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Drumbeats and dance moves as Ragamala joins forces with Japanese percussionists
Caroline Palmer, Star Tribune
March 16, 2013
Original article

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon the walls of Ragamala Dance’s studio in south Minneapolis reverberated with the thunderous sounds of taiko drums played with a combination of raw power and disciplined grace by the Wadaiko Ensemble Tokara of Nagano, Japan. Ragamala members Ashwini Ramaswamy, Tamara Nadel, Jessica Fiala and Amanda Dlouhy moved with assured deliberation and regal poise in striking counterpoint to the rhythmic fury. They became a quartet of statues animated by the exquisite breath of life.

And that is precisely what Ragamala artistic directors Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy intended when they set out to create “1,001 Buddhas: Journey of the Gods,” premiering this weekend at the Cowles Center. The choreographers (who were named the Star Tribune’s 2011 Artists of the Year) work primarily in the south Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam and found inspiration from the uncommon pairing of 28 Hindu carved deities with 1,001 Buddhist figures in the famed Sanjusangendo temple in Kyoto, Japan. After being awed firsthand by the impressive sight of the temple and its spiritual lore, the mother and daughter team began to delve further, eventually merging their artistic perspectives with information gleaned from extensive research.

The resulting evening-length work unites mythology, iconography and history with the practice of honoring the past by finding new relevance and expressive possibility in the present day. This is the sort of delicate balance between the ancient and the innovative that Ragamala has managed so successfully over the company’s two decades in existence.

“We are not trying to make statements about Buddhism, that’s not our goal,” Aparna said during a rehearsal break. Instead, both she and Ranee explained, the piece is a deeply personal response to the power, grandeur, beauty and fearsomeness of the Hindu sentinels, gods and demons alike. It is also an exploration of the deep-seated connections between Japan and India established through thousands of years of cultural interchange, including the new ones forged through this particular project.

Everyone involved in “1,001 Buddhas” has been challenged to stretch the boundaries of his or her particular artistic form while staying true to its integrity. The musicians, for example, come from both Japanese and Indian rhythmic traditions, and yet have found ways over just a few short weeks to seamlessly meld the two so they become like one in the piece. “We’re building not just in blocks, but in layers,” said Aparna.

“All of us are keeping our information correct while experimenting amongst each other,” added Ranee.

The explosive Tokara (Art Lee, Yukari Ichise, Dean Havixbeck and Takafumi Onozawa), which first worked with Ragamala locally in 2008’s fiery “Sva (Vital Force),” has expanded upon the basic elements of the taiko drumming tradition. “We’ve come up with something completely new,” said Lee, referring to the increasingly fluent musical conversation that occurs over the course of the performance between his ensemble and Ragamala’s south Indian orchestra featuring Rajna Swaminathan (mridangam drum), Anjna Swaminathan (violin) and Lalit Subramaniam (vocals) plus guest Chenda drummer Kalamandalam Unnikrishnan.

“What I play is usually in close dialogue with footwork. Now there are new things to rearrange, it’s more abstract,” said Rajna, who has also considered ways to give voice to her much smaller drum in response to the larger ones played by Tokara.

The sense of abstraction has opened up an opportunity for the Ramaswamys to approach their own work differently. While classical Bharatanatyam technique and tenets still underscore the dancing in “1,001 Buddhas,” longtime Ragamala watchers will note that many of the gestures, poses and movement elements have a different sense of rhythmic freedom, characterization and flow. The varied personalities of the Hindu deities are represented through alert bird-like stances, gnarled hands, shuddering arms and piercing stares. The dancer’s bodies remain very upright and they perform even more closely together as a unit, emanating the sort of regimentation befitting supernatural beings tasked with the role of zealous protectors.

Aside from this latest endeavor the increasingly in-demand Ramaswamys are keeping busy with other commitments both on and off the stage. Last year Ranee was nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Council on the Arts. She was also named a United States Artists Fellow. And Aparna, who has received international recognition as a soloist, recently scored a National Dance Project Touring Fund to tour an evening of her own choreography.

