St. Cloud Times - Dance company brings Indian culture to Central Minnesota
The Ragamala Dance Company will perform “Written in Water” at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 8 in the Gorecki Family Theater at the College of St. Benedict.
Sarah Colburn, Special to the Times
February 4, 2019
Original Article
A Minneapolis dance company has toured the world with a new composition based off the ancient Indian board game Paramapadham, also known as “Snakes and Ladders."
The game became the basis for “Chutes and Ladders,” and the Ragamala Dance Company is now bringing the performance to Central Minnesota.
An original piece of dance, music and visual art, “Written in Water,” was imagined and created by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy.
“As a child I played this game with my grandmother,” said Ranee. “Through the board, travelling through the squares, you learn life. It’s very similar to the life you live. Everything is not joy, we go through so many experiences in life and what we learn from it, how we learn from it, is so similar. It is a reflection on life itself.”
As dancers move up and down the board in the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam, they tell a story. Growing up, Ranee said, the game time was filled with stories of morality, good and evil.
“It’s a game but the game is very much part of a complex culture of Indian society,” Ranee said.
The creation, composition and choreography for the piece took Ranee four years of work and four residencies to complete.
The piece opens with dancers actually playing a life-sized version of the board game. The game board is projected on the floor and the back of the stage. The idea of the game board is meshed with Hindu and Sufi poetry and thought, and original musical composition by Amir ElSaffar. Artist Keshav Venkataraghavan created the game board paintings and additional artwork was created Nathan Christopher.
The production is multi-faceted and pulls from various artistic disciplines. Live musicians perform as vocalists and on trumpet, violin, the santur, mridangam and nattuvangam.
Though the piece overall has a classical bend, some of the poetry is sung while other pieces in the performance are purely instrumental.
“The dancers emote,” Ranee said. “All together it’s a feeling of transcendence, the whole story is about transcendence.”
The show is fast-moving and high-energy and even without understanding the full background of the piece, Ranee said, audiences will enjoy the performance.
“We have a multi-disciplinary performance where everything can stand alone,” she said. “There is so much creativity in this piece.”
The performance begins at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Gorecki Family Theater at the College of St. Benedict. Tickets are $30 for adults, $27 for seniors, $23 for faculty/staff, $15 for youth/student ID and $10 for CSB/SJU students.
Tickets are available at https://www.csbsju.edu/fine-arts/performances/ragamala-dance-company-written-in-water.
There will be a Ragamala Public Indian Dance workshop at noon Saturday in the Helgeson Dance Studio at CSB. This workshop is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required and can be completed on the same website as ticket purchasing.