Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Let the Crows Come soars into BAC April 13-15 (photo by Jake Armour)
LET THE CROWS COME
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
April 13-15, $25, 7:30
646-731-3200
bacnyc.org
www.ashwiniramaswamy.com
While Baryshnikov Arts Center continues presenting outstanding filmed works on its website, including some of the best pieces made during the pandemic, it has also returned to live, in-person performances. Next up is Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Let the Crows Come, taking place April 13-15 in the Jerome Robbins Theater. A founding member of Ragamala Dance Company, Minneapolis-based dancer and choreographer Ramaswamy experiments with the South Indian Bharatanatyam technique in the sixty-minute dance, which explores ritual and tradition, memory and homeland, and features Brooklyn-born Alanna Morris, whose work focuses on her Afro-Caribbean diasporic identity; Minneapolis native Berit Ahlgren, a Gaga dancer and teacher; and Ramaswamy.
“I have been immersed in the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam for over thirty years,” Ramaswamy notes on her website. “The vitality of my choreography stems from extensive training guided by the technical rigor and expressive authenticity that are the hallmarks of my cultural and artistic lineage. The body of a Bharatanatyam dancer moves like an interlocking puzzle, its pieces a display of otherworldly grace.” The original score, inspired by Carnatic (South Indian classical) music, by Jace Clayton (DJ/rupture), Brent Arnold, and Prema Ramamurthy, will be performed live by Arnold on cello, Clayton on electronics, Rohan Krishnamurthy on mridangam, Roopa Mahadevan on vocals, and Arun Ramamurthy on violin. The sound is by Maury Jensen, with lighting by Mat Terwilliger.
“My upbringing in both India and the US has encouraged a hybrid aesthetic perspective, and my work is aimed at immigrants longing to make connections between the ancestral and the current,” Ramaswamy explained in a statement about Let the Crows Come. “I create environments for the stage where past, present, and future intermingle; these worlds capture the disorientation and reorientation of the immigrant settling into a new land and explore how to preserve individuality while creating new spaces of convergence.”