Ashwini Ramaswamy: Let the Crows Come

With composers Jace Clayton, Prema Ramamurthy, Brent Arnold, and dancer/choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren

Friday–Saturday, November 8–9, 8pm
Lab Theater, Minneapolis

“Ashwini is innovative not for the sake of trendiness but out of a sincere [even desperate] curiosity about what the art form can do.” –Mallika Rao, freelance writer (The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker)

"Jace Clayton's in the rare category of DJs who gives the impression that he is not just wading through music, but correcting it by building his own canon, and constructing an alternate history. It's a place you would want to live.” –Pitchfork

“Morris-Van Tassel is positioned between the celestial and earthly realms, as faith, family, and cultural history find articulate expression in her bold, beautiful movement vocabulary.” –City Pages

"Berit Ahlgren gathers energy around her like a cyclone." –Star Tribune

“[The music of Brent Arnold] feels like a journey… beautiful.” –VICE

The culmination of her 2-year Liquid Music residency, Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer/choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Let the Crows Come uses the metaphor of crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed – and in the process explores how memory and homeland channel both guidance and dislocation.

In a series of three dance solos from Ramaswamy and Twin Cities’ dancer/choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren, the South Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam is deconstructed and recontextualized. Concurrently, composers Jace Clayton and Brent Arnold extrapolate from Prema Ramamurthy’s classical Carnatic score, utilizing centuries-old compositional structures as the point of departure for their sonic explorations, with additional compositions and score development by Rohan Krishnamurthy, Roopa Mahadevan and Arun Ramamurthy.

Evoking mythography and ancestry, Ramaswamy – Choreographic Associate and soloist with the renowned Ragamala Dance Company – layers ritual, tradition, deconstruction, iteration, and origin. Let the Crows Come is a genre-twisting evolution of movement and music across cultural and corporeal boundaries.

Tickets: $25, $20 Liquid Music/SPCO subscribers, FREE for students and children ages 6–17