Words & Sound: An Interview with Dorothea Lasky

By Liquid Music blog contributor Katie Hare

Ted Hearne’s new work, In Your Mouth premieres at Walker Art Center Nov 21-22 in a theatrical, 12-song suite. The source material and inspiration behind the work comes from the lush, stinging poetry of writer, author, and educator Dorothea Lasky. Along with a quintet and a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, Lasky’s words will be vocalized throughout the piece in an evening reflecting a complicated, loving mediation of the personal and domestic, while savoring the depths of wildness within. Featuring an introduction written by Ted Hearne, this interview with Dorothea delves into her background, the relationship of words and sound, and her collaboration with Hearne.

a note by Ted Hearne:

I first came across Dottie's work in 2016 and was instantly struck by the simplicity of the language – her poems just felt like song lyrics – but also the complicated and ambiguous identities, the dark and tumultuous sense of self, and the rich worlds of different "I"s her poems seemed to be able to harness and hold next to each other.

Photo courtesy of Lasky’s blog.

What does it mean to be wild? My first impulse to set this text was driven by an unironic identification with this idea that the wildness within could be embraced more fully. Perhaps I've never felt more drawn to set a text earnestly because I resonated with the feeling that I was keeping a true part of myself from the rest of the world. Or was the rest of the world holding me back?

“Everyone keeps me from my destiny
Keeps me from it
And keeps me locked away from beauty
And they can’t feel my beauty
In me reaching out
Like glass into itself
And everyone keeps me from myself
Cause the self they had imagined
Was flesh and bone
And this flesh I am is glass”

— Dorothea Lasky

As I started setting these poems for myself to sing, all sorts of intriguing complications set in. Funny how words that felt so empowering to read, and felt empowering to hear in Lasky's voice at one of her readings, sounded differently to my own ears when I heard them sung in my voice. Who was I to be singing her words? Do the words change when I sing them as a different person? As a man singing words written by a woman? Could I assume to put her words in my mouth? 

There's a complicated and fluid “I” in Lasky's poems, which seemed to reflect and nicely counteract these compounding questions of mine, and with Dottie's encouragement, that relationship is what led me through writing this piece.

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Meet Dorothea lasky

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Lasky earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachussets Amherst. She is the author of Animal, a book of poetry lectures, and co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Alex Dimitrov. She has also written five full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky now resides in New York, and is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Tell us a bit about your introduction to writing, and your journey into identifying as a writer.

I've been writing poetry since I was a little girl. When I was around 7, I started writing in a journal late at night because I didn't like going to sleep when my parents told me to. So, I've always written, but it took me a long time to identify as a writer or poet per se, because I tended to feel like the instinct was narcissistic and didn't help others. It has taken a long for me to realize that writing is capable of helping others, but I think being a teacher of writing has helped me feel the most comfortable in the role. 

I’ve read that your earliest poems were meant to be spoken, and always about sound—the idea of a listener. Can you expand on how that idea has translated through your work over time? And perhaps, how it correlates with your collaboration with Ted Hearne?

I feel that my poems are still meant to be spoken. Sound is the biggest motivator for me when it comes to writing and finishing a poem, and I value a word's sound over its meaning. I think because of this it is extra exciting that Ted has decided to put my poems to music, because there is (hopefully) a naturally musical quality to them that will be enhanced by his own beautiful sounds. 

What is your thought process behind presenting your work (or any work)? How does space and audience affect your readings?

Space and audience is very important to my poetry readings, because I am a performative person. There is very little that excites me as much as the stage and I see a poem as the ultimate stage. 

What inspired you to become an educator, and what do you like most about it?

My mother was a professor and I grew up going to her classes, so I feel an almost inevitability that I have ended up as one as well. I love the space of the classroom, because empowering people to be their most creative makes me endlessly happy.

How do you stay motivated to create?

I try as best as I can to create for the future. This motivates me because I know there will be future readers who will need me. 

We’re looking forward to your upcoming talk ‘The Strange Hexacomb’: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace, as well as your pre-performance reading at Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis! Can you tell us more about those? What are you most looking forward to on your visit?

Thank you so much! I am so looking forward to these events as well. The bee conversation will be so exciting to be a part of, because I will be talking with actual scientists and artists who do work on and with bees. I will love to learn from them and I have a feeling that the conversation will inspire me to write more about bees in the future. But the thing I am most looking forward to is hearing Ted's songs. 