So today Ragamala Dance and the Ramaswamys are taking on the United States, India and Japan. Which corner of the globe will find its way into their next project? Wherever it may be, when these artists act as guides the journey is always a delight.

Classical Voice of North Carolina Review

ADF Presents Ragamala's Beautiful Sacred Earth
Kate Dobbs Ariail, Classical Voice of North Carolina
July 10, 2012
Original article

Ragamala, a South Indian Bharatanatyam dance company from Minneapolis, turns the Reynolds Theater stage into a mesmerizing village in Sacred Earth, for the company’s first American Dance Festival appearance. The six female dancers are accompanied by a four-person orchestra, which includes a rich-voiced Carnatic singer. The beautiful program will repeat on July 11 and 12.

Ragamala was founded 20 years ago by Ranee Ramaswamy (she and daughter Aparna are co-artistic directors and soloists; another daughter Ashwini is also a soloist), but the ancient forms of Bharatanatyam dance, with its expansive language of gesture and movement, developed in south India over centuries before the Indian diaspora cast it up in such an unlikely new home as Minnesota. Bharatanatyam can seem surprisingly modern, and here the production’s video backdrop component keeps us aware of the 21st century. Drawings in the Warli style by Anil Chaitya Vangad, white on dark grounds, are projected onto backdrops and sheer scrims. Motifs include trees of life, rivers, rice fields, and village rituals, all arranged with relaxed symmetry and many including circular or spiral patterning. Sacred Earth utilizes, and draws imagery from, Tamil Sangam poetry (300 BCE-300 CE). An English version of these fragments is conveniently provided in the program, and intermittently, the texts are spoken in English, as well as being sung in their original language, accompanied by nattuvangam, mridangam and violin. The rhythm is steady, rising and falling like breathing, and the dancers add high and low sounds to the mix with their gentle stamping and the shimmer of their ankle bells.

For many people from Western cultures, the way in to Indian classical dance is through color, and the glories of silk pleated, wrapped and draped over the dancers’ bodies. Certainly, those are important components of the spectacle. In Sacred Earth, each dancer wears a very similar costume, but each has her own color, ranging through the golden and red earth tones, with one the green of rivers and distant mountains. The rich silks are given even greater depth by the way their pleats and folds move and reflect the light differently from their taut expanses, and the colors are further augmented by the red-stained decorations of the bejeweled dancers’ feet, fingers and palms. Although the dancers are almost completely covered, their shapes are well-defined and smoothed into sensuous curves.

Sacred Earth begins with a long, pleasing ritual spreading of rice flour upon the earth. Kolam is a practice of women in southeastern India, who begin each day marking out a pale design, an offering to the Earth Mother, outside their doors. This stage version was designed by Ranee Ramaswamy. In it, five dancers quietly arrange their white flour drawings on the black stage floor, turning around them as they begin to spiral. In the center of their circle, a sixth dancer does the same, a wheel within a wheel. The designs eventually meld into circles within a circle, which becomes the dance ground.

As the dance develops, the storytelling strengths of Bharatanatyam become evident. Even if you’ve never seen any Indian classical dance, you will find some of the gestures immediately clear, and here the use of poetry and painting makes gesture interpretation generally easy (although I’m certain there are levels and levels beyond the easy one). As the evening goes on, this complex art’s many elements — music, rhythm, song, story, poem, prayer, gesture, motion, image, light, color — meld, like “Earth and pouring rain/Mingled/Beyond Parting.”

Twin Cities Daily Planet Review

Ragamala's multimedia "Sacred Earth" draws from ancient art forms
Sheila Regan, Twin Cities Daily Planet
September 21, 2011
Original article

This weekend Ragamala Dance takes the stage at the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts with a gorgeous collage of Indian folk art customs, Ancient Indian poetry, a live South Indian orchestra, and fantastic dancing. The multimedia show incorporates two ritualistic forms of visual art traditionally practiced by women in different parts of India explores the sacredness of nature and is a visual feast.

The two forms of visual art that are used in the show include Warli paintings by Warli folk artist Anil Chaitya Vangad and a stage covered with kolams, created by the dancers themselves.

