Please join Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy for a Bharatanatyam master class at TU Dance Center.
Taught by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy of Ragamala Dance Company, this master class introduces participants to the Pandanallur lineage of Bharatanatyam, focusing on the rhythmic, gestural, and expressive vocabularies that are the underpinnings of the form. In addition to active instruction, the class explores concepts of lineage, aesthetics, the close relationship between music and movement in Bharatanatyam, the evolution of culturally rooted art forms, and their ongoing relevance in the 21st century. This class is open to any level of experience.
Saturday, March 23 | 2:00-3:30pm
Cost: $16, online pre-registration required.
Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy are Artistic Directors of Ragamala Dance Company, founded by Ranee in the Twin Cities in 1992. As choreographers and performers, they explore the dynamic tension between the ancestral and the contemporary, highlighting the fluidity between the secular and the spiritual, the inner and the outer, the human and the natural. Their training in the South Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam under legendary dancer/choreographer Alarmél Valli, known as one of India’s greatest living masters, is the bedrock of their creative aesthetic.
Most recently, Ranee and Aparna were awarded 2018 Guggenheim Fellowships and selected as 2017 Research Fellows by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy). Their work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Krannert Center for Performing Arts, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and the Walker Art Center, and presented by the Kennedy Center, Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, University Musical Society, Cal Performances, Just Festival (Edinburgh, U.K.), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), and National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai, India), among others.
Ranee currently serves on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Barack Obama. She is a recipient of a 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2012 United States Artists Fellowship, and a 2011 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award.
Aparna is a recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2016 Joyce Award, a Bush Fellowship for Choreography, and was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch for 2010.
This event is part of the Ragamala Rooted community engagement series. Ragamala Rooted is supported in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the Knight St. Paul Arts Challenge, the Mardag Foundation, the F.R. Bigelow Foundation, The Saint Paul Foundation, Target, and the City of St. Paul Cultural Sales Tax Revitalization Program.
Photo credit: Grant Halverson