La Bâtie, Geneva’s smart, adventurous performing arts festival, takes place as summer slips into fall. This year it opens with Four New Works, whose author, the famed New York minimalist Lucinda Childs, features in two. For the first of these rare appearances, the 84-year-old reads from John Cage; for the second, she dances alone to a new composition by the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Illustrious company, all. And this is just the beginning. The festival continues with South African dancer-choreographer Mamela Nyamza, who builds on her globally acclaimed 2007 solo, Hatched, with the spacious, surreal, exquisitely designed Hatched Ensemble, to sweet South African song. The South African thread unspools further with Impilo Mapanstula, practitioners of the speedy, subversive Johannesburg township idiom pantsula, which injects high-jumping, loose-limbed traditional dance with urban speed and sardonicism. For one of their two outings, Impilo Mapanstula joins forces with the African-American choreographer Jeremy Nedd for a Pan-African exploration of liberation—then, now, and later. Over the course of three weeks, La Bâtie stages 58 shows: circus, music, theater, and, of course, dance. —Apollinaire Scherr