I came home and immediately listened to the soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi (or “life out of
balance” in Hopi), the masterpiece of modern music and video by Philip Glass and Godfrey
Reggio. I experienced, with ever-changed ears and saw with new-sighted eyes, the Philip
Glass Ensemble play the full score live with a wide-screen showing of the film at Northrup
Auditorium more than thirty years ago. It was an intense, beautiful and disturbing experience.
Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Invisible Cities, a dance, music and visual show strikes me to be of
equal ambition and is similarly intense and inventive. The music was dynamic and varied, with
classical Carnatic (South Indian) instrumentation and modern production alternating and blending.
The Invisible Cities score is not, like Glass said of his first movement “ahistorical”, but rather it
takes in essences and excellence from the past 2000 years of Indian music and from today’s house,
hip hop and cinematic sounds. Kayhan Kalhor is a Grammy-winning Kurdish Iranian musician who
has toured with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road ensemble. He plays the kamancheh (Persian spiked fiddle)
and is incredible; Cristobal Tapia de Veer is a film/tv composer born in Chile who has lived most of
his life in Canada. His work, including that for The White Lotus, for which he won an Emmy, work is
very evocative and emotive.
The visual artist, Kevork Mourad, projected on rear and (translucent) front screens his
prerecorded, individually computer-drawn inanimate/animations - abstract shapes and
landscapes and rough-visual projections of rocks, city walls, seashores move across the
screen and the audience is drawn through a temple’s doors and sits transfixed as broken
satellites move into our space. Veils and ribbons and roots and ranks of guards are live-added
to the vision by Mourad’s computerized hand controls. These 75 minutes are the culmination
of years of work, he says. Mourad, based in NYC, draws on Syrian and Armenian themes in these
visions. With only the music and visuals, the senses would have been well-sated.
But this is a dance performance. Ashwini Ramaswamy of Minnesota’s Ragamala Dance
brought together other choreographers: Alanna Morris [Afro-Modern technique], Berit
Ahlgren [Gaga technique] and Joseph ‘MN Joe’ Tran [modern/break] and her mother and sister
plus six other Minnesota dancers to reflect on the Italo Calvino novel, Invisible Cities . The
visuals allude to that era of encounters and to the places of Polo and Khan.
The Koyaanisqatsi “story” was conveyed most explicitly with its speeded up movies and
visuals of nature and humanity moving into “life out of balance.” It is dance that is front and
center of relating the more open-to-interpretation story of Invisible Cities. It is telling that this story
that reflects on impressions of transnational conquest and exploration is "told" by people of various
diasporas.
The tension of the insistent and ever-evolving music and visuals is intensified by the
movements and lively beauty of 12 dancers. Ramaswamy with her mother (Ranee ) and sister
(Aparna) in gorgeous tunics and skirts danced after, among and without the modern dancers -
providing an historical, controlled and, Ashwini hopes, spiritual center to the project. Their
upright postures and rhythmic movements, their stylized and historic Bharatanatyam dance,
often centered in eyes and fingers, contrasted with the frequently antic and acrobatic actions of
the 9 modern dancers.
These fine modernists’ all-encompassing massed physicality put me in mind of The Joffrey’s
production of The Rite of Spring with a live orchestra at The Northrup. And some funny poses and
moves recalled the broad physical humor of Dominique Serrand, Vincent Gracieux, Barbra Berlovitz
and Stephen Epps of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. And do pro wrestlers watch modern dancers for some
quick holds and escapes? My scope of reference has gotten too wide....
The arrangements of bodies framed and immersed in ever-changing projections, first still, then
moving singly and moving as a rolling surf of bodies and moving around the stage didn’t bow
to, in any obvious fashion, the exotic visuals of landscapes, space, prisons and palaces that
seemed sourced in Samarkand and Venice. The dancers did not “enact” obvious scenes but
with swirls, lights and visuals and music and finally, bird song, their bodies sculpted and wove
and drummed and painted a world, not of invisible cities, in my experience, but of boundless
imagination and passion. Unless passion and imagination are the essence of such cities. This
is art of the most splendid scope and execution.
Notes
Despite some years on the Ramaswamy’s Ragamala Dance Board and fair number of dance
performances, I’ve not found a vocabulary or voice for dance review. Till now. I think.
This modern masterpiece, Invisible Cities, Wikipedia says, is a conversation between the Emperor
Kublai Khan and the possibly real explorer, Marco Polo. In which they describe their cities of the world.
And, I also read, a highly structured and deeply philosophical treatise on matters beyond my reach.
Ranee’s first public dance performance after her move to the U.S. came in 1991 and was a
combined production with a modern dance group and her own developing Bharatanatyam
work.
More detail from Ashwini and samples at ashwiniramaswamy.com
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