by Mike Steele
Minneapolis StarTribune
Staff Writer
May, 1999
In the 1920s and '30s, Uday Shankar took Indian dance out of the temples and put it in a Western theatrical setting, turning a distinctly Eastern dance into a Western craze.
So it makes sense that Ranee Ramaswamy and her Ragamala Music and Dance Theater should celebrate Shankar today. Since 1978, Ramaswamy has taken Indian Bharatanatyam dance and presented it to Twin Cities audiences in the context of Western theatrical dance and made it surprisingly popular.
For this concert, Ramaswamy and her daughter Aparna have created new dances, each of them built around titles from Shankar works taken from a 1932 program.
It turns out to be a light, lively and highly entertaining evening of dances, interspersed with musical selections played by sitarist-composer Shubhendra Rao and a crack Indian orchestra.
The program opens with a formal offering of thanks to the gods, but even this ritual begining has plety of verve. The gods, in Indian style,are soon brought down to human scale, where they play dancing roles.
"Radha Krishna" is a four scene charmer about the love of Radha, a milkmaid who loves Krishna and yearns for the divine. Aparna Ramaswamy as Radha not only dances with a silky, flowing virtuosity, now kittenish, now pining, but she also choreographed the dance. Kats Fukasawa as Krishna presents a stately, regal character in Ranee Ramaswamy's choreography.
It all leads to a final duet, choreographed by Aparna, which begins slowly and pensively, then gets faster and faster as they truly dance with and for each other, his strength contrasting with her lightness.
Ranee Ramaswamy takes center stage for "Ganga Puja", the most poetic work of the evening, danced to a verse praising the Ganges River, the goddess and lifeblood of the country. It's not a virtuoso technical dance, but a virtuoso interpretive one, and Ramaswamy is at her most subtle and expressive in a work such as this.
