What Ragamala Dance Company's New Show Says About Life and Death

Ranee Ramaswamy, along with her daughters, Aparna and Ashwini, are using Bharatanatyam, an ancient Hindu dance form, to help us understand modern life... and death.

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For a billion Hindus, the holy city of Varanasi, set on the banks of the Ganges River in northern India, is the ultimate bucket list destination. Literally. In fact, according to Ranee Ramaswamy, the co–artistic director of world-renowned Ragamala Dance Company, the best time to make your pilgrimage is while your bucket is actually being kicked.

“They say that when you die in Varanasi,” Ramaswamy explains during our visit to her south Minneapolis studio, “Hindus believe Shiva himself whispers a mantra in your ear.”

Sitting in the Ragamala studios/offices and talking about death and reincarnation with Ramaswamy and her two daughters—eldest Aparna is co–artistic director with her mom, and youngest Ashwini is choreographic associate as well as in-house PR and comms—isn’t nearly as much of a downer as you  might think. I mean, yes, the three of them are all wearing black blouses (Ranee is wearing hers with nutmeg-hued slacks; Aparna and Ashwini with blue jeans). And their new show, Fires of Varanasi, (which debuted at the Kennedy Center last September and will play Northrop for one night only on February 26), was inspired by the death of Ranee’s father and Aparna and Ashwini’s grandfather. And the dance is being presented in the context of a seemingly never-ending pandemic. But for Hindu believers, death is not the end. In fact, it’s one of the most beautifully meaningful parts of life.

Ranee actually made her own pilgrimage to Varanasi on a trip she took with her brother and her husband in 2014, a year before losing her father. She says seeing the funeral pyres burning on the steps, or ghats, leading down to the Ganges is some of the imagery she’s drawing on for the piece she’s dancing in with her daughters this winter.

“We all have this human fear about what happens when you die,” Ranee says. “What if you wake up? But seeing the bodies burning, seeing the pilgrims taking ashes into the Ganges, there is no question that those bodies are no longer in pain.”

“People drag themselves to Varanasi to engage with the river,” Aparna adds. “To feel cleansed and to be purified. To step closer to transcendence, to be closer to the sacred. This is the symbolism that we wanted to bring to this piece.”

“There is a better way of looking at death than you’re finished,” Ranee concludes. “The belief in reincarnation gives resilience to Hindu civilization. And as my mother always said, ‘Well, maybe in your next birth.’ Well, in my next birth I will tell my teacher that I want to be their student when I’m 5 years old.”

•••••

In this life, Ranee was 31 when she found her teacher, or guru, the Bharatanatyam legend Alarmél Valli. Ranee had grown up studying Bharatanatyam, a 2,000-year-old classical dance form that Hindus believe was given to them by the gods. From the age of 7 to 17, Ranee learned Bharatanatyam in her hometown of Chennai, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

A Bharatanatyam dance can be as beautiful as it is dense, as meaningful as it is technically demanding.

“Bharatanatyam is a stylized dance language,” Ranee says, “with 28 single-handed and 24 double-handed gestures.”

And just like, say, American Sign Language, each gesture in Bharatanatyam can be inflected by what the dancer is communicating with their eyes, face, or stance of the body. And with a tradition that draws on more than 2,000 years of history, language, and myth, a Bharatanatyam dance can be as beautiful as it is dense, as meaningful as it is technically demanding.

“It’s not like somebody can translate it word to word,” Ranee says. “But you can communicate whatever you want, as long as it’s convincing.”

Ranee stopped dancing for a while as she finished college, married, and had children. It wasn’t until immigrating to Minnesota in the late ’70s that she started engaging with this ancient art form again, first by teaching what she knew to members of the small Indian diaspora in the Twin Cities, including her own daughter, Aparna.

“When I came here, the community wanted me to dance, to teach,” she says. “And I didn’t have the basic information because I had forgotten.”

So, she started to travel back to her hometown in order to learn. But then in 1984, she finally met Valli, who she now refers to reverently as her guru.

“There is a saying in Hinduism,” Ranee says. “‘Mata, Pita, Guru, Daivam.’ Mother is the first step; she gives birth to you. Father is the second; he educates you. Guru is the teacher who actually shows you the way to transcendence, to reach the highest level, which is God.”

Valli had been brought to the University of Minnesota by a professor in the history department for a two-week residency. She is actually younger than Ranee, but at the age of 23, Valli was already one of the most famous classical Indian dancers in the world.

“A maestro,” Ashwini says. “Like a Pavarotti.”

“She was famous since she was a teenager,” Ranee says. “Very well-known all over Europe and India. And I had heard about her. I’d read about her, and she lived only three miles from the house I grew up in, but I had never seen her!”

Ranee took Aparna along with her to see Valli’s two-hour solo performance at the St. Paul Student Center auditorium. And the Ramaswamys instantly fell in love. Even now, when they talk about Valli, they all get that faraway look in their eye, more familiar on somebody talking about their new crush than somebody talking about a teacher.

“You see that, right?” Aparna says when I mention the look of admiring bliss in their eyes when they talk about their guru. “This country was founded by people who wanted to break away, to start something new. Americans are against this idea of following—but we’re a relatively new country. If you think of an ancient civilization like India, where there are so many layers of thought and belief, it becomes a much more nuanced and complicated relationship with your teachers and your gods and your families.”

She catches Valli’s photo staring at her from a shelf and suppresses a giggle.

