Ratnam graces stage in seven shades of Tara

Author: Joyce Man

At one point, as a sea of red light filled the background and an excited flurry of wind chimes and Tibetan chants rolled across the stage, Anita Ratnam ignited the stage with her swirling, grooving movements. Her arms, snakelike, slithered through space. In the dimmed atmosphere of the Center for the Arts Dance Theatre, the audience was left unsure whether it was the air that moved the dancer or the dancer that moved the air. With that, and if only for a moment, spatial defintions disappeared.

In a nutshell, this is what Ratnam, does - she slides through the crevices of what is certain and blends the things that are undefined. And she does it through classical Indian dance, a skilled art form she began learning when she was just three years old. On Monday night, Ratnam performed her latest and most challenging work yet, "Seven Graces," a performance in seven parts and colors that explores the feminine archetypes through the character of the Buddhist goddess Tara.

To say Ratnam blends the undefined seems perhaps like irresponsible art jabber, but in her own statement, Ratnam herself explains "Seven Graces" is a performance about indefinite spaces and the unknown. "It's about the in-between spaces of performance and experience," she wrote. "There are many erasures, hidden and apparent."

Happily, Ratnam does carry this idea through her dance and even further beyond that. She is trained in Indian dance, whose earliest theories are traced back to 400 B.C., and is especially skilled in three of the seven classical dance styles - Bharatanatyam, Mohiniattam and Kathakali. Yet, Ratnam frequently incorporates movements and gestures from contemporary dance and from the Western tradition. To the pleasant surprise of the audience, "Seven Graces," at once had the splayed fingers - interestingly enough, also a trademark of Flamenco dancing - and the powerfully elegent undulations that are part of the Bharatanatyam tradition, but also the interpretive, wide arm gestures and diagonal leg movements that are recognizeable from contemporary dance. The soundtrack changed suddenly from Tibetan chanting and chiming bells to Mozart's "Ave Maria," leading the audience to leap across the expanse from east to west.

For those who had seen classical Indian dance before, the changes between different traditions were very noticeable, but Ratnam worked these to her advantage. The performance, instead of splintering into distinctly separate parts, became a great reflection of exactly what Ratnam had set out originally to do. Mary Fillmore, one local member of the audience who had been to India before and had seen Bharatanatyam performed, agrees that Ratnam was able to bring these seemingly incompatible dance elements together.

Indeed, the incoporation of classical Indian dance with contemporary movement in a performance steeped in Indian, Tibetan and Buddhist elements shown to a Western audience would seem to have huge, inherent problems, but Ratnam seemed unhindered by this. Fielding questions after "Seven Graces," it became apparent that such a problem had been raised before but presented no barrier to Ratnam's work. "I do a lot of dance beyond classical Indian dance [and] people just leave me alone now," she said, "Besides, dance is interactive. A lot of Indian audiences expect me to spoon-feed them. If people reflect on what I do, they will come away with some understanding."

But "Seven Graces" was not an experience of blending elements for just these reasons. Beyond the amalgamation of dance cultures, the purpose of the performance was to explore the feminine. Tara, or the Jetsun Dolma, is the mother of liberation and represents the female version of Avalokitesvara, the embodiment of all the compassions of the Buddhas, and Ratnam made her the chief subject of the performance. If Ratnam's dance was a successful blending of different skill traditions, then her performance had similar success in letting this Buddhist characterization of the feminine slide into the audience of a completely different culture. This was no Western conception of the female, and she was being explored through dance.

This was exactly what Chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program (WAGS) Moorti Sujata intended to happen when she invited Ratnam to perform. As Sujata, who is also associate professor of WAGS, explains, she had wanted students to be exposed to gender issues from other cultures. "We tend to theorize so much in WAGS, so this, she said, gesturing to the image of Tara that still hung in the background of the stage after the performance, "was a perfect chance to see an exploration of the female from a completely different perspective. I do hope we can have more work from a whole variety of cultures."