Interview with Aparna Ramaswamy - Huffington Post

Meet the Women Radicalizing One of the World's Oldest Dance Forms
Mallika Rao, The Huffington Post
August 12, 2015
Original article

One of America’s most unusual dance dynasties reigns in Minneapolis: the trio of Ranee Ramaswamy, and her daughters Aparna and Ashwini.

In just over two decades, their company, Ragamala, has become the standard bearer of a singularly successful kind of hybridity, merging ancient traditions into high-end productions that major grant organizations find hard to resist. Their only other members are not of Indian origin. Together, the five dancers travel the world with first generation Indian-American women accompanists, bucking the classical hangup that true virtuosity is the domain of men.

Maybe it's the "Minnesota nice" effect, but the cutthroat vibe that usually attends Indian classical artistry isn't evident in the company's protocol either. Sweeping her arms upward at a rehearsal in Manhattan this past Sunday, in a move choreographed by her mother for the pièce de résistance of a bharatanatyam program -- the varnam -- Ashwini joked that the gesture reminded her of the Disney classic “Fantasia": “when Mickey calls up the waves.” 

That sense of "mischief," to quote one reviewer, comes out in Ashwini's adami, the signature head movement usually associated with seduction. Offstage, the dissonance continues, with speech peppered in a cheery mix of pop culture references and the flat As of the midwest.

Ashwini was rehearsing for her solo Manhattan debut, made Tuesday night as part of the South Asian arts festival Drive East. In one wing of the studio sat Ranee, on nattuvangam -- brass cymbals used to keep time by the dancer's guru. Youthful at 63, she was the eldest there by a few generations. To her left sat vocalist Roopa Mahadevan, and flanking the two, sisters Anjna and Rajna Swaminathan on the violin and the mridangam respectively, the latter a barrel-shaped hand drum.

In her saffron half-sari set off by neon orange toenails, Ashwini looked up to the task of hooking modern viewers. Aparna sat directly in front of her so as to “nitpick” -- as she put it -- precisely. English, Tamil and Sanskrit flew. Everyone except Ranee occasionally dipped into Indian-isms for comic effect: “Why you do like that?” Aparna asked Mahadevan, when the singer mistakenly cut a jati off too quickly.

The women took pains to plot out the impact of fleeting moments, timing each step of Ashwini’s slower riffs, and building in space for Mahadevan to improvise with pleasure. “You should feel freedom,” Aparna told the singer gravely. Comic relief came during a recap of the varnam, in the form of a Tamil metaphor for lovers: a “creeper” vine and a tree. Ranee got an earful on the stalker vibes of a word the rest insisted only Indians use. “If I ever find a skinny man,” said Mahadevan, who with her curly hair and Venus shape, looks like a Renaissance painting, “I’m going to say, ‘You’re the creeper to my tree.’”

“I think we’ve got a good Hallmark card idea here,” Ashwini shot back.

The Ramaswamys function on an "adapt or die" mentality, but “fusion” is a bad word. They say they haven’t yet found a term dimensional enough to please them. “You wouldn’t believe how many people ask us if we’ve done something with flamenco,” Aparna says later, sitting at a café down the street from La MaMa, the experimental performance space where Drive East unfolds through mid-August.

The elder of the two, Aparna is ferocious where Ashwini is affable. She gets visibly charged when she explains why the company, which doubles as a small dance school, doesn’t "do arangetrams."

For Indian-Americans, the word itself conjures up an entire culture. Think wedding, quinceañera and bat mitzvah madness rolled together, only with the star of the show dancing for three hours with the help of live musicians flown in from India, and flower arrangements from Holland and Hawaii. Literally translated to “ascending the stage,” the arangetram is essentially a debut performance. What was once the purview only of dancers with intentions of going pro has become a standard rite of passage for Indian-American high schoolers set to switch their sights onto medicine or engineering come fall. Over the years, one-upmanship has scaled new heights, with some families booking the Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall for their girl’s big day. 

For non-Indians throughout the country, invited by colleagues or friends, these events can be a primary mode of dance education. This primacy troubles the Ramaswamys. “As a cultural representation, community productions are not always of the highest quality,” Aparna says carefully. “And it’s hard for audiences to tell the difference.”

In some respects, the apocryphally old dance form enchants easily. Bharatanatyam dancers dress in peacock-bright pleated costumes, sewn from saris. Good footwork is thrilling, and experts can seem to fly in the air when they get going. Then there are the stretches of abhinaya, or expression, which can feel like avant-garde theater. Scenes take shape with mudras -- hand gestures -- depicting every magical Indian icon, from the elephant to the peacock to the pantheon of Hindu gods.