What have you been reading lately?

I have been obsessed with Shirley Jackson a lot the past few months and can't stop now. 

Anything else you’d like Twin Cities audiences to know about you and your work before experiencing In Your Mouth?

Just that I would I thank them so much for having me in their beautiful town! 

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See Dorothea Lasky in The Strange Hexacomb: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace Books on Thursday, Nov 21 at 1:30pm. She will also share a few poems and discuss her collaboration with Ted Hearne in a preconcert happy hour reading on Nov 21 at 7:00pm at Walker’s Cityview bar.

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH NOV 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

FOLLOW DOROTHEA LASKY FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Twitter: @DorotheaLasky
Instagram: @dorothealasky

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Ted Hearne: exploring notions of truth, radical openness, and the promise of the unexpected

by Liquid Music blog contributor Trever Hagen

Photo by Jen Rosenstein

“I think I’d like to call it In Your Mouth, actually,” Ted says, pondering a last minute name-change. We are discussing the composer’s forthcoming piece – originally titled Live Things ­– which will be performed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center November 21-22, 2019. One’s imagination attempts to portray what might take place based on Mr. Hearne’s brief description of the process of creating the piece.  However, as with many other Ted Hearne performances, your mind’s eye will never be prepared for what is to come. Anticipation and expectation are difficult to conjure up when you are exploring unfamiliar aesthetic worlds. Partly this is due to Hearne’s up-ending of genre definitions but also in addition to his readiness to collaborate across media in order to realize wholly new performance experiences (and thereby illustrating a depth of expression that necessitates multiple forms of affect). Conveyed across multiple intersecting media currents – sound, language, visuals – and directed by theater veteran Daniel Fish, In Your Mouth calls out the promise of the unexpected.

This is Ted’s first full-length piece for Liquid Music, although he has performed and composed previously for the series. Liquid Music has highlighted the challenging and provoking world of contemporary composition in the Twin Cities, offering artists the opportunity to premiere new work. “I wanted to write my voice into the piece,” Ted explains. “This is the first time I have done this,” he continues. For the text to vocalize, Ted was attracted to the radical openness of the poetry of Dorothea Lasky. “I started really falling for Dottie's poetry in 2016, and it came to be something really special for me over the next year. I wrote a few individual songs before I started to think that I needed to dig deep and make a whole song cycle, and it wasn't until last year that I decided it needed to be an evening-length theatrical work.”

The twelve-song cycle of In Your Mouth will be performed by a quintet, which as Hearne admits, is basically like a rock band performing an album. Put this way, we already can imagine how Hearne draws on a wide range musical references to create a type of meta-language of music. Along with Hearne on voice and electronics, the composer will be joined by Ashley Bathgate (cello), Taylor Levine (electric guitar), Nathan Koci (keyboards), Diana Wade (viola) and Ron Wiltrout (drums).

Together with the quintet and Lasky’s poetry, the performance will incorporate a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, who has collaborated with Hearne on previous occasions. “In terms of working with these three incredible artists, they've each brought a different approach to my understanding of the poetry and of the project. Rachel's analogies in color, material and light; Daniel's patience in experiencing and processing the work in time, and looking to the text and the music to determine how the piece should be structured; and Dottie's big woolley ideas and colorful, sometimes contradictory, always poetic associations that really connected me to the sensuality and timeliness of her work.”

Young Voices

Mr. Hearne grew up in Chicago. His mother was a classically trained vocalist steeped in Baroque performance, which Hearne experienced as a child. Ted joined the Chicago Children’s choir where he learned and sang in a multi-cultural ensemble of voices and compositions. “My mom encouraged me to learn and perform music, but she didn't push me to do it even though it's the thing she loved most in the world. I credit her for getting me involved, but she knows me well enough to know I would probably balk at the time commitment and steep hill of work I'd have ahead of me if she had applied pressure,” Hearne states.

In addition to the fulfilling and grueling regimen of a composer-conductor (e.g., commissions, curations, teaching duties, writing and collaborations), Mr. Hearne finds time, as he will in Minneapolis, to perform as a vocalist. The nature and intent of how Ted sings is immediately gripping. For instance his 2007 Katrina Ballads features him performing the piece “Brownie you are doing a heck of a job” – as much as it is the musical materials that are captivating it is the execution that captures a sardonic energy, which serves to remind listeners of the out-of-touch FEMA response to the 2005 disaster. The place from where he is performing these words seems antagonistic, tongue-in-cheek: a curious vibe reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s disruption of expectations and the status quo. A crowning achievement for the social potential of new music. In this manner, Hearne’s patterned ability for taking mundane or everyday speech and musicalizing it recalls Harry Partch’s vocalisms transformed into musical worlds and phrases.  

