Celebrate Brooklyn with the BRIC! The air was muddy on Friday night, but was regularly cooled by the wind. “”Holy earth” Lagamara Dance Company Played on the Lena Horne band shell in Prospect Park, it felt the other way around.
It happens that the “holy earth” is the correspondence between human emotions and the natural environment. Like all other works in Lagamara, a Minneapolis-based exemplary theater company led by Ranny Ramaswamy and his daughters Aparna and Ashwini, this work is rooted in the Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form in South India. increase. More specifically, it utilizes Kolam, a kind of decorative art made from rice flour. Warli paintings (some of which are reproduced in projection); and in ancient Tamil poetry, the divinity of the physical world enables images from nature, suggesting internal states, especially romantic ones.
For example, one poem deals with the instability of love. A woman gave her lover a bitter fruit and he called it sweet. Now she gives him sweet water and he calls it brackish water. Others liken the connection between lovers to a mixture of red earth and rain.
In “Sacred Earth”, the words of the poem are not displayed unless one of the four musicians next to the stage sings or translates it into English in an online program, but the series of solos is an image. Is displayed. It’s like a quiet soliloquy. These are mainly danced by Lamaswamy. Lamaswamy is an expert in hand-suggesting flowering buds and abundant bees. While the mother sticks to storytelling, the daughters alternate between mime-like movements and more athletic behaviors, rushing with swordfighter precision and jumping with great lightness.
These solos, in turn, alternate with a short group section containing the other four dancers. The change of group solo works best before the section that enacts a poem about Aparna being abandoned at the beach. The other dancers crossed the stage like waves and then washed her alone.
Otherwise, the group section is a bit functional and all the solos are on the frivolous side of Bharatanatyam, winning the same thing in a row. Exciting group material — a procession of rhythmically living snakes — does not reach near the end, and its effects are mitigated at many entrances and exits. This is a strangely jerky pattern that the audience can repeatedly wonder if the show is over.
But that’s not how it ends. Ranny and Aparna, who choreographed the work, conclude with a pair of prayers, stretching into the shape of a tree branch and reaching for offerings. This is a meditative conclusion to a dance that is gentler than the subject.
For me, the strongest connection of the “holy earth” was not between mankind and nature, but between music and dance. How Preethy Mahesh’s voice, which intersects KP Nandini’s violin closely, helped Aparna suggest the sleeping eyes of a lotus flower, and CK Vasudevan’s rhythmic reading of the speed of Aparna and Ashwini. How did you stimulate and sharpen the explosion? Or, how Sakthivel Muruganantham’s drumming flapping matched Rainee’s finger flapping to stir up the sensation of a storm even when sitting in the heat without rain.