The flashy exterior belies an intense interior experience for the dancer. Aparna equates dancing to engaging in “prayer.” The soulfulness of the form is why collaboration must be approached respectfully, she argues. Mindless flamenco infusions are out. “You have to be thoughtful. It's not just about, ‘Oh, they have rhythm, and we have rhythm!’” she says, her eyes widening. “That's too shallow.”

Given the obsession with classical culture in Indian-American communities nationwide, the dearth of homegrown professionalism is striking. Rajna Swaminathan says she is one of two Indian-American women who plays the mridangam full time in the country. Those who do take the leap typically do so with the support of parents unswayed by the security of a career in medicine. Often, they are musicians themselves. The Swaminathans’ father, for instance, a physicist based in Maryland, is also an accomplished mridangist who accompanies visiting performers.

In this underpopulated landscape, cross-disciplinary collaboration is key. On the docket for Ragamala is a project with Amir ElSaffar, a talented Iraqi trumpeter. Last year’s “Song Of The Jasmine” -- run at the Lincoln Center, which also co-commissioned the production -- featured the Indian-American jazz composer Rudresh Mahanthappa. In the lead-up, he decamped to Minneapolis to workshop with the Ramaswamys, a process that involved poring through love poetry by the eighth-century Tamil poetess Andal. The result was an original work heralded in The New York Times as “infectious.” “You don’t generally go to a performance of Bharatanatyam,” began the review, “expecting to want to get up and dance.”

The key in mixing forms is “finding a thematic bedrock,” Aparna says. Tapping into a shared idea -- the parallel between romantic and spiritual love, perhaps, or, as in the case of jazz and Carnatic traditions, a love of improvisation -- yields entry points. Engaging fully in the creative stages "allows wider audiences to understand the complexity and the richness of the individual forms," Aparna says.

The Ramaswamys' obsession with the idea of individual integrity comes from their teacher, Alarmel Valli. A legend in India, Valli is trained in a style known aspandanallur. A guiding metaphor is of a feather blown into a straight line. “That interplay of grace and strength,” Ashwini credits as the basis for the style's every movement.

A point of distinction for Valli is to access one's personhood on stage. The Ramaswamys are schooled to some extent in themselves. Where Aparna is fierce (in the family mythology, she knew she was going to be a dancer at the age of three), Ashwini is a wanderer. Both women are graduates of Carleton College, a liberal arts school not far from where they grew up. After graduation, Aparna worked on Ragamala with their mom while Ashwini headed to New York, spending a few years in the book publishing world before turning back to what they jokingly call “the family business.”

In childhood too, the girls diverged. “I was more of an American kid,” Ashwini says, rattling off her list of interests: writing, drawing, singing. “Most American kids try all the activities,” Ranee says pragmatically. “They don’t go deep, they go out.”

Aparna, she contrasts, “was ready to be molded” the moment she saw Valli perform, as a young girl. That first glimpse became the family’s origin story. Living in Minneapolis, they rarely saw the big visiting artists from India, who mostly toured the diasporic hotspots: New Jersey, Texas, California. When Valli came to town in 1982, “she changed the city,” Ranee says. Non-Indians and Indians alike turned out for what would become the first of many appearances in Minneapolis.

By then, Ranee had become the small community’s de facto performer. “Women my age were not usually trained at all,” she says. Her first marriage, to Ashwini’s and Aparna’s father, was arranged, into a family who “didn’t even like me to hum,” she says. “They thought it wasn’t proper for a Brahmin woman to perform,” and so she pursued her childhood passion tepidly, performing to taped music at community events that didn't require much soul-searching.

Her eventual divorce set the three women in motion toward the stage. They began to take annual pilgrimages to India to learn at the feet of Valli, who encouraged Aparna to access her fire, and Ashwini to let her playfulness shine through.

The counterintuitiveness of their lives (relatedly, all three women are now married to non-Indian men) seems to give them pleasure. "We're not one or the other culture, so why would our work be?" Aparna says. 

Indeed, they seem to be performing even when they're not. At the end of rehearsal, Ashwini mugged one last time. “The best feeling is being done,” she said, panting a little after the final leg of her thillana -- all leaps and quicksilver footwork. Then, a smile, as if she didn't mean that at all. 

Interview with Aparna Ramaswamy - The Chicago Tribune

Mother and daughter pair jazz with Indian dance
Laura Molzahn, The Chicago Tribune
April 7, 2015
Original article

"We are partners in everything," says Aparna Ramaswamy, co-artistic director of Ragamala Dance Company with her mother, Ranee Ramaswamy. "We each have our own strengths, but everything we do comes from a dialogue."