In addition to his score-writing credits, Hearne also performs in the duo R WE Who R We. “R WE WHO R WE is a band I have with Philip White – we co-write all the songs, so this is very different from almost anything else I do.  Also, as a band, everything we write for R WE is for us and only us to perform, and actually we don't "write" anything down at all, although it's just as specific as any other compositions I've written.” 

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Most recently, in 2019 Mr. Hearne released the album Hazy Heart Pump, which begins with the composition “For the Love of Charles Mingus”. Ted asserts: “Charles Mingus is one of my favorite composers and has been a huge inspiration for me – the way he controlled chaos, harnessed a feel and employed it abstractly, the beautiful sloppiness. My piece For the love of Charles Mingus for six violins, which is the first track on my new instrumental album, is inspired by the way the opening of "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" pulls the rug out from under you ­– setting you up to believe you're existing in one 'feel,' only to discover the music is actually being governed by a different time, one you can't hear at first. This underlying pulse that you can't always hear is a source of poetic inspiration for me.” 

The Inspiration of Injustice

Being raised in Chicago certainly lends itself to the urban experience of inequality – homelessness next to skyscrapers. Segregation and access to education. Where life expectancy in one affluent neighborhood is ninety and 9 miles away residents live to sixty. Even though urban centers may offer the world’s residents greater economic opportunities and the potential to sustain large groups of people efficiently, we have still yet to uncover how to provide fair access to resources as governments attempt to organize people. As consistent with the history of the civilization, race, class and gender continue to be the lines upon which inequality falls. And for these reasons Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound.

Clearly these forms of injustice move Hearne’s compositions. Not by moralism but rather by Hearne’s witnessing of injustice – particularly social inequality and stratification – is the departure point from which he composes. How might the experience of gentrification be expressed in a score? How might reading the gruesome details of military conflict be composed? These musically-mediated emotional and cognitive responses to the contemporary world are manifest in Hearne’s work. The musical-social mélange of Mr. Hearne’s upbringing sensitized him to the plight of modern daily survival like many processors before – from John Steinbeck to Sebastião Salgado.

“Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound. ”

Plunderphonics and Compositions

We speak for a moment about using samples within orchestral arrangements – taking a listen to Hearne’s 2015 The Source we hear samples from “Mac the Knife” and Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”, popular sounds that filled the ambient radio waves of those years. These plunderphones – recognizable audio bits – serve to ground listeners by using the bits to reference the time of creation and consumption. It is a real-time experience of how culture builds on culture, how memory and associations provide context and coherency for the future. How plunderphonics runs counter to intellectual property and capital. This in itself makes Hearne’s pieces decidedly political by how and which sounds are used.

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The use of samples shows how genre material is used to reference genre as a frame of perception. Ted draws on genre at the meta-level – using some of the signs and sounds of genre while using other musical languages. For example, electric distorted guitars sounds against a string quartet. The result is an intriguing soundscape of associations and the juxtapositions are entirely new contexts – the samples and composition create a type of infoscape (to borrow from Appadurai’s thoughts on how we encounter information, an Ives-ian presence of all materials happening at once) that remove the listener from the initial work into a more reflective and considered point of receiving information.

(Absolute) Truth

“Truth isn’t truth” – the phrase uttered by former New York mayor Rudy Giulliani sticks in one’s mind as emblematic of the 21st century social-techno reality of perception management. Indeed, ideas of absolute truth have been dissipating for nearly a century as scholars have brought to our attention fragmented realties and multi-centered universes of the post World War post-modernism world.

What might truth mean in contemporary times? Has it lost its absolute value? This leads us to the question, “Can music lie?” which perhaps might feel like an absurd thought but one that is perhaps relevant in the so-called post-truth world of media and information. “Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you,” he continues. Hearne speaks about how music has allowed him to explore notions of truth and explore other cultures. Indeed, music is precisely this pathway between peoples, places and cultures. And for this reason, music has the propensity to be movingly political.

“Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you.”

