Imagine an evening of watching extracts from “The Nutcracker” as choreographed by first George Balanchine, then Mark Morris, and finally Tony Williams, with Duke Ellington weighing in on the Tchaikovsky score. Something like that was offered in the Celebrity Series presentation at New England
Conservatory’s Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre this weekend. “Let the Crows Come” begins with a solo created by Bharatanatyam dancer Ashwini Ramaswamy. Her work is then reinterpreted by Berit Ahlgren, who teaches the Gaga movement language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, and
finally by Alanna Morris, who hails from Trinidad and Tobago and has an Afro- Caribbean dance background. Over 60 fascinating minutes, we get to see how the same movement ideas look on three different performers.
Ramaswamy describes herself as an “artist of diaspora.” Born in the United States, she was brought up in this country and in India and is a founding member of Ragamala, the dance company her mother, Ranee, and sister Aparna direct in Minneapolis. But in “Let the Crows Come,” which she calls a hybrid collaboration,
she places her heritage in the context of other cultures. She asked composers Jace Clayton (dj/rupture) and Brent Arnold to riff on a score by Carnatic vocalist Prema Ramamurthy that was developed in concert with musicians Rohan Krishnamurthy, Arun Ramamurthy, and Roopa Mahadevan, and she invited Ahlgren and Morris to join her onstage. The piece’s title refers to the Hindu mourning ritual of putting cooked rice out for crows; if the birds come and eat, it means that the departed soul has moved on to its proper place.
At the Plimpton Shattuck, a large brass bowl of rice sits downstage left, and the musicians are arrayed stage right. Arun Ramamurthy’s wailing violin, Arnold’s plucked electro-acoustic cello, and Mahadevan’s wandering, weaving vocal evoke a timeless past. Once Krishnamurthy’s double-headed mridangam drum has established a complex rhythm, Ramaswamy enters in a royal blue sari and crow- black choli top. She mimes carrying a vessel and pouring rice into the bowl as an offering; then she begins to dance.
Bharatanatyam is a classical form from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. The word is a portmanteau of the Tamil words for expression, melody, rhythm, and dance; for this particular dance, Ramaswamy has drawn on ancient Tamil texts, one about the landscapes around us, another about flight patterns of crows and how they might predict the future.
A scene from Ashwini Ramaswamy's “Let the Crows Come."Robert Torres
She’s a natural storyteller. One moment she’s delighting in the natural world and calling to the crows; the next, she’s depicting them with elegant hand gestures and splayed, fluttering fingers. With quiet upper body, bent knees, and flexed feet, she’s contained and centered, but there’s nothing static about her reverent pliés or her exuberant hops and skips, or the playful way she puts a finger up reminding us to pay attention. After seven or eight minutes, the music slides into a Western mode, Ahlgren and Morris join Ramaswamy, and we get a five-minute preview of what their solos will look like. It’s a conversation: Ramaswamy demonstrates, they translate.
The rest of “Let the Crows Come” unfolds in the same way: Ahlgren and Morris, in dark, informal tops and bottoms, pour rice as an offering and then solo before being joined by the other two. Gaga focuses on listening to the body and its physical sensations while exploring each individual’s capacity for unique movement. Ahlgren is clearly listening to her body, and whereas Ramaswamy is focused on the audience, Ahlgren barely acknowledges us. Set to Clayton’s deconstructed remix, hers is a journey of self-discovery. Every moment she’s morphing in a new direction, exploring, carving out space for herself. Her upper body is more agitated and off-center than Ramaswamy’s, her elbows flail protectively, and just when it seems she’s forgotten the Bharatanatyam original, she remembers. Toward the end she lies down and her head almost touches the floor, as if she were a crow eating the rice.
If Ahlgren is wind and water, Morris is fire and earth, her dance both challenge and celebration. She brings an angular precision and a jittery energy to Arnold’s jazzy section of the score, crouching on tiptoe, saluting the earth’s four corners in turn, jumping, whirling, shimmying, stomping, conversing with spirits; she’s not so much telling us a story as creating one. At one point she puts her hands to her ears, asking us to hear what she hears; later she blows us a kiss.
At the end, Ramaswamy and Ahlgren return and all three dancers converge on the now spotlit brass bowl. They pick up handfuls of the rice and let it drain through their fingers. Hard to imagine a crow that wouldn’t turn up for this performance.
“Let the Crows Come”
Choreographed and performed by Ashwini Ramaswamy, Berit Ahlgren, and Alanna Morris. Music by Jace Clayton, Brent Arnold, Prema Ramamurthy, Rohan Krishnamurthy, Arun Ramamurthy, and Roopa Mahadevan. Presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. At: New England Conservatory’s Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre, Friday, Jan. 19 (repeated Jan. 20).