Their collaboration began officially in 1992, when Ranee founded Ragamala, an innovative Minneapolis-based Indian dance company, and made her teenage daughter co-artistic director.

But they were working and studying together much earlier, says daughter Aparna, who believes their different personalities balance each other out: "My mother is high-energy, full of ideas, a broad thinker. I'm more deliberate: I like to go deep, so I'm more cautious. If we were in rehearsal and had an argument, she would storm out, and I'd be the one to ask her to come back, even at 8 or 10."

Over the years, Ragamala has leveraged that talent for collaboration in pieces that featured a flamenco dancer and opera music, for example. In 2013, with award-winning jazz composer-saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, the company began to create "Song of the Jasmine" (2014), which will have its Chicago debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art with five dancers, including Ranee, Aparna and younger daughter Ashwini.

Mahanthappa joins them onstage on sax, along with four other musicians playing electric guitar and Indian flute, percussion and violin.

Mahanthappa has studied traditional Indian Carnatic music, he says, but not in depth. The "Jasmine" score is jazz — with "big chunks" of improvisation built in. The choreographers have done the same, expanding the usual improvisations of Bharatanatyam.

Both Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music are rooted in Hindu religious poetry and take decades to master; both are revered, and carefully preserved, in Indian culture.

And what Ragamala performs is traditional Bharatanatyam, period. But collaborators have taken the company far afield in other ways. In 1991, Ranee set a piece to Robert Bly's translations of 16th-century Indian poet Mirabai.

"I was very scared," she says. "At that time, no one danced Indian dance to poems in English." So she added an Indian singer to the mix, "to justify what I was doing, so I was dancing to Indian words too."

Though Ranee studied Bharatanatyam from an early age, "I was only trained to be married," she says, "so I'd have an added qualification with Indian dance."

She stopped dancing when she wed, at 17, then took it up again after a lapse of several years. "I'm not a very assertive person," she says. "But I wanted to do that so badly that I choreographed myself from whatever I could remember."

Ranee started studying again, then taught, then began choreographing and performing. When Aparna was 8, mother and daughter took workshops at the University of Minnesota taught by renowned Indian dancer Alarmel Valli, venerated for her mastery of Pandanallur, one of three schools of Bharatanatyam.

"When we took that class," Ranee says, "Aparna was the one who absorbed everything. Valli said, 'You're like a computer!'" She became their guru, inviting Aparna and Ranee to train with her in India.

"From then on," Aparna says, "we went to India four months a year." Back home in Minnesota, the two toiled together to absorb Valli's teachings, knowing that she wouldn't take them back if they returned and had regressed.

"We would work tirelessly, every day," says Aparna. "We were correcting each other, working together. Then, when we went back (to India), it was a very vigorous study, 10 hours a day, every day."

In "Jasmine," Aparna wanted to collaborate with Mahanthappa on a thematic level.

"My mother and I wanted to work with the idea of the sacred and the sensual, something that's very clear to me in jazz and Indian music," says Aparna. "There's no separation between the two."

As their text, they chose "Sacred Sayings of the Goddess," a poem of 143 verses by 10th-century female mystic Andal, whose longing to unite with Lord Vishnu has struck some conservative Hindus as overly erotic.

But no verses are heard or embodied in "Jasmine." Instead, mother and daughter chose just a few lines of poetry to "inspire the work," Aparna says. "There's no spoken text, no sung lyric. The ideas are brought out, in five sections, in the music and dance."

Mahanthappa says the challenge was to "conjure this emotion and imagery with wordless melody and choreography." That's "a big deal, a big stretch," he adds, in the universe of Indian music and dance.

The Washington Post Review

Song of the Jasmine divinely blends movements with South Indian melodies
Celia Wren, The Washington Post
January 30, 2015
Original article

Like a lover yearning for her beloved, the human soul longs to unite with the divine. That idea comes into play in “Song of the Jasmine,” the bharatanatyam dance work scheduled to visit the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Feb. 7.

Choreographed by Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy of the Minneapolis-based Ragamala Dance Company, in collaboration with saxophonist-composer Rudresh Mahanthappa, the piece takes inspiration from the writings of the Tamil mystic poet Andal, known for her devotion to the god Krishna.

“In Andal’s poetry, and in bharatanatyam — and on a much deeper level as part of the Indian psyche — the sensual and the sacred are one. There doesn’t have to be a disconnect between those two concepts,” Aparna Ramaswamy said, speaking by phone from Minneapolis.

