Passage from India

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.”