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Ragamala Dance Company Announces 2021-22 Season
The Company will tour the country through April 2022 and will conclude the season with a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Aug. 25, 2021
Ragamala Dance Company has announced its 2021-22 season, featuring the world premiere of Fires of Varanasi: Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim, performances of Ashwini Ramaswamy's Let the Crows Come, podcast episodes, and panel appearances. The Company will tour the country through April 2022 and will conclude the season with a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy.
Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy's award-winning, internationally recognized bharatanatyam dance ensemble will perform the world premiere of the Kennedy Center co-commission Fires of Varanasi on the REACH
campus from September 11-12 as part of the Center's 50th Anniversary weekends and Millennium Stage Summer Series, before bringing the piece to The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College on
September 17-18 and The Joyce Theater in Manhattan from September 22-26.
Rooted in the expansive South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam, Ragamala Dance Company manifests a kindred relationship between the ancient and the contemporary. In their latest evening-length performance, Fires of Varanasi: Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim, eleven dancers conjure a realm where time is
suspended and humans merge with the divine. Award-winning creators Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy imagine a metaphorical crossing place that enters into a ritualistic world of immortality, evoking the birth-death-rebirth continuum in Hindu thought to honor immigrant experiences of life and death in the
diaspora. The work features an original, recorded score and the lighting designs of French scenic and lightning
designer Willy Cessa.
Evoking mythography and ancestry, Ashwini Ramaswamy's Let the Crows Come uses the metaphor of crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed. This 60-minute work for three dancers with live music ex-plores how memory and homeland channel guidance and dislocation. Featuring Ramaswamy (Bharatanatyam technique), Alanna Morris-Van Tassel (Contemporary/Afro-Caribbean Diasporic technique), and Berit Ahlgren (Gaga tech-nique), Bharatanatyam dance is deconstructed and recontextualized to recall a memory that has a shared origin but is remembered differently from person to person. Composers Jace Clayton (dj/rupture) and Brent Arnold extrapolate from Prema Ramamurthy's original Carnatic (South Indian) score, utilizing centuries-old com-positional structures as the point of departure for their sonic explorations.
2021/2022 SEASON SCHEDULE:
Returning to the Earth (Virtual event)
Pre-filmed online performance and panel discussion as part of the Just Festival in Edinburgh
August 25, 2021 at 1:30PM ET, Edinburgh, Scotland
World premiere of Fires of Varanasi
September 11 and 12, 2021 at 7:30 PM, the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
(Rain Date: September 13 at 7:30 PM)
Fires of Varanasi (proscenium stage premiere)
September 17 at 7:30 PM and 18 at 2 & 7:30 PM ET, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Fires of Varanasi (New York premiere)
September 22-26, 2021, The Joyce Theater
Let the Crows Come
October 2, 2021, Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series in Pennsylvania
Let the Crows Come
November 20 and 21, 2021, Cowles Center in Minneapolis
Fires of Varanasi
December 2, 2021 at 7:30PM, Harris Theater, Chicago, IL
Subcontinuity: Voices from the South Asian Diaspora podcast launches via PRX
January 2022
Let the Crows Come
January 15, 2022 at 8PM, Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Scottsdale, AZ
Release of second Subcontinuity podcast episode
February 2022
Ashwini Ramaswamy's work-in-process work Invisible Cities Panel Discussion and Artist Q&A
January 31, 2022
Fires of Varanasi
February 26, 2022, Northrop in Minneapolis
Fires of Varanasi
April 9, 2022, The Soraya in North Ridge, CA
Ramaswamys in residence
April 19-May 20, 2022, The Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy
For more information, visit ragamaladance.org.
Photo credit: Arun Kumar
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