At a time when the United States seems to be at war with itself, Ragamala Dance Company, a tiny, sparkling gem of a dance company from the middle of the country, has brought its interpretation of an ancient war epic to New York. A handful of characters from the Mahabharata and their imbroglios provide the pretext for some intensely beguiling dancing grounded in the language of Bharatanatyam. Framing what program notes call the “enduring power of ancient wisdom to navigate contemporary questions of conscience”, Children of Dharma is most potent as a lyrical expression of the personal consequences of hubris and of our inclination to blame others, including the gods we pray to, for our misfortunes.
Those misfortunes, however, are mostly alluded to in the accompanying text rather than in the dance.
Ostensibly structured in three scenes and an epilogue, the performance comes across as a fragmented series of many scenes – each mesmerizing in its own way. But a throughline is not readily apparent, and any sense of foreboding – though conveyed in the program notes and repeated in the voiceovers which quote Tamil poetry and other literary works – swiftly dissipates. Chilling utterances like “the night is damp with unspilled blood” and “the wailing of women mingles with the roar of hungry beasts” hang over a scene like an unfulfilled curse. The dancers remain surprisingly chill, no matter the tragic circumstances.
The greatest pleasures of this production lie in the nuances of the individual performances rather than in the broad narrative brushstrokes. All seven dancers possess a striking individual beauty and vivacity, a lithe springiness in the air and steely control in all the work done in deep knee bends. The specificity and clarity of every movement, large and small, the carving of intricate geometric shapes with rapier precision, is astonishing. Absorbing, too, are the gestures with exquisitely sculpted hands, the meticulous placement of heel and toe, and the delicate emotional distinctions that played across faces.
Aparna and Ashwini Ramaswamy, two-thirds of the creative force behind this work and this company, engage in some sisterly sparring – the kind where one ripples her arms like water while the other makes stark lines, trading off images of crispness and delicacy, one’s gaze melting, the other’s bold and frank, only to come together in moments of virtuosic unison.
Ranee Ramaswamy, mother to the sisters and founder of the company, offers a restrained yet commanding solo turn of mourning in the character of Gandhari, mother to 100 sons killed in a battle between two warring branches of the Kuru clan. No prostrating, flailing, gnashing of teeth and pounding of fists à la MacMillan’s Lady Capulet for this matriarch: the canting of her shoulders and bewilderment in her eyes speaks volumes, amplified by a stunning corps of four female dancers in similarly restrained vein. Gandhari drops to her knees, the pleats of her gorgeous purple and gold-trimmed sari spread before her like frozen rivulets of tears. Grief and vanity crystallize into wrath before she rises up to incriminate Krishna, accompanied by a splendid tirade from drums, in the most powerful moment of the evening.
Krishna introduces himself to us with gentle impudence in the opening scene as the “embodiment of nature” – a benign meddling force who has attracted a devoted following, at least until things get complicated. He was danced by Garrett Sour, the lone man in this production, whose base training in Khmer classical dance seemed to inform the gloriously glacial pace of his movement and his thorny, unflappable balances.
Krishna made his entrance to the throbbing sounds of “Legend”, a recorded collaboration between deeply sonorous Tuvan throat singers and a shimmering Bulgarian women’s choir. The otherworldly doom of the music made a spellbinding contrast with the serenity and lighthearted confidence of the dancer-god.
Other entrancing compositions pitted traditional percussion and plangent Carnatic vocals against violin and flute, amplifying the waves of power and pathos behind this contemporary retelling of old stories. The quality of the soundtrack broadcast at the Joyce, however, was not ideal – doing no favors for the flute and the women’s vocals, in particular. While it obviously was not feasible to fly in throngs of vocalists and musicians from distant lands to perform live, the dramatic potential of this work would have been better realised with one or two of them on stage. In rehearsal videos of other work on Ragamala’s website, musicians are seen ringing the floor of a dance studio, vivifying the intense connection between music and dance in this hallowed art form.
