By CAMILLE LEFEVRE, Special to the Star Tribune

After a year and a half of touring, the Minneapolis-based Ragamala Music and Dance Theater has returned with a dazzling concert that displays the troupe's visual, aural and kinesthetic poetry. In a dynamic program of three world premieres, created by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, the troupe of seven women dancers demonstrates its dedication to preserving the south Indian classical dance form. The company also ventures into yet another cross-cultural collaboration -- an innovation pioneered by founder Ranee Ramaswamy -- that confirms the ancient temple dance's ability to retain, even through hybridization, its essential form.

If ever there was doubt about Ramaswamy, who founded the company in 1992, passing the torch to her daughter, Aparna, the latter's solo "Ardhanareeshwara Stotram" banished it. Resplendent in silks and jewels, Aparna commands the stage with her gestural illustration of Shakti and Shiva's sacred characteristics.

She encircles her arms with bangles or writhing snakes. Her articulate hands, with fingertips hennaed, open like lotus blossoms, rain down kindness or flare like a crown above her head. A single foot stomp plants a sculptural pose. Embedded in her forceful gestures and facial features is a clarity of expressiveness that dissolves into a divine sensuality at the solo's close.

In the group work "Yathra (Journey)," Ranee's softly executed gestures soothingly caress the space in which the younger dancers lunge, spiral, slice and thrust their bodies. As the text of one section states, "They dance, they leap, undone by feeling," and indeed the dancers do -- Tamara Nadel is particularly exultant -- as the musicians Shubhendra Rao (sitar) and Saskia Rao de-Haas (Indian cello) perform on one side of the stage.

After a highly choreographed display of rhythmic athleticism by the Taiko drum group Wadaiko Ensemble Tokara, the concert closes with "Sva (Vital Force)." A key phrase in the text that inspired this work is "the essence of water." Amid the thundering drums, the dancers' slapping feet sound like sheets of rain and their arms in unison shoot through the air like lightning.

The dancers leap lightly amid the heavy, earth-bound drumming, as the work tips precariously toward aural overload. But it's saved -- just barely -- by the muscular dancing of the lithe yet vigorous troupe.

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.
StarTribune.com Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

City Pages Online, May 1, 2008

Vital Force: Caroline Palmer reviews the Southern's latest
Review by Caroline Palmer

Where does “vital force” come from? Is it the relentless pull of gravity, the dangerous whims of nature, or a stubborn interior motivation? In the case of “Sva (Vital Force),” a collaborative work by local Bharatanatyam troupe Ragamala Music and Dance Theatre and Japan’s Wadaiko Ensemble TOKARA, opening tonight at the Southern Theater, it’s all about the energy created by percussive performance drawn from distinct sources. Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the mother and daughter artistic directors of Ragamala, are no strangers to cross-cultural match-ups but this latest experiment shows just how adept they are at finding commonality without compromising the true essence of either form.

During a dress rehearsal on Wednesday night the drummers warmed up the stage with fiery precision percussion. Harumi Tamaoki played with flair, shouting out encouragements and rolling her body with the beat while Matt Steitle twirled his sticks and coolly kept the tempo. Leader Art Lee moved so quickly that his arms became a blur. They moved upstage to make room for the dancers but their presence remained strong, especially when the signature big drum was struck. It would have been easy for the seven women of Ragamala to surrender to such a “vital force” but instead they created their own, calmly responding with their own intricate physical gestures and foot stamps, at times ably matching or even attacking the drummers’ rhythms, at others offering complex contrasts. It was a memorable exhibition of virtuosity and concentration on the part of all involved.

Bharatanatyam is one of the oldest dance traditions in India with a history spanning 2,000 years. Music and dance are central to the form but poetry, sculpture and literature also play influential roles. The first half of the Ragamala concert showcases these elements through classical works and in “Ardhanareeshwara Stotram,” Aparna Ramaswamy performs a creation story focused on the interplay between the divine feminine, Shakti, and the divine masculine, Shiva. Every part of her body is engaged, from her eyes to her fingertips, and as she seamlessly moves through pensive to aggressive states, she summons up the ancient duality. Ramaswamy’s interpretation is so confident that her performances always seem effortless but she has been studying the Pandanallur style since an early age and her skill is the result of years of training.

