigan Dance Company’s upcoming show, set for Power Center Thursday through Sunday, is far broader than that.

It traverses eras and spans continents as it showcases the dance department’s students in works by faculty choreographers Sandra Torijano and Melissa Beck and by two legendary modern-dance artists: Dianne McIntyre and the late Merce Cunningham.

The concert features live music for the Cunningham and McIntyre dances by, respectively, the UM Digital Music Ensemble and students from the jazz department. Judy Rice provides artistic direction for the concert, with Mary Cole as lighting designer; Kasia Mrozewska as scenic designer and Christianne Myers as costume designer. Stephen Rush is music director, along with Woody Goss.

McIntyre is a choreographer whose works are celebrated not only on the modern-dance stage, but in the theater and on film and television. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2008 American Dance Festival Award for Distinguished Teaching. PBS declared her “one of the most important black woman dance artists to emerge during the 1970s…(with) a distinctive body of work that features an idiosyncratic use of music, (and) a dynamic movement style.”

She has been an artist-in-residence in the dance department this January. That’s not so unusual, but what is unusual, said concert Artistic Director Rice, is that McIntyre has made a new work for the dancers, rather than setting an established piece on them. “That’s the first time this has happened,” Rice said.

And it has happened in a way that has delighted McIntyre, as well as the department. McIntyre cites the students’ adeptness and attitude; the cooperation of University Productions, the producing arm of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance; and the presence of musicians at rehearsals - vital to someone who is used to working with live music.

The results, a dance called “The Summit,” are transfixing, said Rice. “I watched a rehearsal last night,” Rice said last week, “and I got the shivers.”

As McIntyre tells it, “The Summit” owes something for its genesis to musician Stephen Rush, director of the Digital Music Ensemble and a professor of dance who has played a pivotal musical role in the dance department for years.

McIntyre usually collaborates with composers as she crafts her dances. But she said that after meeting with folks in the dance department last spring, it immediately came to her that she would use music by Dizzy Gillespie, Bo Diddley and Eric Dolphy.

“It came very spontaneously,” she said in a phone conversation. “I didn’t know when I woke up that morning that I was going to do this. But I like the era and the music of each of those people, who are masters and pioneers in their era of music.”

Rush began to assemble a catalog of works for her to listen to, and Gillespie’s “Kush” was among them.

Hearing it again captivated McIntyre and sent her in a direction that she had not anticipated.

“Originally, I thought the piece might be more connected with the eras when the musicians created their music, the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, and that the energy of the dance and settings and costumes, and even the style of the dance, would come out of that era,” McIntyre said. “And there could be abstract presentations, or they’d be in a club. When I heard this music, ‘Kush,’ I said, that’s from another time, an ancient culture, an African space.”

So “Kush,” which reflects the ancient African civilization also known as Nubia, spun the dance toward its source. McIntyre made a dance for 11 dancers (it is double-cast) separated into two rival “tribes” whose members meet in encounters marked by mistrust and suspicion. But like the warring Montagues and Capulets, the tribes have members who love as well as hate. Which will triumph?

“I want it to be upbeat,” McIntyre said as she was moving toward closure in the choreography.

Opening the concert is a MinEvent by Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), whose company appears here next month on its Legacy Tour.

With an artistic career distinguished by constant innovation, Cunningham expanded the frontiers not only of dance, but also of contemporary visual and performing arts. His collaborations with artistic innovators from every creative discipline, particularly composer John Cage, yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music, and visual art. Starting in the 1960s, Cunningham created the — evening-length performances consisting of fragments from dances in the company’s repertory so intermingled such as to constitute a new work. Site specific, no two Events are the same. U-M’s MinEvent (a mini Event, approximately 15 minutes long) was constructed and staged by Jean Freebury, a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1992-2003, using material from “Scramble” (1967), “Inlets 2” (1983), “Ground Level Overlay” (1995), and “Pond Way” (1998). The dance will be accompanied by John Cage’s “Cartridge Music,” performed by the Digital Music Ensemble.

Rounding out the evening are premieres by dance faculty Beck and Torijano. Beck’s “Towards a sudden silence,” for 10 dancers, is based on poems by Marge Piercy — American poet and novelist, U-M alumna and Hopwood Award-winner. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the four-movement work alludes to constraint as well as to the struggle to break the era’s societal restrictions. Beck’s choreographic vocabulary plays with emotional gestures and their role in the “core memory” of an individual and a community. Music for the work includes songs by Joe Zawinful, Roy Orbison and Stephen F. Earle.

Torijano premieres “Tango con la vida” (“Tango with life”), choreographed after finishing two years of chemotherapy for leukemia. Following last year’s “La Luna Nueva,” a dance about overcoming adversity as a process of personal transformation supported by friendship and love, “Tango con la vida” is a passionate celebration of life. Torijano has set it on 11 dancers, using music of Latin American composers Astor Piazzolla and Compay Segundo.

Following the performance on Friday, there is a curtain-call discussion featuring the choreographers and cast members. Saturday, from 7-7:45 p.m. in the Reception Room at the Power Center, the dance department presents “Collaborations: Dianne McIntyre”, a panel discussion examining McIntyre’s long history of collaboration with musicians, directors and dancers as a choreographer in dance, film, and theater, as well as through her former Harlem based company and school, Sounds in Motion. Panelists include Rush, theater professor Glenda Dickerson and former Sounds in Motion company memberAlde Lewis. Dance professor Robin Wilson, a longtime friend and colleague of McIntyre’s, moderates. Both events are free and open to the public.