Ragamala’s Co-Artistic Director Ranee Ramaswamy, who was awarded the 2011 McKnight Distinguished Artist award this year, was born in South India, and first learned to draw kolams when she was a child, when her mother taught her how to draw them on the kitchen floor. “It teaches you patience,” she says of the practice. “What you are learning is concentration.”

Kolams are made each day, first thing in the morning outside of a person’s home, Ramaswamy says. Made with rice flour, the designs offer a welcome and invoke a sacred space, and are eaten away throughout the day by birds and insects. The ephemeral nature of the artwork symbolizes that “things of beauty don’t last forever,” Ramaswamy says. The drawings are celebratory, and in some way announce what is happening inside the house. When no kolam appears outside of the house, Ramaswamy says, that means there has been a death in the family, or the woman of the house is having her period.

In the show, the dancers ritually spread rice flour across the stage. As they dance, they spread the powder across the stage, and it becomes at matted palette onto which Jeff Bartlett’s lights create beautiful effects. They also draw Kolams directly onto the the stage, so that the floor itself becomes a work of art. 

The other visual art form represented in the show comes from the Warli people in western India. The Warli make the wall paintings on the inside wall of their huts, made with earth materials and cow dung, painted over with white pigment. Though the Warli paintings are traditionally made by women, in recent years men have learned the art form as well, and it is generally men who have gone outside of villages to share the form as interest in the paintings has grown.

One such artist is Anil Chaitya Vangad, who Ramaswamy visited last year at his village outside of Bombay. The people in the village, she says, live off the land, and lead a very simple life. The artist created 3 paintings for the performance, one of which is in the lobby on display and the other two which have been photgraphed and are projected onto screens (with video work by Perimeter Productions). Vangad’s paintings, seen blown up across the entire backdrop of the stage, are enormously elaborate, telling the story of the daily life of a village. The final image of his painting, that of a tree, is simply awe-inspiring.  

In addition to the visual art elements of the show, Ragamala’s performance also utilizes an ancient Indian poetry that takes as its subject 5 different landscapes- desert, mountain, field, seashore and forest, according to Ramaswamy.

The poems are translated into English and heard as voiceovers in between the sections. They are also set to Southern Indian Classical music that evokes the emotion of each of the landscapes through the different scale progressions. The music ranges from somber to very lively and particularly noteworthy is the vocal work of Lalit Subramanian. 

While the dance vocabulary for all of the pieces is classical Bharatanatyam, used in all of Ragamala’s work, the dance pieces are informed by both the visual art and musical and poetry elements, Ramaswamy says.

The dancers, who include soloists Ranee Ramasamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, are each individually precise and full of flair, but what is most admirable about the production is the way that the choreography moves throughout the space, with incredible flow and rhythm that seems effortless as the dancers weave in and out of the entrances, between each other, moving like pendulums like a living organism.

Dance Magazine 25 to Watch, 2010

Dance Magazine 25 to Watch in 2010: Aparna Ramaswamy
Linda Shapiro

At once iconic and explosive, Aparna Ramaswamy infuses the formal rigor of Bharatanatyam with fluid spontaneity and rock star allure. Her quicksilver dexterity allows her to alter states from ferocious to fragile, earthy to transcendent. One minute she’s an implacable deity, the next a besotted lover. Ramaswamy’s dancing scintillates with clarity, fire, and multifaceted mystery. Along with her performing, Ramaswamy’s vibrant choreography expands and illuminates this classical Indian art. ‘My work pushes the boundaries of Bharatanatyam and allows me to discover the creative flexibility of an ancient form,’ she says. As co-director of Ragamala Dance Company in Minneapolis, she creates dances that reconfigure the ancient Indian dance form by layering it with modern dance, American Sign Language, taiko drumming, and medieval poetry.  Recognized internationally for her artistry, Ramaswamy has received numerous awards and accolades. In 2010, she performs with Ragamala in Minnesota, Idaho, Oregon, Michigan, and Tennessee.