“Yathra” reveals another fine musical experience, this time from sitar player Shubhendra Rho and Indian cellist Saskia Rao de-Haas. Their dynamic live performance drives a group piece illustrating the human journey from birth to the twilight years. As the younger dancers leap through the space, Ranee Ramaswamy offers a subtle counterpoint, using her maturity to show a different side of Bharatanatyam. Her approach is less athletic and emphatic; the edges are smoothed out and her gestures flow with serenity and depth of experience. It is this sort of adaptability that drives the Ragamala spirit of invention and collaboration on display this weekend at the Southern.

-- Caroline Palmer

May 2, 2008 Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine

5.1.08: Ragamala’s "Sva (Vital Force)" at the Southern Theater

By: Lightsey Darst

Ragamala’s Minneapolis concert marking the company’s fifteenth season opens with “Ardhanareeshwara Stotram,” a dance of the dual creation divinity, Shakti/Shiva. A statuette in a delicately curved posture, draped in colorful silk and adorned with gold bangles and flowers in her hair, Aparna Ramaswamy also shows a coiled, grounded strength in her stamping feet and flashing eyes. The dance follows a hymn, showing Shakti’s bracelets in one line and Shiva’s live snake jewelry in the next, Shakti’s mercy and Shiva’s dreaded power. Ramaswamy is alternately rose and diamond; the weaving, playfully darting dance of her head and eyes contrasts with her sudden jumps and lunges.

Classical dances (such as Native American fancy dance or ballet), if not ossified, embody a culture’s ideas of beauty and divinity. Watching this new creation in the classical Indian tradition of bharatanatyam, choreographed by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy (mother and daughter cofounders of Ragamala), it’s hard not to wonder how differently Western history might have turned out if we had imagined our gods this way, or dared to represent them in the body of a young woman dancing (Western classical dances show royal couples or noble abstractions rather than gods). But while the classical ideals of other cultures might have immediate appeal, only deep education can bring us inside those ideals, showing us their roots and their dark side. So we might envy bharatanatyam’s curvy, swaybacked stance, so different from ballet’s ramrod uprightness, or covet the dancers’ bright clothes and red-painted feet, but it’s hard to know the meaning or true cost of those items.

The Ramaswamys aren’t primarily interested in showing the dance of another place and time, though. Their work is firmly grounded in Indian classical tradition, but the result could be called American contemporary dance in the truest sense—dance of the multicultural America, the meeting-ground America. This is best seen in the other two pieces in the concert. Here we see Ragamala’s trademark crosscultural collaborations—sometimes unlikely combinations that turn out, under the Ramaswamys’ intelligent guidance, to have deep sympathies. “Yathra (Journey)” joins bharatanatyam with Indian music played by a sitar and cello duo, with projected motion drawings by Terry Rosenberg in the background.

Along with fusion, kaleidoscopic complexity of composition is another contemporary element in Ragamala’s dance. Dancers come in from all corners of the stage, meeting and joining in a unity splintered by a new dancer’s sharp entrance. The part speaks for the whole: a brief frieze of women with longing hands stands in for a history of grief. “Yathra” is a quietly moving, beautifully oblique piece, one that any American audience can grasp intuitively.

“Sva (Vital Force)" yields an even more immediate connection. Here, Ragamala’s stellar dancers perform alongside the Tokara Wadaiko Ensemble. Japan’s Taiko drumming does not partake of the tradition of drummers as crazy guys who lurk in the corner: this is unapologetically buff, bare-arm, samurai drumming, played on big drums whose hits reverberate in all the empty spaces of the body (my heart is still echoing). And here, Ragamala joins bharatanatyam’s classical style to a certain modern force. I’m not sure what to call it—democracy? women’s rights? freedom under the law?—but whatever it is, it had opening night’s sold-out crowd straining forward. It’s not that bharatanatyam alone needs this modernity—more that any classical dance needs this modernity to reach today’s American audience. Ragamala shows a way into the twenty-first century for all classical forms. The thrill that the dancers feel in their own strength and grace rolls across the audience; their happy and powerful beauty is one we understand and aspire to.

This concert’s vital choreography, skilled collaborators, and outstanding dancing all make it easy to see why Ragamala’s been on national and international tours for the past eighteen months, and why they’re booked well into next year. It’s also a reminder of how lucky we are to have Ragamala here in the Twin Cities.

Sva (Vital Force) continues at the Southern Theater through May 4.