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.

Before studying with Valli, however, Ramaswamy had already begun to create her own dances, out of necessity, not ambition: “I came here [to America], I didn’t have anything, so I was forced to create. That’s it: I either create or I don’t do anything.” She started building momentum, but it was her mother—who, like Ramaswamy, had loved dance as a girl—who encouraged Ramaswamy to truly pursue the dancing life she’d begun and become an artist. “For her, freedom was the most important thing in life,” says Ramaswamy. Her mother had very little freedom, she says, and wanted more for her daughter.

And so began Ramaswamy’s unlikely career. She learned, performed, and taught, founded Ragamala in 1992, and has never looked back. Having discovered her vocation so late in life, especially for a dancer/ choreographer, Ramaswamy says she believes her life has started over: “I feel younger now than I felt when I was twenty-six.” She feels lucky too. “It’s so amazing to think—what lies ahead in the future, no one ever knows.”

Ragamala practices traditional bharatanatyam in Alarmel Valli’s distinctive precise style, but draws on a variety of artistic influences for her own work. She loves the traditional style, but thinks American audiences need an access point to appreciate bharatanatyam—access that her cross-cultural inspirations and collaborations allow. “If I stick to my own old style,” she says, “and say this is what I am going to do and I’m not going to change, I will have it and nobody else will have it.” Bharatan-atyam’s purpose is to move the audience, but American audiences don’t know the traditional stories and can’t understand the traditional singing, she says, “so we have to try all other ways of moving the audience—by making new pieces, by making interesting pieces.”

The strategy has worked. Walker Art Center performing arts curator Philip Bither confesses that when he first saw Ragamala he came to the show with low expectations, thinking Ragamala’s fusion wouldn’t work. Instead, he says, he was “charmed and impressed by how something so unlikely on paper was done with such sensitivity and passion and excellence.”

“Sethu,” a 2004 Walker commission and Ragamala’s most ambitious collaboration to date, combined bharatanatyam with Balinese vocal and ganelon music to tell stories from the epic Ramayana. Nearly 6,000 people came to see it in the sculpture garden—and, says Bither, “it continues to be a highlight in my years here.” Ragamala’s ambitious but carefully realized collaborations have resulted in the company becoming increasingly known “in national circles as an innovative and important company,” Bither says.

Ramaswamy attributes Ragamala’s success to Valli’s superlative technique and to education. So much Indian dance in the United States is practiced simply as a cultural tradition, not as an art form, that a lot of mediocre bharatanatyam makes it to U.S. stages, leaving audiences and presenters thinking, as Ramaswamy puts it, “Oh, is this Indian dance? It doesn’t move me.” But Valli has given Ragamala knife-sharp technique, and Ramaswamy has dedicated herself to making her company as professionally polished as any top ballet or modern dance company. Bharatanatyam is a “fantastic dance form,” she says. “It has everything. But it has to be done well in order to be noticed. So now people are noticing us.”

Ramaswamy rarely mentions herself when she talks about Ragamala. She has no false modesty, but tends to take herself for granted, an attitude those who’ve worked with her can’t share. Bither credits her focus: “She’s a fierce and absolutely dedicated creator. She doesn’t let ‘no’ stop her.” Also, he says, “She’s got unique abilities as a collaborator.”

Two of Ramaswamy’s collaborators are her own children—her older daughter, Aparna, coartistic director of Ragamala with her mother and principal dancer, and her younger daughter Ashwini, a company member. Both are in awe of their mother. “Anything she wants to do, she can do it,” Ashwini says. “She has incredible vision,” Aparna adds. And her deep sincerity, the sisters say, may be her greatest strength. “As a performer, she has incredible soul and honesty,” Aparna says. “The depth in her eyes, the soul in her eyes, no one else has that. That shine in her eyes—that is who she is. And everyone sees it. And that’s what you see when she dances and that’s what you see when she creates.”

Now in her fifties, Ramaswamy says she will “eventually” begin to think about retiring from the stage. “I can dance for another couple of years—three years, maybe four years, maybe five—as long as the audience can put up with me,” she laughs. More seriously, she adds, “It’s so wonderful to dance. But one part of me feels a little old.”

What she’s feeling doesn’t show yet—she’s still sharp and quick. Besides, there’s a traditional tale that aptly describes what it is to be a bharatanatyam dancer. In Hindu belief, souls are reincarnated, beginning life again and again until they attain enlightenment, but a dancer goes through so many emotions in a concert that each concert is the equivalent of a lifetime. A dancer performs so many concerts that “you have lived many, many lifetimes,” Ramaswamy says, and “you don’t have to be—you will not be born again.”

The high-caste but ordinary life Ramaswamy was born to would be just one link in a long chain of rebirths, but Ramaswamy has changed her destiny (and her daughters’) by pursuing art. There’s something remarkably present-tense about this creator in an ancient dance tradition: Each step, each word, each dance is a vivid now never to be recovered.

She smiles mischievously and says, “I used to tell people: ‘So, you can see me now—you’re never going to see me again.’ ” All the more reason to celebrate Ragamala’s fifteenth anniversary this month at the Southern.