ASHWINI RAMASWAMY: LET THE CROWS COME
Liquid Music commission
Work-in-progress conversation moderated by TU Dance artistic director Toni Pierce-Sands
Monday, February 11, 2019, 7:30pm (reserve tickets)
Ashwini Ramaswamy by Amanulla
Ashwini Ramaswamy “weaves together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine. There is a continual flow of energy coursing through her limbs.” –The New York Times
"Jace Clayton's in the rare category of DJs who gives the impression that he is not just wading through music, but correcting it by building his own canon, and constructing an alternate history. It's a place you would want to live.” –Pitchfork
Alanna Morris Van-Tassel “embodies the power of dance to create deep and lasting connections where words cannot.” –Dance Magazine, “25 to Watch”
Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer/choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy (Ragamala Dance Company) invites you into the artistic process behind her multidisciplinary original work Let the Crows Come. Evoking mythography and ancestry, Let the Crows Come depicts crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed. In a series of three dance solos (by Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, and Berit Ahlgren), with music by three composers (Jace Clayton, Prema Ramamurthy, and Brent Arnold), this work deconstructs, extrapolates, and retrogrades Bharatanatyam (south Indian classical dance) and Carnatic (south Indian classical music) to explore how memory and homeland channel both guidance and dislocation. Using these Indian forms as their point of inspiration, the artists explore deconstruction, iteration, and crossing cultures. Let the Crows Come layers Ramaswamy’s visceral interpretation of ancestry, ritual, and tradition with a genre-defying evolution of movement and music across cultural and corporeal boundaries.
Presented at the newly-renovated Parkway Theater in South Minneapolis, this work-in-progress event includes live music by cellist/composer Brent Arnold, video footage from Ramaswamy’s Space Residency at The Baryshnikov Arts Center, and a conversation with the artists moderated by TU Dance Co-Artistic Director Toni Pierce-Sands.
Tickets: Pay as you wish in support of this project
World premiere to take place November 2019, The Lab Theater, Minneapolis