Hearne is not hesitant to call his work political. His labeling of his music is an indication of the hyper self-awareness that comes with contemporary identity politics, news cycles, pastiche ideologies, and an informed sense of political agency. Hearne’s work has decidedly fallen upon what many call ‘political’ because of the content it uses: 2015’s The Source, 2018’s Sounds from the Bench. Political, as such, emerges as a comment or presentation upon information and events. ‘Political music’ occupies a different social space than the ‘politics of music’ – the latter being the zone of censorship, discrimination and stigma. The sometimes unintended social reactions to music. In addition to the content, Hearne reveals where the politics emerges from: his response to information. The role of the witness.

Sounds from the Bench, 2018

The Source reveals an emotional response to the information leaked by Chelsea Manning (as opposed to say a composer taking this information and then writing a piece that is intently conveying a political position). Sounds from the Bench is a piece based on the Supreme Court oral arguments of Citizens United, which gave corporate entities personhood by granting them legal rights as people. Sounds from the Bench was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which was given that year to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.’ Hearne, no doubt grateful for the placement in the prestigious prize’s shortlist, commented, however, about the exclusionary practice of the award against people and music of color.

Aesthetically, Sounds from the Bench uses voices and electrified instruments to underpin the line between humans and non-humans. That is novel about Ted’s politics: it is something fresh but also reflected in political discourse nowadays – the subjective nature of truth or rather how we respond to truth, how machines are entering further into our daily lives, how political governance is failing at organizing social needs of communities. In other words, Ted’s music is not a truth-claim but an impression of the truth, and this impression is what is communicated musically.

Musical Pathways

So what is socially engaging music? Is there any music that is not? Or is it that Mr. Hearne’s music attempts to connect the fields of society and aesthetics in a way that we do not commonly encounter? Ted’s music has been touted as such. The label is curious because Ted’s music seems to highlight that however we once thought of the autonomy of music from social forces (that 19th century notion), it clearly shaped and is shaping, of the social forces around. In other words, every music is socially engaging by virtue of it being music – music being a social practice.

Music leads the way for our social explorations. Aesthetic risks, challenges and comfort involved in much of Hearne’s music. To dwell on the trope of being “ahead of one’s time” asserts music’s bullish properties: Hearne’s music is not reflecting society, it is actively showing us a way forward. That finger that music is point back at us is, in fact, leading the way.

Still from Blue Falling ©2019 by Rachel Perry

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH
NOVEMBER 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

FOLLOW TED HEARNE FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
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Finding Freedom in the Format // An interview with Ashwini Ramaswamy

by Liquid Music Blog Contributor Patrick Marschke

Collage by Peter Groynam

There often seems to be a paradox at work in the world of Western classical music. How is it possible for orchestras and classical music organizations to stay relevant and contemporary while preserving and venerating music that was created decades and sometimes centuries ago? In response to this dilemma, one of the primary missions of Liquid Music over the course of the past 8 seasons has been to discover and showcase all that is new and alive in the world of classical music. Yet, is this perceived tension between the binaries of new versus old, contemporary versus classical, and boundary-pushing versus tradition-bound a uniquely “Western” point of view? 

For many music cultures and traditions, exploring the past through vibrant contemporary art practices while respecting lineage and heritage is standard procedure. In the Twin Cities we have been lucky enough to have one such institution in our community since 1992: Ragamala Dance Company, which approaches the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam as a living, breathing language that speaks about the contemporary human experience. Ragamala’s Ashwini Ramaswamy is pushing this mentality even further with her Liquid Music commissioned work Let The Crows Come, premiering November 8–9 at The Lab Theater in Minneapolis. 

The work takes place in three unique choreographic worlds: Ramaswamy’s section explores her take on Ragamala’s specific lineage of Bharatanatyam, while dancer/choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren interpolate Ramaswamy’s movements and gestures through their own distinct and refined schools of movement. Similarly, each of the three sections of solo dance is accompanied by uniquely composed sonic worlds: a Carnatic chamber ensemble consisting of mridangam, voice, and violin; Brent Arnold’s electro-acoustic approach to cello; and Jace Clayton’s live sampling, acousmatic, and DJ aesthetic.

Jace Clayton’s research around digital music culture seems particularly salient to this work and for that reason scattered throughout the conversation below you’ll find quotes from Jace’s book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, which deeply resonated with Ramaswamy’s creative process. Both the book and Let The Crows Come challenge readers and audiences to embrace the idea that no art form is frozen in time, and that artists will continue to find freedom within their framework.