Aparna and her mother, Ranee, are co-artistic directors of Ragamala Dance, which Ranee founded in 1992. Both women were born in India; both have trained with Alarmél Valli, a celebrated performer and choreographer in the Indian classical dance form of bharatanatyam.

Mother and daughter are among the five dancers who interpret “Song of the Jasmine,” a roughly hour-long work set to music inflected with jazz and South Indian music. (Ashwini Ramaswamy, Aparna’s sister, is also among the dancers.) In a version of the piece performed at New York’s Lincoln Center last year, the dancers drew on bharatanatyam’s physical vocabulary in ways that seemed now seductive, now jaunty, now rapt.

One side of the stage featured the five-person band, including composer Mahanthappa on alto saxophone. Other instrumentalists played the guitar, the mridangam (a two-sided hand drum), the Carnatic (or southern Indian) flute and violin. (The band will also perform live at the Feb. 7 performance.)

“Song of the Jasmine” began to bloom after the Ramaswamys attended a concert by Mahanthappa, who is known for fusing elements of South Indian music with jazz. Aparna Ramaswamy says she immediately connected with the musician’s sound.

She resolved to come up with a project that would involve the composer-saxophonist. Discussions about such a collaboration intensified in 2011, when Ragamala Dance performers and Mahanthappa were among the artists participating in the Kennedy Center’s Maximum India festival.

Eventually, the Ramaswamys proposed building a joint venture around the poetry of Andal, who lived in the 8th century or thereabouts. In India, Andal is “a household name,” Ranee said.

Ranee was raised in India. Aparna grew up primarily in the United States, but she spent a few months in India every year, and was familiar with Andal’s legacy. Mahanthappa, raised in Colorado, didn’t know Andal’s writing, but he found the source material fruitful. The Ramaswamys “would send me pages and pages of poetry and their thoughts about the direction of the piece,” he recalled, speaking by phone from his base in Montclair, N.J. Often, he “would latch on to two or three lines [of verse], and that would be the big inspiration for the musical narrative.”

Early on, the collaborators agreed on the instruments that would supply the accompaniment. Subsequently, the music and choreography fell into place roughly simultaneously: The Ramaswamys and Mahanthappa typically drafted sketches on their own, but then, in regular joint workshopping sessions, they significantly revised those drafts.

Mahanthappa, who had never collaborated with dancers previously, found the process exciting. “Dancers hear music differently,” he observes. The dancers’ needs, and the specifics of the ensemble, led him to an approach in which “it’s melody and rhythm that are the guiding forces, and not necessarily Western ideas of harmony and chord progression.”

Eventually the piece grew to encompass several sections based on different ragas (a raga is an Indian musical concept somewhat akin to a scale) and rhythmic structures.

As South Indian dancers, “it’s important that we have a raga-based music. It pushes the spirituality of the work,” says Ranee, whose credits include being appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Arts.

Both score and choreography would ultimately include sections of improvisation, including sequences where the musicians and dancers are essentially reacting to each other.

“That was one of the intentions when we created the piece, to have that freedom on the stage between music and dance, and to really underscore that relationship,” says Aparna.

Co-commissioned by the Clarice Smith and other entities, “Song of the Jasmine” premiered last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The collaboration with Mahanthappa was a new line of inquiry for Ragamala Dance, but the mystical motifs that surface in “Song of the Jasmine” speak to the company’s broader interests, Aparna Ramaswamy says.

“Dance and music evoke the feeling of transcendence and spirituality,” she says. “I’m very interested in weaving that thread through any work that we do.”

The Hindu Review

Tribute to Mother Earth
George Pioustin, The Hindu
January 22, 2015
Original article

With the ever increasing number of aficionados crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, Bharatanatyam has gained international recognition.

Exploring this contemporary possibility are performers and choreographers such as Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, who are protégés and senior disciples of Alarmel Valli. As Indian dancers based in the U.S., their works reflect the rich heritage and deep philosophical roots of India amalgamated with the inquisitiveness and creative liberty of the United States.

Their initiative, Ragamala Dance Company, presented ‘Sacred Earth’ for Trinity Arts Festival of India at Sri Krishna Gana Sabha. ‘Sacred Earth’ delved into the interconnectedness of man and Nature.

The repertoire started with Lakshmi Stuthi from Sri Suktam, a choreographic piece by Alarmel Valli. Inspired by the philosophy and art of Kolam, the artists blended dance and drawing kolam designs on stage.

