Observer: India Week’s Dance Performances Explore Connection, the Self and the Sacred

By Caedra Scott-Flaherty
July 9, 2024

Summer is here, and so is Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival, jam-packed with its hundreds of free and choose-what-you-pay events happening throughout its sixteen-acre Upper West Side campus. One of the 2024 festival highlights is sure to be India Week, which starts tomorrow (July 10) and will celebrate the country and its diaspora’s music, art, literature, film, cuisine and, of course, dance.

Dance and movement are deeply embedded in Indian culture and traditions—from the sacred classical dance forms and yoga to the joyous Garba and Bollywood dance styles. It is no surprise, then, that the week features five nights of silent discos (on the city’s largest outdoor dance floor, under a shimmering 10-foot disco ball) curated by the iconic DJ Rekha, a social dance party (with lessons from folk dance expert Heena Patel and live music by Ujjval Vyas Musicals), mindful movement workshops led by dancer and yogi Minila Shah, and dance performances by the internationally-acclaimed troupes Ragamala Dance Company and Aakash Odedra Company.

India Week’s lineup of events is wonderfully and purposefully diverse. The multigenerational performers and presenters come from not only the U.S. and India, but also Canada, China, England and South Africa. Shanta Thake, the Ehrenkranz Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, told Observer she hopes the widespread Indian community will be able to see themselves reflected through the diverse programming. “But it’s equally important,” she added, “to bring folks from outside of the Indian community into this world and be able to celebrate this culture that actually does influence all of us. And it’s important for people to be celebrated in our communities, and not just tolerated.”

As for the two dance companies selected to perform, Thake was drawn to them because they are both informed by the history of their classical dance forms, but also very contemporary. “These are artists that are in conversation with the past and the present and the future, and I think that’s important for us to constantly be thinking about. Being rooted in traditional forms, but always looking forward, always figuring out how to make this a bigger tent.”

Avimukta: Where the Seeker Meets the Sacred

On Wednesday, July 10, Ragamala Dance Company will perform Avimukta: Where the Seeker Meets the Sacred at Damrosch Park. The hour-long work is a new adaptation of the large-scale stage work, Fires of Varanasi: Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim (2021), which was selected to open the Kennedy Center’s 50th Anniversary celebration and then The Joyce Theater’s Fall 2021 season. That piece had an extensive, white set. “There was water on the stage,” the Company’s Executive Artistic Director Aparna Ramaswamy told Observer. “There were large brass bells hanging. It was quite a spectacle.” The piece received great acclaim, but “we wanted to create something that felt more intimate and tourable, so the nucleus of our message could be sharable and more widely received.”

When Ramaswamy says “we” and “our,” she is referring to her mother Ranee Ramaswamy, the Company’s Founding Artistic Director. Ranee immigrated to the U.S. in 1978 but returned to India a few years later to study the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam under master dancer/choreographer Padmabhushan Smt. Alarmél Valli. Even though Aparna was only a young child then, Ranee took her along and the two learned the form together. “And from that moment on,” Aparna said with great love, “we became artistic partners.” Together the mother and daughter returned to India again and again to study for four months a year, ten hours a day. When back in the U.S., they kept practicing together, soon including Aparna’s younger sister Ashwini in the lessons.

Mother and daughters are all featured soloists in Avimukta: Where the Seeker Meets the Sacred, which was inspired by the death of their father/grandfather who was a devout Hindu and wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges River in Varanasi, as is the tradition.

The three soloists are joined by four Company members (Kassiyet Adilkhankyzy, Jessica Fiala, Sri Guntipally and Tamara Nadel), and two guest artists (Garrett Sour and Alan Tse) who function as the seekers. The piece follows the seekers on their pilgrimage to the holy city of Varanasi as they immerse themselves in rituals of sacred contemplation and ecstatic prayer.

“The ideas behind it really are the concepts of life and death in Hindu philosophy,” Aparna explained, “and the relationship between the seeker and the sacred, and the rituals that we all embody in order to activate that relationship.” The relationship, Aparna clarified, is not a distant one. “It’s not a formal one… It takes many shapes. You can see the sacred in so many different things.

The piece weaves together poems, mythology, music, solo dances (Bharatanatyam is traditionally a solo form) and ensemble pieces to create a multi-layered experience. In this style and lineage, poetry, music and dance are inseparable. “We don’t think of it as ‘this is kinetic movement,’ and then ‘this is storytelling’,” Aparna said. “The emotion has so many different textures and runs through.”

The original musical score, created by acclaimed composer Prema Ramamurthy and recorded during India’s Covid lockdown, is also multi-layered and features Preethy Mahesh (vocals), Lalit Subramanian (vocals), C.K. Vasudevan (nattuvangam), S. Sakthivel Muruganantham (mridangam), Ramanathan Kalaiaransan (violin) and Sruthi Sagar (flute).

When I asked Aparna what it was like to have created this company and work with her mother, her exquisite composure softened, and she became—just for a moment—less divine creature and more human daughter. She said, “There’s one piece on this program where I sit on the stage, just me and my mom. She’s doing a solo, and I just sit and watch her, and I don’t have anything to do except to watch my mother perform. And every day in rehearsal, every performance, I feel so fortunate. I don’t take for granted what we have together, the fact that we have this love that we’re ensconced in together.”

Ragamala Dance Company