by Camille LeFevre
Minneapolis
StarTribune Staff Writer
October, 2001
For more than a decade, Ranee Ramaswamy has explored the similarities shared by her art form, the ancient south-Indian dance style bharatanat yam, and Western forms of dance and culture.
She's combined bharatanatyam's tales of Hindu deities with Catholic icons and choral music. She's used Indian dance to elucidate the poetry of Robert Bly. She's juxtaposed the form's percussive footwork and poetic gestures with tap and flamenco. Always the effect is remarkable.
Ramaswamy's latest endeavor is no exception. In "The Transposed Heads," she joins with Nicole Zapko, an American Sign Language (ASL) actor, to tell the tale of a woman who loves two men. The ancient Indian story inspired Thomas Mann's novella of the same name, on which Zaraawar Mistry based his lively, humorous script for this production.
Read aloud by Mistry and Carolyn Holbrook, the script provides the basis for Rama swamy and Zapko's interpretations using two different yet remarkably similar gestural languages. The cross-cultural production is further enhanced by singer Nirmala Rajasekhar and Chinese pipa player Gao Hong. What sounds like a jumble is an utterly captivating exploration of such universal dualities as life and death, beauty and knowledge, order and chaos, sacrifice and bliss.
Opposites eventually meet at their extremes, and so it is with bharatanatyam and ASL. Ramaswamy's refined, codified movements flow from her fingertips, which crook into temples or flutter like a breeze. Standing on one leg with arms joined overhead, she personifies the goddess Kali.
Eyes bright, she conveys emotions with subtle movements of her eyebrows, mouth and shoulders.
In contrast, Zapko's ASL gestures are large, demonstrative and vernacular. For example, when she rolls her hands over her arms to demonstrate one man's physique, even the hearing audience knows exactly what she means. Using every muscle in her face, body and hands, she boldly describes each event and emotion in the story, from lust, wooing and marriage to decapitation and rebirth, music and art.
When bharatanatyam and ASL meet -- in such gestures as the flames of the funeral pyre, the blossoming of a flower or the lapping of water -- we recognize that. Just as the two men in the story, with their transposed heads, are counterparts of each other, so are Ramaswamy and Zapko.
Never is this more apparent than in their portrayal of Kali, the goddess who embodies the dynamic unity of life's dualities. Zapko stands stern, aloof and impenetrable, while Ramaswamy shines with a beatific accessibility.
Given the show's wit, tremendous energy, profound expression and kinetic drama, it's difficult to imagine storytelling done in any other way.