The Sangam poets’ works which use Nature as a metaphor to identify emotions, were taken to craft the repertoire. Tevakulattur’s verses from Kurunthokai 3 describing paalai tinai were followed by Paranar’s mullai tinai from Kurunthokai 36, Venputhi’s neythal tinai from Kurunthokai 97, Milai Kanthan’s marutham tinai from Kurunthokai 196 and Sempulappeyanirar’s kurinji tinai from Kurunthokai 40 respectively. ‘Sacred Earth’ concluded with Prithvi Suktam from Atharva Veda.

The choreography was visually opulent and filled with zest. Perfectly synchronised movements, pointing out the conspicuous rigorous rehearsals deserved compliments.

Though the crisp geometric formations throughout the nritta segments were impressive, there was less space for abhinaya.

The voice-overs throughout the performance lacked clarity and created ambiguity amidst the background music.

The beauty of the Pandanallur bani was well delineated by the dancers clad in earthen shades of yellow, brown and green, aptly designed for the theme. Ragamala Dance Company comprises lead dancers and choreographers Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy along with Aswini Ramaswamy, Tamara Nadel and Jessica Fiala. The orchestra had Ramya Kapadia on the vocal, Suchitra Sairam on the nattuvangam, Rajna Swaminathan on the mridangam and Anjana Swaminathan on the violin who gave melodic enrichment.

Interview with Aparna Ramaswamy - Asian Age

US-based dancer, Aparna Ramaswamy speaks about how the traditional teacher disciple relations defined her art
Aarti Bhanushali, Asian Age, Mumbai
January 4, 2015

Aparna Ramaswamy was born in Calcutta and raised in the United States. A senior disciple of dancer-choreographer Alarmel Valli, Aparna joined her mother’s Ragamala Dance Company, based in Minneapolis, as an artistic director and choreographer. All set to perform at NCPA’s Umang on January 6, she shares her thoughts about her guru, excitement of performing in India and what Bharatnatyam means to her.

“The crowd in India is eclectic, they are a wonderful audience and my performances have been received well. Indians have music and dance in their blood, they can tell what is good and what is not. So doing justice to an art form so rich before Indian masses is always an honour,” Aparna exclaims about her visit to India.

A teacher is never a giver of truth, she is a guide, a pointer to the truth each student must find for himself, this adage by Bruce Lee holds completely true as Aparna reflects on her relationship with her guru. “She has been a force of inspiration, throughout my life, she taught us that dance is about miming the subject, I was fortunate enough to learn under her as she directed me towards unwavering dedication and teaching me that art is bigger than a person always, and when one realises that, self becomes less important.” Adding that one of her most memorable moments was sharing the stage with her master at ICRR, Japan.

Shedding light on her school of dance style Pandanallur, Aparna elaborates, “Each school has its own hallmarks, Pandanallur is one of the oldest and authentic dance styles in Bharatnatyam, with headlined by geometry and balanced by grace. The subtle shades of emotions inter-connected by music are reflected in this form. We come from a great teacher and carrying her lineage forward is a responsibility,” she says. Talking about evolving over the years as a dancer, she says “Each art form has an interpretation which grows and lives with the dancer. It’s like an endless treasure trove. Keeping the lineage intact and putting your own stamp to it, is what every dancer tries to do over a period of time and understand the forms dynamic evolution, it’s a never ending process.” To the students learning the eloquent dance form, the artiste advises, “Students these days are interested in hundred activities, when I was learning Bharatnatyam it was just my dance and college. Bharatnatyam is an ocean in itself, students involved in learning the art form must explore it to its full potential and have a single minded focus at what they learn.”

The New York Times Review

Sacred Music and Movement, With an Infectious BeatSiobhan Burke, The New York Times
August 8, 2014
Original article

You don’t generally go to a performance of Bharatanatyam, the classical South Indian dance style, expecting to want to get up and dance. The form inspires a more removed kind of reverence, as something to be admired from afar, like a sacred object.

But on Thursday at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Ragamala Dance, a Bharatanatyam company from Minneapolis, upended that expectation with the New York premiere of “Song of the Jasmine,” a soulful, imaginative and rhythmically contagious collaboration with the superb jazz composer and alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. It was the main event on an otherwise tepid program shared with the Chinese American Arts Council and Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, a group based in Philadelphia.

Mr. Mahanthappa and the artistic directors of Ragamala, Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy — they are mother and daughter, as well as the troupe’s principal dancers — approach their art forms with a similar eye (or ear) toward blending old and new. Mr. Mahanthappa’s composition, played live, oscillated between warbling, wailing improvisations and tightly structured rhythmic cycles for alto sax, guitar, mridangam (two-sided hand drum) and Carnatic flute and violin.

