The New Mexican - Review: Poetry in Motion

Poetry in motion

Michael Wade Simpson | For The New Mexican

Mar 31, 2023

To spend an evening watching Bharatanatyam, a 2,000-year-old storytelling dance of southern India, is to become captivated by the choreography of the eyes, palms painted blood-red, ankle bells, sudden deep squats, stylized pantomime gestures, and twirling fingers. The glimmering costumes become part of the show, with the bejeweled tunics atop loose pants with overskirts.

“Bharatanatyam is so popular right now,” says Ranee Ramaswamy, founder of and co-artistic director and choreographer for Ragamala Dance Company, which is bringing an evening-length Bharatanatyam piece, Sacred Earth, to the Lensic for an afternoon performance on Sunday, April 2. “In the [Indian] cities, girls are flocking to classes. They like the dress, the cultural knowledge. But it is like ballet classes here — many girls study ballet; very few become professionals.”

Ramaswamy founded the Ragamala Dance Company in 1992 in Minneapolis. “My ex-husband was an engineer. ... We came here from India in 1978. We planned to stay for five years, but I started a dance company, raised two kids, and got Americanized,” she says. “It’s been 43 years. We used to go back to study with our teacher for four months every year. We still go back to India often.”

When her oldest daughter, Aparna, was eight, they attended a performance by Alarmel Valli, a visiting artist at a nearby college who was from the Indian city of Chennai (formerly known as Madras). Ramaswamy quickly signed them both up for classes during Valli’s two-week residency. “She is the most exquisite, amazing dancer that lives.”

“She could see my daughter had talent,” Ramaswamy says. “I asked her if we could both come to India to study with her. I was already teaching. The only way she would agree to teach me would be for me to agree to start all over again — from the beginning. And so I did.”
The younger Ramaswamy is now the company’s co-artistic director, choreographer, and principal dancer. Another daughter, Ashwini Ramaswamy, danced with the company before heading off to college. After a few years working in publishing in New York, she returned to Minneapolis.

“Dance pulled her back,” says Ramaswamy. Ashwini now works as a choreography associate, dancer, and communications director. “We’ve all been dancing together since 1983,” Ramaswamy adds.

Classical Indian dance is usually a solo form, accompanied by musicians. Ragamala offers a theatricalized version of Bharatanatyam. The productions include scenery, lighting, and sound design, a cast of six dancers, and a small group of musicians. Sacred Earth uses ancient poetry, Ramaswamy says, “from the fifth century BCE to the third century CE, when nature was God.”

“The poems are like haikus, short, just four lines. We elaborate on their themes,” she says. “One is about a woman who enjoys the rainy season. When the man who said he would be with her leaves, she thinks about elephants who rest on rocks, and the vines underneath them, which get destroyed.”

Although most poems describe love lost, one from the production is a hymn to love that endures:

What could my mother be / to yours? What kin is my father / to yours anyway? And how / did you and I meet ever? / But in love our hearts are as red / Earth and pouring rain: / mingled / beyond parting.

— “Cempulappeyanirar, Kurunthokai 40,” Sangam era (300 BCE to 300 CE)

“We picked love poems because love brings out all the other’s emotions,” she says. “When you are in love, you are sometimes sad or angry. We elaborate the poems. We add peacocks and weather. Sacred Earth.”

In an earlier solo, Aparna dances about the Ganges River. A recent review from The New York Timesdescribed her performance as embodying the river, “now to indicate it, now to worship it; and the forms of expression alternated between detailed mime gestures to the kinds of pure dance that seem as abstract and as impersonal as a human being can ever achieve. The dancer seems continually to move between different kinds of being and of thought, and the Western observer is aware of many layers of mystery.”

Visual elements are also part of the theatricalization Ragamala brings to its version of Bharatanatyam. For Sacred Earth, they include kolam floor drawings, which the Ragamala program notes describe: “Each morning, women in southeastern India undertake the silent ritual of kolam, making rice flour designs on the ground as mindful offerings to Mother Earth. This daily ritual creates a sacred space and becomes a link between the intimate home and the vastness of the outside world. In our family, the tradition of kolam has been passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter for generations.”

Another visual element is the Warli wall drawings enlarged for the production to serve as backdrops. The program explains that the “Adiwashi (Indigenous) Warli people of western India revere the land and live in perfect and intentional coexistence with nature. Using their everyday lives as inspiration, their dynamic wall paintings find the spiritual in the everyday. Master Warli artist Anil Chaitya Vangad (of Ganjad Village, India) spent six weeks in residence with Ragamala, creating large-scale original paintings as we simultaneously built the choreography — working in constant and dynamic conversation between visual art and movement.”

Ramaswamy says Vangad will be one of the artists at this year’s International Folk Art Market. One of his drawings hangs in her Minneapolis living room.

“In the Hindu tradition, the earth is overseen by the Goddess Lakshmi. We need to pay her homage,” Ramaswamy says. “We need to be careful. We respect the earth in order for the earth to give back to us.”

After decades of teaching and performing, Ramaswamy, at 73, is backing away from the physical demands of Bharatanatyam dance and sticking to the storytelling.

“It takes tremendous strength to do the dance, but it is the faces and the facial expressions which communicate feelings of exuberance and joy. I found the depth of expression during COVID,” she says. “One-and-a-half years of solitude. I realized I no longer needed to do the physical dance. I want to do the emotional dance. Now I work on the most complex expressive movements with my face, my fingers, my eyes.”