Passage from India

Outside, it’s a muddy February afternoon, dirty and cold. But inside Ragamala Music and Dance Theater’s Uptown studio, it’s India. Ragamala is a Minneapolis–based dance company dedicated to bharatanatyam, an ancient Indian dance with 2,000 years of tradition behind it.

To watch Ragamala is to see temple statues come to life: The curves, mysterious smiles, flexed and grounded feet, precise and prickly hand gestures like bird of paradise flowers—all are there. But animated, these temple figures are powerful, their feet stamping with surprising force, movements rapid as martial arts. These dancers are goddesses, not nymphs. And they smile: not carved grins or coy Bollywood simpers, but real and individual smiles as each dancer finds her own happiness in this intensely spiritual dance.

They’re rehearsing for this month’s concert at the Southern Theater, a concert that marks Ragamala’s fifteenth season. Perhaps the thought of that achievement animates the smile of Ragamala’s founder, Ranee Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy is a small woman with a vibrant personality, in many ways opposite of the Western stereotype of the reserved Indian woman. Her hair is cropped in a curly halo and she’s dressed casually. She speaks and moves quickly, her words and half-dancing gestures coming out in rapid bursts. She has a youthful, even girlish charm, but her untraditional demeanor is just one side of a nature in which tradition and innovation thrive together.

This month’s concert, Sva, is an evening of smaller works, including the title work, a twenty-minute piece set to thunderous tokara drumming. Traditional bharatanatyam divides between dances in which gestures and expressions carry the meaning of a song’s words and rhythmic dances with purely decorative gestures and expressions. “Sva” is somewhere in between—rhythmic, but with an emotional arc. The Japanese tokara drumming, too, is nontraditional. Such innovations will make “Sva” approachable, but what will truly wow American audiences is Ragamala’s signature precision and complexity—brilliant dancing, woven in complex rhythms and floor patterns.

Cultural fusion and fierce dancing have made Ragamala one of the most successful dance companies in the Twin Cities. Ramaswamy’s success is even more remarkable when you consider that she was never meant to be a dancer or a choreographer. She grew up in India—the only daughter of a high-caste family—destined for an arranged marriage and a life as wife, homemaker, and mother. To that end, she learned desirable accomplishments, including bharatanatyam. She did not study the dancing seriously, she says, but she did enjoy it. “If the teacher taught everybody two steps, I would learn eight,” she says. “I totally, totally was in love with it.”

But pursuing it was never an option. “You’ll never dance!” was her caste’s attitude toward professional dance, she explains. So she stopped dancing at seventeen, married, then immigrated to America with her husband without a thought of what this new country might mean for her own life.

In Minneapolis, Ramaswamy began to teach and perform within the then-small Indian community as a way of helping them maintain their culture. Then a momentous event propelled her forward: She saw famed bha-ratanatyam dancer Alarmel Valli perform. Before witnessing this dancer’s glittering technique, Ramaswamy hadn’t known there was anything wrong with her own substandard training. “As they say, if you are in a puddle, you think that’s deep, but you have to know what the ocean is”—and Valli was (and remains) Ramaswamy’s ocean.

“This is dance. I have to learn from this woman,” Ramaswamy remembers thinking. And although she was then already thirty, “an old woman,” learn she did—along with Aparna, her young daughter. Thereafter, she and Aparna began returning to India every year to study with Valli.