The meeting of jazz and South Indian Carnatic traditions was startlingly seamless and marvelously danceable in the hands of the Ramaswamys, who choreographed “Song of the Jasmine” for themselves and three other dancers, Ashwini Ramaswamy (Aparna’s sister), Tamara Nadel and Jessica Fiala.

A program note elaborated on their inspiration: the eighth-century musings of the Tamil poet Andal, known for her expressions of “deep longing” and “the desire to merge the soul with the Supreme Consciousness.” Vague though that may be, it captures the emotional landscape of “Jasmine,” where every gesture radiates joy or generosity or a sense of striving toward some higher form of being.

Those gestures ranged from bold, daggerlike strokes of the arms, shooting out from the chest, to a fragile, quivering lexicon of the hands that suggested stitching, caressing, planting, gathering and other tender actions. At one point, resolving from appealingly asymmetrical arrangements into a more cohesive group, the five women performed a kind of sewing motion to all four corners of the stage, as if mending the space in front of them.

Though the sightlines at the Damrosch Park Bandshell often masked their pattering feet and bell-clad ankles — a persistent shortcoming of that stage — the specificity of their painted hands, particularly Aparna Ramaswamy’s, was breathtaking.

Star Tribune Review

Ragamala Dance gets jazzed in new dance collaboration
Caroline Palmer, Star Tribune
May 16, 2014
Original article

Ragamala Dance, led by the mother-daughter team of Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, never has shied away from exploring new ways to perform the ancient Indian dance form of bharatanatyam. “Song of the Jasmine,” which premiered Thursday night at Walker Art Center, may be their most audacious experiment to date.

Created in collaboration with composer Rudresh Mahan­thappa, an alto saxophone player who combines progressive jazz with South Indian classical music, the work challenges us to re-imagine the role of tradition in the 21st century. It’s disorienting when the stately dancers first encounter the lively circular rhythms generated by Mahanthappa and his ensemble. The internal pulses of each form seem incompatible.

But this initial uncertainty makes sense — sometimes we need a moment to adjust expectations away from the familiar to something groundbreaking. That’s when the magic of “Song of the Jasmine” reveals itself — the relationship between the music and dance in this work is not only meant to be, it exemplifies what happens when artistic boundaries (real or artificial) are radically tested, if not knocked down all together.

“Song of the Jasmine” draws inspiration from the writings of eighth-century Tamil poet Andal. Her words of longing for the god Vishnu are intimate and sensual, and those are the feelings Mahanthappa summons in his composition. Joined onstage by Rez Abbasi (guitar), Raman Kalyan (Carnatic flute), Anjna Swaminathan (Carnatic violin) and Rajna Swaminathan (drum), Maranthappa leads his tight ensemble on a musical journey of joy, bliss and contemplation.

The dancers respond in kind by staying true to the storytelling gestures of bharatanatyam while simultaneously adjusting their technique to reflect a different sort of spiritual longing.

Aparna Ramaswamy is particularly effective in this role, her vibrant movements lingering just a bit longer than usual, her fluid arms arcing through space as if playing an invisible instrument. In one section, Aparna, Ranee and Ashwini Ramaswamy slowly shift from one pose to another, their facial expressions transitioning between emotions with languid ease.

The set features dozens of hanging bells, but they are rarely rung. When one is struck, the clarity of its tone serves as a reminder of how deeply human beings respond to rhythms, both old and new. “Song of the Jasmine” pays homage to this universal truth.

Star Tribune Preview

Classical Indian dance meets jazz in Ragamala's 'Song of the Jasmine'
Pamela Espeland, Star Tribune
May 13, 2014
Original article

The ancient, codified forms of Indian classical dance. The in-the-moment, unpredictable sounds of modern jazz. What could they possibly say to each other?

So much that “Song of the Jasmine,” a new collaboration between Minneapolis’ Ragamala Dance and New York-based jazz saxophonist and composer Rudresh Mahanthappa, could be one of the year’s must-see performing arts events.

Co-commissioned by four arts organizations including Walker Art Center, “Song of the Jasmine” has been booked for an 11-city national tour starting in August, without anyone having seen it all the way through. We’ll be first when the evening-length work has its world premiere in the Walker’s McGuire Theater, Thursday through Sunday.

