It’s time to celebrate when any arts organization attains a quarter-century. And celebrate is just what People Dancing, the dance consortium founded by Whitley Setrakian 25 years ago and directed by Christina Sears-Etter for the last 10, is doing.

Two concerts, November 19 and 20 at Washtenaw Community College’s Towsley Auditorium, mark the company’s “Silver Jubilee.” And for these concerts, Sears-Etter and company are taking seriously the notion of “liberation” that’s sometimes associated with the word “jubilee.”

“The concerts,” she said, “are definitely more of a look forward than a look back.

You could do it the reverse way, and look to the past. But it’s jubilee, a time of freeing.”

So the concerts include many new faces — including some from People Dancing’s new Movement Artists Guild, which has become an incubator for dancers and new choreography — and many premieres, some of which are cross-disciplinary collaborations with musicians, digital and video artists.

“We have quite a bit of technology in the show,” said Sears-Etter.

And guest choreographers, like the University of Michigan’s Robin Wilson and the Detroit Dance Collective’s Lisa LaMarre, expand the program’s artistic scope, as do musical and digital guest artists Thomas Cocco, Steve Joslin and Ken Kozora.

Wilson contributes a new, rhythmically focused quintet, “the fun of FEET,” and La Marre has a new quartet, “The light within,” that is inspired by notions of wisdom and spirituality. Joslin has made “Colour Obscura,” an abstract digital work that incorporates computer animation and original music; and he was the creative force behind “Le Sans Souci,” a lighthearted piece for live musicians (including Joslin) and a quartet of dancers whose movement was choreographed by Sears-Etter.

While premieres predominate, Sears-Etter’s “Dollhouse, revisited” finds a proud place on the bill. Created for the Movement Artists Guild in its initial 2009-10 season, the dance, which investigates gender-role prescription, just won the statewide Maggie Allysee New Choreography Competition.

But Sears-Etter also has a set of brand-new pieces to unveil. Among them is her “Bedrift, by fives,” an abstract video piece that began on a beach in Italy, on the Tyrrhenean Sea, and incorporates her dancing there.

“It has kind of a deep tone to it,” she said, “a little mysterious. It came out of the landscape.”

She collaborated with video artist Cocco for the piece and also with Kozora, who wrote the score.

“We used chance methodology to construct the structure,” she added. “That was fun.”

Sears-Etter also had fun with a score for her other new work for the show, a duet called “Sky woman and earth Echo.” When things stalled on getting rights to the music she’d planned for this “Big Sky” piece, Sears-Etter simply collaborated with multi-instrumentalist Pamela Meisel to create a score for her work.

The program is ambitious, but she and the company have the energy for it, Sears-Etter said.

“We’ve had the realism moment, but with the dancers there is this sense of excitement. It’s a thrill to have these new artists come in. It does stimulate things. It’s renewal, we have a sense of that.”

And, she added, “I’m a Leo, it’s definitely an occasion and I’m not going to miss it. And I figure I’m not going to be doing the 50th. So I thought, let’s do the silver because we don’t know about the gold.”

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.