Ashwini Ramaswamy has dancing in her blood. Much of her extensive training in the South Indian classical form of Bharatanatyam took place under her mother, Ranee Ramaswamy, and her sister, Aparna, the artistic directors of the respected Ragamala Dance Company in Minneapolis. But don’t most of us need a touch of rebellion to grow? Or at least a touch of daring?
In her magnetic “Let the Crows Come,” Ramaswamy achieves something of both, with one foot in the present and the other in tradition. For this full-length piece at the Baryshnikov Arts Center — opening two years after its scheduled New York premiere — she’s taken a Bharatanatyam solo and placed it on three bodies to discover how she’s been shaped by two worlds: India and the United States.
Most important are the different ways in which these agencies have been trained: The work characterizes Ramaswamy; Alanna Morris, whose background is in modern dance and Afro-Caribbean traditions; and Berit Ahlgren, who specializes in Gaga, the movement language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. (All three are credited as choreographers of the work.) Ramaswamy is a unique dancer, but they all are — the power that is Morris is breathtaking.
The source is Ramaswamy – alive and glittering in her sculptural poses, her exacting footwork and her fluttering, bird-like fingers and hands that partially illustrate the crow’s role in connecting the living with the dead. After dancing alone and then briefly joined by Ahlgren and Morris, she ends her opening solo alone. The same structure is repeated with the other two, knitting the piece together with simple eloquence.
Even as the dancers brought each other’s arms and feet together and echoed, their interpretations were sometimes wildly—and certainly stylistically—different. Yet they were all able to hold the stage with the same intensity, as if they were dancing ghosts, one overshadowing the other. And the music was just as important. For her experiment, Ramaswamy was drawn to how a DJ remixes a song. How does a piece of music, or a dance solo, change and shift to reveal different facets over time? And how can that honor different generations?
Jace Clayton, known as DJ Rupture, and Brent Arnold use a Carnatic score by Prema Ramamurthy as a starting point for their composition. Joined by Rohan Krishnamurthy, Arun Ramamurthy and Roopa Mahadevan – whose rousing voice seemed to lead Ramaswamy’s lithe feet along an invisible cord of sound – they created a sonic world that, like dance, plunges into the past and the present.
Through the interpretations of Ahlgren and Morris, Bharatanatyam’s choreography creates an undulating pattern of sensations. Ahlgren is eloquent yet dreamily pliable, as if she had learned Bharatanatyam while floating through the water; all the while, her arms carve and bend almost emphatically as she holds shapes and her torso undulates, pausing when necessary to provide emphasis.
And Morris, taking advantage of Ramaswamy’s detailed use of the face with her own cheery smile and glowing eyes, finds her way to Bharatanatyam as she darts across the stage, sinking into big juicy pliés as she stretches her arms for days. She is eloquent and yet free in her body; as you whirl to the floor and get back up, you feel that her cascading sense of momentum, for all her grounded glory, also has a weightlessness to it.
When Ramaswamy is like a living sculpture and Ahlgren is further away, translucent and of the sky, Morris ties them together, surfing a peak of feeling as if he were reading the history of hair ancestors. It makes sense: Ramaswamy’s title is inspired by a Hindu tradition of offering rice. If a crow comes and eats the rice, it means your ancestors are healthy – they have ascended.
All evening a large bowl of rice stood at the front of the stage. In its final moments the three dancers surrounded it; with open palms, they all gathered as much as they could before letting it rain through their fingers as they stood under a narrow spotlight.
Did you know something like this was coming? Secure. But it kept arresting. Finally, the dancers, who had moved in separate realms, joined forces as if the threads of Ramaswamy’s imagination had united and blossomed, making room not only for more generations, but more ways of thinking. The crows came.
Let the crows come
Until April 15 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan; bacnyc.org.