The seeds were sown in 2007, when the Walker presented Mahanthappa’s world jazz group Kinsmen. Ragamala’s Aparna Rama­swamy was in the audience and liked what she heard, and the way Mahanthappa brought Indian ragas and instrumentation into his music. Both are second-generation Indian-Americans, and she thought it would be interesting to work with him.

Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither offered to help. He was a fan of Mahan­thappa and had history with Ragamala.

“Many years of working with Ragamala on various projects, all of which involved some kind of collaboration, gave me utter faith they would find their way on this one,” Bither said. He was clear about the relationship between the two creative sides: “They’re equals and were commissioned as equals.”

Right there is one reason this collaboration could have been a mess. Dancers perform to music, but the music is there to support the dance. Both Ragamala — Aparna and her mother, Ranee, co-artistic directors and choreographers — and Mahanthappa wanted to move their own art forward, not simply get along.

“What we didn’t want was a shallow cross-cultural collaboration,” Aparna explained. “We are all artists who have created a lot of work with great depth. We didn’t want to meet on easy ground.”

Early on, they had to confront the question of which would come first, the music or the dance. “We wanted both to happen simultaneously,” Mahanthappa said. “It doesn’t usually work that way. It’s one or the other.”

He had never composed for choreographers; Ragamala had never danced to jazz, which includes an element foreign to most dancers: improvisation.

“Dances are generally not improvised,” Mahanthappa said. “This project is a big push in that direction for Ragamala, something they wanted to explore.”

Aparna and Ranee began working on the choreography, Mahanthappa on the music. Both sides sent MIDI files, videos and e-mails back and forth, and there were many late-night texts and conversations. Starting last December, everyone convened for three intense periods of multiple rehearsals at Ragamala’s south Minneapolis studio. Final rehearsals started last week at the Walker.

The musicians — Mahanthappa and jazz guitarist Rez Abassi, Raman Kalyan on South Indian flute, violinist Anjna Swaminathan and Rajna Swaminathan on mridangam (South Indian drum) — all live on the East Coast and have flown in from New York, Baltimore, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

At an early rehearsal in December, some of the music had been composed and parts of the dance choreographed. Things were loose and tentative, with frequent stops and starts as the musicians and dancers negotiated tempos and transitions. The dancers’ bare feet slapped the floor and Mahanthappa’s alto saxophone soared in a fiery, instantly memorable melody.

“It’s going to be different every time,” Ranee explained during a break. “We’re getting to know each other.”

In fact, each performance will be different from night to night, and from venue to venue as Ragamala and Mahanthappa go on tour, because improvisation is part of the dance as well as the music. At a rehearsal in mid-April, there were long passages of crisply choreographed and executed group movements, and parts where the dancers moved independently while staying aware of and responsive to one another. That’s improvisation.

“Song of the Jasmine” is guided by the poems of sixth-century Tamil Bhakti poet Andal, a woman who wrote about desire so strong that illusion seems real, and the agony and ecstasy of longing to unite with the divine.

“Those emotions are what we are painting on the stage,” Aparna said.

Jazz is music that communicates and evokes emotions, and Mahanthappa wanted joy to be first. “It’s not in the dance tradition to start with a bang,” he said. “Usually it starts slowly and amps up. In my music, my sensibility, 99.9 percent of the time my set starts with a bang. I wanted to bring that element in. They [Ragamala] were game for it.” And so “Song of the Jasmine” begins in a blaze of joy, shimmering blue silk and 80 suspended bronze bells.

Aparna describes the collaboration as “a wonderful process. … You never know until you jump in. What I found is that we can stay true to so many of the elements of our form, our aesthetic, and the creative process that satisfies our souls, but also employ all of these new strategies for creativity.”

For Mahanthappa, “this whole project has been really inspiring. It has cracked open my sense of how music is placed in the world. It has changed the way I see how music can be used, conveyed and interpreted.

“What [Ragamala] is doing rhythmically as choreographers is astounding. Their sense of rhythm with their feet is as good as any drummer. It makes me think of Max Roach and Jack DeJohnette. … It makes me want to play.”

Ann Arbor News Review

Ragamala Dance casts an artful spell in Power Center performance
Susan Isaacs Nisbett, The Ann Arbos News
August 25, 2013
Original article

It is autumn for the 6 women dancers on stage, adorned in pleated silks of russet and gold, scarlet, olive and saffron. But there are flowers in their hair, and there is nothing autumnal about the hour-long “Sacred Earth,” presented by Minneapolis-based Ragamala Dance Wednesday at Power Center by the University Musical Society. On the contrary, it’s joy and serenity—the very opposite of fading light and waning days—that radiate from these exquisite dancers, trained and performing in the style of Indian classical dance known as bharatanatyam.

