The Hudson River Valley has been developing for several years into a cultural destination. Now, with the John Cage Trust newly installed at Bard College’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company coincidentally kicking off a two-year residency at Dia:Beacon, the region is poised to become a center for celebrating two of the 20th century’s great masters of music and dance.

The John Cage Trust, which administers the rights to Cage’s works and maintains his library and archives, formally moved to Bard in March. This Thursday and Friday, the Fisher Center will celebrate the Trust’s arrival with performances of several works by Cage: instrumental works performed by Merce Cunningham Dance Company Musicians and the group Nexus, and a 1975 multimedia stage work, “Lecture on the Weather,” performed by a group of speakers including Mr. Cunningham, John Ashbery, Bard College President Leon Botstein, and Jasper Johns. On Saturday evening, MCDC will hold a benefit at Dia:Beacon, followed on Sunday afternoon by the first performance in its series of “Beacon Events.”

Mr. Cunningham has collaborated with a large group of visual artists, many of whom are in the collection of Dia:Beacon. Sunday’s performance will take place in Andy Warhol’s “Shadows” gallery, the walls of which are lined by 60 repeating, multicolored abstract canvases. In the early afternoon, before the performance, education staff from both Dia and MCDC will lead families in an improvisational workshop through several of the museum’s galleries.

Warhol referred to “Shadows” as “disco décor.” He “meant it to be seen not as an artwork but as a backdrop or scenery,” the assistant director of Dia:Beacon, Steven Evans, said.

In an interview, Mr. Cunningham said that the gallery is large enough (8,500 square feet) to allow the dancers a lot of freedom. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said of his performances at Dia:Beacon, which will continue through several different seasons. “It’s always an adventure, and the situation here is really beautiful.”

The performance at the Fisher Center on Thursday will include two premières: the world première of “For John,” performed by MCDC Musicians, and the American première of “Dance Music for Elfrid Ide,” performed by Nexus. The latter, a 15-minute percussion piece, was lost until the director of the Cage Trust, Laura Kuhn, discovered it in the stacks at Mills College, where Cage taught on the dance faculty during summer sessions in the early 1940’s.

The director of the Fisher Center, Tambra Dillon, said the presence of the Cage Trust will bring “a whole new sphere of potential audiences and artists and funders” to the Fisher Center. “It broadens the family,” she said, referring to the artists participating in “Lecture on the Weather,” who also include the composer Mikel Rouse and the performance artist John Kelly. She added that presence of the Trust and the programming it inspires would have a wonderful cultural impact on the local community.

Since Cage and Mr. Cunningham were longtime partners and collaborators, the synergy between Bard and Dia:Beacon is a natural one. There are also a “lot of connections among the staff” of the two institutions, Mr. Evans said.

When Cage died in 1992, he left his holdings to Mr. Cunningham. The Trust formed about a year later, with a board consisting of Ms. Kuhn, who had been Cage’s assistant; Mr. Cunningham; an archivist at the Cunningham Dance Foundation, David Vaughan, and the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne D’Harnoncourt.

In addition to administering the rights and maintaining the library and archives, the Trust seeks to stimulate interest in Cage through performances, workshops, and new recordings. In 2001, for instance, Ms. Kuhn directed a touring production of Cage’s 1982 radio play, “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet,” with a cast including Messrs. Vaughan and Cunningham, as well as Messrs. Rouse and Kelly

In the same year, the Cage Trust lost its rent stabilization on its office on Greenwich Street, and the board decided to look for a new home. Last December, Ms. Kuhn asked Mr. Botstein whether Bard would be interested in housing the Trust. The interdisciplinary program at Bard — which has four academic divisions, but no formal departments — appealed to Ms. Kuhn.

“Cage was a composer and a poet and a philosopher and a mushroom expert and a chess player and a visual artist, so we were not interested in going anywhere where we would be within the [exclusive] purview of a music department,” Ms. Kuhn said. “Leon got that immediately.”

There were other happy coincidences. Mr. Ashbery, who was a longtime friend of Cage, is on the faculty at Bard, as is the Cage scholar Joan Retallack. And Ms. Kuhn, a musicologist who left a position at Arizona State University to administer the Trust, was drawn by the chance to return to teaching. Mr. Botstein, for his part, said he was “thrilled” by the proposal.

For this weekend’s celebration, Ms. Kuhn chose “Lecture on the Weather” largely because it would allow her to get many people, including non-musicians, involved. The work is composed of texts by Henry David Thoreau and was a commission by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in honor of the bicentennial of America. The original score called for it to be performed by 12 speaker-vocalists, “preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens.” On Friday, the speakers, while male as specified, will be mostly American citizens, with the exception of the Canadian writer John Ralston Saul.

Cage was fascinated by Thoreau’s writings, as well as those of Joyce and Buckminster Fuller, and often found ways to use these in his music. “Long before hiphop used appropriation in music, Cage was using works by people he was influenced by,” Mr. Rouse said.

Mr. Botstein said he thought the campus community would be a positive source of energy for the Trust. “When people die there is the tendency to create shrines, and those have tendency to distort the legacy of someone like Cage, who was always interested in trying new things,” he said. “What’s nice about it being on a college campus is you always have young generations.”