Dance of Devotion

Ragamala Music and Dance Theater takes up residence at the State Theatre.

By: Matt Smith

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Ranee


Ramaswamy brings Ragamala Music and Dance Theater to New Brunswick as the
annual Bristol-Myers Squibb Artist-in-Residence. The company will offer
a free public performance at the State Theatre on May 22. 


   Ranee Ramaswamy is an accomplished performer and artistic director
of Ragamala Music and Dance Theater, an acclaimed Minnesota- based troupe known
for melding Indian classical dance with Western ideas. Before leaving India for
the United States in the late 1970s, Ms. Ramaswamy was required to give up a dancer’s
life for a domestic one — a victim of that country’s strict caste system.
   "When I grew up in India, I was not actually groomed to be a
professional or even take up dance as a profession," she says by phone from Minneapolis,
"but I learned it as a hobby, something every girl does. I got married when I
was young and didn’t dance after age 17 because in India, in families like ours,
you just learn it until you get married.
   "Because I came to the United States, and because I came to
Minneapolis and the Indian community had no dance instructor, I started all over.
It was like a rebirth. I never would have danced if I was in India."
   As a girl, Ms. Ramaswamy learned the Tanjore style of Indian
dance, one of the five regional variations of the 2,000-year-old art form. When
she arrived in this country at age 26, Ms. Ramaswamy began teaching Tanjore to
her young daughter, Aparna. Both mother and daughter switched to the ancient Bharatanatyam
style a few years later, after attending a workshop at the University of Minnesota
taught by renowned dancer Alarmel Valli.
   "She came to Minneapolis when my daughter was 8 years old, and
the two of us began going to India to study with her," says Ms. Ramaswamy of Ms.
Valli, a master of the Pandanallur variation of Bharatanatyam. "Her style was
so unique, and so different from all the years of learning I had to do, that I
started all over again from ABC. So, an 8-year-old and a 31-year-old were dancing
together. It was like going to kindergarten."
   Aparna Ramaswamy is now associate artistic director of Ragamala,
and a master dancer as well. She is also choreographing the piece Bakti (Devotion),
part of the company’s performance at the State Theatre in New Brunswick May
22, the culmination of Ragamala’s two-week stay as Bristol-Myers Squibb Artist-in-Residence.

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A


dancer with Ragamala. 


   The elder Ms. Ramaswamy, whose younger daughter Ashwini is a
part-time Ragamala dancer, formed the troupe in 1992 with composer/sitarist David
Whetstone. At the time, she was weary of performing a classical Indian repertoire
that was often lost on non-Indians — and Indians who speak another of that
country’s 15 major languages and 3,000 dialects. Ms. Ramaswamy says her first
East-West collaboration grew out of a fortunate encounter with a work by author
and poet Robert Bly.
   "One day I saw a student of mine holding a book of poems, his
translations of Mirabai, an Indian saint-poet from the 16th century," she says.
"In India, Mirabai was a saint, a religious figure. In Robert Bly’s eyes she was
a very strong woman who stood for what she believed in. When I read these poems
I was so moved.
   "A friend of mine said, ‘Well, you should just call up Robert
Bly and ask him if he would read for you.’ I thought I should dance to the readings
in English, which I had never done before, but I didn’t know who Robert Bly was.
If I had known that he was such a popular, famous person, I would have been so
afraid to call him. I looked at the telephone directory, called him, and said,
‘I would like to do these poems, would you read them for me?’ and he said ‘yes’
right away."
   The collaboration, Mirabai Versions, was even more daring
because Mr. Bly asked to include two North Indian instruments completely foreign
to South Indian forms such as Bharatanatyam — the sitar and tabla.
   "It was a daring departure," Ms. Ramaswamy says. "I was afraid
at first, but it was so amazing. Robert read and I danced to his poems, and it
was the first time a lot of non-Indians came to see one of my performances."
   In addition to building Ragamala’s audience and setting her
down the path to collaborations with opera singers, African dancers and Chinese
musicians, working with Mr. Whetstone (who has since departed the company) gave
Ms. Ramaswamy the ability to further question artistic traditions.
   "As an Indian person, I never questioned tradition," she notes.
"When someone would say, ‘This has to be done a certain way,’ you always did it,
you didn’t say, ‘Why?’ I was working with somebody who was always taught to say
‘Why?’ I began to think about things and say, ‘Why not?’ And then my head would
start to work and think of five different ways of doing something."
   Ragamala will open the State Theatre performance with two traditional
pieces, Bho Shambho and Thillana, and then dance Bakti (Devotion),
which features six Ragamala dancers and five guest musicians. It illuminates
the work of two other saint-poets — Andal of 8th-century India and Hildegard
von Bingen, an 11th-century German composer, abbess, mystic and writer. Both women
used poetry and music as a medium of communication between the masses and the
divine, a common theme of Indian classical dance.
   "There’s a lot of divinity in the art form," Ms. Ramaswamy says.
"It’s not just dance that was created for movement — it has so much spirituality
because most of the stories that were told were from Hindu mythology."
   Other Indian dance companies experiment with traditional forms,
but often incorporate Indian martial arts, trading the expressive gestures of
classical forms for cold, blank expressions akin to some Western modern dance.
Ragamala is one of the few that keeps the spiritual and emotional core intact,
Ms. Ramaswamy contends.
   "When people come to see us there is a difference in feeling,"
she says. "They don’t go away with emptiness, or just having seen how fantastic
the body movement is, they go away with an amazing amount of spiritual feeling.
And it’s not because of the songs alone — it’s because the dancers show it
in every part of their face and body. That’s what a Bharatanatyam dancer is supposed
to do, emote what they feel to the audience. Only then is their work done."
Ragamala Music and Dance Theater concludes a two-week residency at the State
Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, with a performance May 22, 7 p.m.
Free admission, but tickets are required. For information, call (732) 246-7469.
On the Web: www.statetheatrenj.org.
Ragamala on the Web: www.ragamala.net