The dancers of Ragamala, directed by 2 of the 6, mother and daughter Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, who also choreographed “Sacred Earth,” dance with every fiber of their bodies, from the top down and to the tips of their fingers. Eyes dart, teeth flash, bells jangle at their ankles, feet and hands are tinted red to read all the more vividly.

They are pictures of grace and balance, centered and upright, but also supple in their movement. And they dance in harmony with, well “Sacred Earth,” revealed here through Tamil poetry, tribal Indian art and live music.

Bharatanatyam is traditionally a solo art, but in “Sacred Earth” the Ramaswamys artfully employ an ensemble—not just to echo and amplify the movements of soloists (the two of them plus Ashwini Ramaswamy and Tamara Nadel), but to mesmerize through unison movement and accumulation of gestures.

In the opening, the ensemble circles Ranee Ramaswamy, rice powder streaming from their outstretched hands as she crouches at their center, making a rice-powder design on the floor, an offering to Mother Earth. It would have been nice to see that pattern projected on the backdrop, but what is there instead—projections of chalked wall paintings commissioned from a Warli artist from western India, Anil Chaitya Vangad —seems the very incarnation of the dance’s theme of harmony between the elements of nature and all who inhabit it, human and animal.

Stick-figure humans spiral across the space in expanding arcs at the dance’s beginning. Trees of life spring up, monkeys climb them; rivers flow, fish swim; horses graze and are groomed; birds nest among grasses and whole villages materialize against smoke and mauve skies.

The dancers bring these pictures—and those of the poems, with their metaphors of love and nature—to life in narrative sections of the dance; the excellent musicians (Lalit Subramanian, Suchitra Sairam, Rajna Swaminathan and Anjna Swaminathan) contribute their voices with expressive melismatic singing, and with violin, tabla and cymbals. They follow and lead and call out the rhythms in the animated pure-dance sections that showcase the dancers’ technical skills.

Aparna Ramaswamy made a particularly strong impression with her vivacity and precision and musicality, but all the dancers—as befits a dance about harmony—worked together with a sort of luminous sympathy that was itself a meditation.

Star Tribune Review

1,001 Buddhas is a trip for the soul
Caroline Palmer, Star Tribune
March 25, 2013
Original article

The Sanjusangendo Temple is a marvel, a sight not to be missed in Kyoto, Japan. But if a trip halfway across the globe isn’t in your future, the next best thing can be found at Minneapolis’ Cowles Center this weekend. Ragamala Dance’s “1,001 Buddhas: Journey of the Gods” celebrates the famed landmark with a stunningly beautiful production created and choreographed by the mother-daughter team of Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy.

Inspired by the temple’s treasures, 1,001 Buddhist figures “guarded” by 28 Hindu deities, the artists made a work combining elements from their area of expertise — south Indian music and dance, specifically Bharatanatyam — with soul-stirring Taiko drumming performed by the impressive Wadaiko Ensemble Tokara of Nagano, Japan. The collaboration had its world premiere on Friday night before a rapt audience.

Relationships are important to this work. The first is among the Ragamala dancers (Amanda Dlouhy, Jessica Fiala, Tamara Nadel and Ashwini Ramaswamy, in addition to Ranee and Aparna). Their reverent movements evoke the gods and demons in Hindu traditions — from the gentlest to the most fearsome — accounting for every element of symbolic expression. Sisters Aparna and Ashwini are particularly divine in a lengthy duet, their eyes conveying different personalities from one moment to the next. They dance as if two halves of a single being.

Next is the coordination between the members of Wadaiko (Art Lee, Yukari Ichise, Dean Havixbeck and Takafumi Onozawa). They play their massive drums with masterful precision, proving that power and grace are compatible concepts. They are partnered with the soaring sounds of an Indian orchestra featuring Kalamandalam Unnikrishnan (Chenda drum), Rajna Swaminathan (Mridangam drum), Anjna Swaminathan (violin) with vocalist Lalit Subramanian, whose singing casts a spell. Prema Ramamurthy also contributed to the musical composition.

And finally there is Jeff Bartlett’s lush lighting, imbued with golds and reds. The dancers seem to flicker like flames.

All of these elements come together in a seemingly effortless manner to produce a singular and transformative work. “1,001 Buddhas” shifts the viewer’s relationship to space and time. Within just one hour it feels possible that we were spirited away to Sanjusangendo to witness its carved statues come to life, perhaps during the magical darkness of a late night. And then we return, forever changed by — and grateful for — the experience.