The Ragamala Dance Company will perform “Sacred Earth” at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 2, in the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe.
Under the co-directorship of mother-daughter South Indian American artists Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the company creates multi-disciplinary dance works, engaging the community and educating the next generation through teaching and performance.
Practitioners of the South Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, the Ragamala Dance Company fuses timeless stories and myths of the Indian subcontinent with contemporary themes of Indian diasporic experience.
The dancers perform alongside a musical ensemble from India with visuals from folk artists. They invite the audience to honor the divinity in the natural world and the sustenance we derive from it.
The New York Times wrote “Ragamala shows how Indian forms can be some of the most transcendent experiences that dance has to offer. This is an excellent company … Aparna Ramaswamy is an enchantingly beautiful dancer.”
Their work has been commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts at Cal State Northridge, Northrop at the University of Minnesota, the Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, and the Krannert Center for Performing Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