“I feel like every time we have an interview, we should just bring her picture and put it here,” Aparna says. “The music flows through her. You can’t separate the music and the dance. We always say she’s like a diamond because she has everything: She has such truth to her performance, she’s so commanding, she has poetry. It’s a prayer. You can see the nuance, you can see the humanity, you can see the complete—” “—surrender,” Ashwini finishes.

Ranee says when she saw Valli for the first time, it changed her life.

“If it’s a religious guru and it’s a man or a human being—that doesn’t interest me because I have my God,” she says. “But it’s very rare to find your guru. You live in India, three miles away; you never see her. You come to Minneapolis, and she comes. It’s magic for us. It’s divine intervention.”

•••••

Both Aparna and Ashwini grew up within the Bharatanatyam tradition, but while Aparna never had a doubt about her path, dancing through her time as a student at Carleton and eventually becoming co–artistic director with her mom, Ashwini took a more circuitous path back to the family business.

“When you’re a kid, you don’t remember everything super clearly,” Ashwini says about her older sister, “but one thing I know was that Aparna was going to dance.” 

“Growing up, Ashwini was always dancing,” Aparna remembers. “She was talented, but she didn’t take it as seriously, and I just didn’t understand how a person couldn’t do that. We were very different. We are very different.”

“It was one of those things,” Ashwini says, “that if your family is doing something from the time you were born, basically, you’re kind of, like, ‘Well, am I doing this because I want to or because they want me to?’ So, it’s nice to be like, ‘No, I do want it.’”

“And then to see her commitment deepen over these last 15 years, and—I mean, she’s become a more serious artist and become more involved in the work,” Aparna says. “So, it’s been amazing. The fact that we have this partnership is very rare. We’re very fortunate to have that.”

In addition to the dancing and choreography work, all three of them serve as teachers to their own students, usually starting at 7 years of age. The connection to their own teacher remains as indispensable as ever—the Ramaswamys still regularly communicate with Valli on WhatsApp about every possible aspect of their practice.

“We used to travel to India to see her twice a year,” Ashwini says. “But we haven’t been in two years because of COVID.”

Aparna says after more than three decades, their relationship to their guru still feels vital.

“The fact that we have this partnership is very rare. We’re very fortunate.”

Aparna Ramaswamy on her sister, Ashwini

“The way she intellectualizes all the different layers and how, after all of this time, she’s still deep in it,” Aparna says. “She’s growing as an artist, and that’s so inspiring for us.”

“People ask us, ‘It’s, like, 30 years or 40 years; what do you still have to learn?’” Ranee says. “But every time we go here”—Ranee raises her hand, before raising the other one just above it—“she’s here.”

•••••

Both Ranee and Aparna say that Fires of Varanasi is the company’s most ambitious performance yet. With 11 dancers, growing from five to seven company dancers and augmented with a few ringers, including, for the first time in recent years, two men, the cast is Ragamala’s largest in many years. Aparna says that the scale of this work is the latest outgrowth of the evolving way Ragamala has always approached their favorite 2,000-plus-year-old art form.

“Bharatanatyam itself is a solo art form that is meant to be performed in an intimate setting,” she says. “We usually have no set, and we usually don’t interact, but in this piece we had the idea of interacting with the water.”

In addition to the ambition of the set and the expanded cast, the major complicating factor for Fires was COVID. When the pandemic hit, they had just flown in several classical musicians from India.

“Everything stopped, and they got here within a week,” Ashwini says.

“They said they had to leave; otherwise, they would’ve been stuck here for months,” Ranee adds.

So, like every other creative in the world, everybody was forced to collaborate over Zoom. It wasn’t until the summer that they started moving dance rehearsals outside to city parks.

“I think what COVID did for us was it gave us more time,” Aparna says. “More time to imagine and imagine and imagine.”

And because Bharatanatyam shares principles of yogic posture and alignment, it actually promotes health and longevity, unlike some of its Western counterparts. In fact, Ashwini says, COVID gave each of them more time to devote to their individual practices.

“And my mom has improved her dance immensely in the last two years because she had a lot of time during COVID to mind her depth and figure things out,” says Ashwini.

This deepened practice is evident in the work—despite the joyful virtuosity of her two daughters, Ranee’s solos in Fires of Varanasi function as the soul of the entire piece.

They kept expanding the idea of Varanasi as a symbol for the eternally recurring cycle of life to death back to life again and how those stories are constantly shared through the repetition of stories of nature and myth.

“The city has all of these iconic aspects to it that we touch on as we progress through the piece,” Aparna says. “But it’s not a travelogue. The city is a symbol for Hindu belief and belief that is based in these myths.” Aparna says their dance will hopefully get their audience to consider the death rituals that we all participate in, all of us hoping to send off loved ones to a good death, making sure they’re cared for as they pass on to the next station. “So, there’s a beauty in the cycle in all of this. The idea is that each of the gods in the pantheon have these very important roles in the creation and the destruction of the world and its renewal.”

Shiva, for instance, is known as the first dancer, whose dancing brings about the creation and the destruction and the regeneration of the world. There is symbolism in his cycle.

“The river is important; the fire is important,” Ranee says. “Our bodies are made out of five elements, and we go back to the five elements, and then we come back again. So, it’s a constant renewal story of removing the darkness and coming back to life. We come from nature; we go to nature.”

“But all of this is to say that different traditions have their own sets of beliefs and their own ways to feel resilience and their own rituals,” Aparna says. “And that’s what we’re shining a light on: the fact that these are our stories and that, hopefully, our stories are a way for everyone to think about their own stories and their own families and where they come from.”

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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