These are ignorant notes on an art form that I don't understand. Here, I describe the performance that I witnessed on October 24, 2026 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Minnesota (as distinguished from the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas where the comedian Janeann Garafalo was performing last night). Beyond description, there isn't much I can say. Description has its merits -- we would all profit from an intelligent alien life form describing our appearance and behavior and folkways to us. Sometimes, looking at things from the stance of the outsider is helpful, although, of course, problematic. It's bracing to encounter something wholly new and, perhaps, this encounter frees one from the burden of critical responsibility, an aspect of writing that is always daunting. I don't have to worry about doing justice to this dance performance because I grasp so little of it.
The Ragamala company, as it appeared in Austin, consists of six dancers. They performed eight pieces each between 6 and ten minutes long. The form of dance derives from practice in south India. The first four pieces, perhaps, were dedicated to the Hindu deity, Krishna. The last three pieces consisted of a three-movement suite honoring Shiva. On the basis of old movies, I came to the program expecting the dance to consist of sinuous, serpentine movements, the choreography of a King Cobra advancing on its prey (cf. Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur), in other words, an undulant practice, perhaps, like belly-dancing. In fact, the dance is rigidly hieratic with the torsos of the dancers forming the core of rectilinear gestures and movements. In effect, this dance seems to animate a square or rectangle with all gestures oriented toward defining the outer edges of the imaginary cubic form occupied by the dancer. Hands and arms extend rigorously at right angles from the body, the hands often hyper-extended at right angles to define the square or cube in which the motion occurs. Another rectilinear movement is a squat in which the legs form an implied square base to the body -- you can't really see the legs clearly except for the calves, wrapped in tinkling bell anklets, and the feet that stomp emphatically on the stage; otherwise the motion of hips and groin is covered by a sort of silk apron that the dancers wear. (The dancers wore identical but differently colored costumes consisting of a harem-style blouse and harem pants with a fan-like apron extending below the waist; on their heads, the dancers seemed to have skullcaps that were themselves crowned by white diadems.) To me the dancing seemed archaic, suggestive of the motions implied by the rectilinear forms of moving figures inscribed on the walls of Egyptian temples. An apophatic description may be best -- that is, a description on the basis of what the choreography was not like: this is certainly not a form of folk dance, the motions are too robotic and rigidly defined for folk dance; indeed, the dancers move with a martial precision -- they walk with their backs absolutely rigid, shoulders thrown back, with a military bearing as if on parade. There is no resemblance to classical ballet -- the ensemble in Ragamala moves mostly in unison, although sometimes a soloist is featured in the foreground of a group of four dancers. There are no lifts, no leaps, and no carries; the dancers never touch one another at all -- thus, there is none of the drooping and falling and catching motions that you might see in modern dance like that of Pina Bausch. There is nothing erotic about the dance, even though the subject might, in fact, be eros -- an friend of Indian background said that one of the dances portrayed the Gopis (or milkmaids) vying to seduce Lord Krishna. Everything is intensely dignified, de-eroticized and expressive only within a limited repertoire of motions and gestures. (At times, the most expressive aspect of the dance was the eyes of the dancers, sweeping back and forth but without turning their heads which remained rigidly immobile.) The effect is courtly -- this seems to be a refined form of dance developed for some kind of royal court and, sometimes, the movements reminded me of baroque dances that I have seen in operas staged in period style. The de-eroticized bodies move in a declamatory fashion as if they are pronouncing certain decrees or geometric axioms/. There is no shimmying, wiggling of hips or backside, or anything burlesque about any aspect of this dance. It is highly dignified in form and gesture. The only time there is any variation from the right-angle moves of the dancers is when a diagonal is inscribed by hands in the air, a sort of choreographed Pythagorean theorem.
Evidently, this form of dance represents a living tradition. The second half of the show featured "Sacred Earth", a dance choreographed when two practitioners (both named Ramaswamy) were in residence with the company in 2012. Sacred Earth begins with a devotional solo that seems supplicatory to Shiva. In the second piece, daily activities are depicted in stylized dance movements -- these include gestures that signify planting and picking rice as well as other quotidian activities. At one point, rather thrilling, I thought, a dancer representing a deer gallops across the stage, an exception to the rule that dancers generally don't leap or lunge. The elements are represented by various hand motions, a fluttering gesture that signifies air and water, including a Tai Chih-like figure as if the dancer were unscrolling some length of parchment or silk (this means "Ganges"). Fire is a bird-like fluttering in front of the chest. Hindus imagine the world configured by five elements, not the classical four identified in the West -- the fifth element is "ether" marked by an appropriately "etherial" gesture of the hands waving over the head. The last dance seemed to be a hymnic blessing to Lord Shiva including an actual sung or chanted section that is a prayer. In this dance, the performers sometimes replicated famous images of Shiva dancing with his many arms extended as a halo or mandorla about his body, his foot crushing the dwarf of the material world, and the other leg bent at the knee and extended to the side. The music in general was highly percussive with repetitive plaintive singing above a seismic drone. In the final suite of "Sacred Earth", the vocal part featured singing of a kind that I have never heard before -- that is, the singer vocalizing "d" sounds, but triple tonguing them so that the staccato enunciations are like rapid-fire clicks, a precise replication of the very fast d-d-d-d-drumming accompanying the piece.
I'm glad that I saw this show. It was relatively short and quite literally entrancing. You walk out into the night with a feeling that your senses have been revivified, made active, and receptive. This is what performing arts, at their best, can accomplish.
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