Minneapolis-based choreographer and dancer Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Let the Crows Come was developed during a 2018 BAC residency and originally scheduled to be performed at BAC in spring 2020. Let the Crows Come evokes mythography and ancestry, using the metaphor of crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed—and in the process explores how memory and homeland channel guidance and dislocation. In a series of three dance solos from Ramaswamy (Bharatanatyam), Alanna Morris-Van Tassel (Contemporary/Afro-Caribbean), and Berit Ahlgren (Gaga), Bharatanatyam is deconstructed and recontextualized to recall a memory that has a shared origin but is remembered differently from person to person. The work features live music by composers Jace Clayton (DJ/ rupture) and Brent Arnold, who extrapolate from Prema Ramamurthy’s classical Carnatic (South Indian) score, utilizing centuries-old compositional structures as the point of departure for their sonic explorations.
Ashwini Ramaswamy
Ashwini Ramaswamy has studied Bharatanatyam with Ragamala Dance Company’s artistic directors Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy—her mother and sister—since the age of five. Celebrated for her ability to “[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine” (The New York Times), Ramaswamy now has the honor of studying under Bharatanatyam legend Alarmél Valli (Chennai, India), one of the greatest living masters of the form.