“If this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.” — Ashwini Ramaswamy

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[This interview took place on October 14, 2019, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Patrick Marschke: So, where is the project at at this point? 

Ashwini Ramaswamy: All the choreography is done for the dancers: Berit Ahlgren, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, and I. We've been working for about a year, just in little spurts. Now the main big “to do” is integrating dance and music. 

Photo by Tanner Young

I leave on Sunday to meet with all the musicians in Akron, Ohio, to the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. It'll be a chance to see how everything sounds and how it looks on stage. It's also the first time that everyone's getting together for the show. Jace [Clayton], unfortunately, can't make it to that but he'll Skype in. It's my hope that there'll be some opportunities for overlapping musicians within sections. Up until this residency, I've only worked with a very rough recording of my section. Brent and Jace are still composing, and they need to see the dance to bring everything to life. It's going to be very cool to see the dynamics at play after next week and then how it evolves as the piece tours.

PM: I happened to be at your work-in-progress conversation at The Parkway last winter — It seemed like even at that point the overall conceptual framework was really strong, so it could hold up to things moving around within that and lots of exciting development.

AR: Yeah, there's a lot that I'm excited about because it's been in my head for so long. I'm kind of excited for the unknowns, which is a lot of what we're going to encounter next week.

PM: What is the specific orchestration for the three sections?

AR: So far the thinking is Brent will be the instrumental constant amongst the three sections. He won't play in every single part of every section but because all the effects he creates on his cello, he can work in both the electronic and acoustic realms of the music and can bridge the two worlds together. What we did at our Baryshnikov Arts Center residency last year in New York, when Brent came in for the first time, we had an opening song where he played his cello like the tanpura instead of having the drone box, which ended up being really cool. Even if it's just something as subtle as that, it adds a different texture.

For my solo, we have Carnatic vocals by Roopa Mahadevan, Carnatic violin by Arun Ramamurthy, and mridangam/ghatam/kanjira by Rohan Krishnamurthy. Then the second section is Brent's piece, which I know will definitely at least incorporate some of the percussion and probably violin, too. As of right now, Jace is basically DJing the third section so that there's still the live component. Depending on how everything sounds Jace will be sampling earlier sections and potentially performing live with The Carnatic ensemble as well. 

You have to be very careful about mixing genres in a way that's not going to be obvious, cheesy, or appropriative. Everything has to feel really comfortable with each other. And when you don't have a ton of time, you want to make sure that it doesn't look like they're putting something on top of something else.

Something that I really want to try is to change the order of the dances from night to night so that it's not always going from Carnatic to classical to contemporary — or whatever you want to call each of the sections. The terms don’t really do it justice. Ideally, we wouldn’t necessarily know what the order is going to be until the day of the performance. So as an audience member, just understanding like, "oh, this could be in any order. What would that look like?" and knowing that it's malleable, is exciting to me. 

PM: There's a really good quote in Jace Clayton’s book that applies to what we are talking about. He was talking about a completely different genre of music but he said 

"The seeming effortlessness with which lifelong musicians summon voices from their instruments always takes my breath away. A guitar, in my hands, is just a strangely shaped piece of wood, a book in a language I can’t read. I whipped out my phone to grab some video, then my thumb froze above the touch screen. If I recorded it, I’d never watch it. These unrepeatable moments are as throwaway as they are priceless — they have to be. There is value in being free and as lost as all the music before Edison. Improvisation gives lightness to history’s weight" (pg. 236, Uproot). 

You are obviously very studied in Bharatanatyam and part of a very long lineage, but it seems like the modularity with this specific piece lightens the weight of all of that.

AR: Exactly. Then you get that sense of "the unknown" as I mentioned earlier. As an audience member that's exciting.

PM: Yeah, there's a risk that is perceivable as well. It has a little spark to it. So are each of the musicians correlated with specific dancers?

AR: Yes — I'll perform with the Carnatic Ensemble, Brent is with Alanna, and Jace's portion will be with Berit. 

PM: Have you considered making any other part of the performance modular?

AR: Well, there are sections where we're all dancing together within each solo. So everyone does get to perform with everyone else’s music. That wasn't always the intention, but I just felt it was too stark to only have three solos. Basically I'm just being guided by what I want to see on stage. And so if I was to go to this show, I would want to see us dancing together. Maybe not in a way you might expect, but we will be on stage together at various points in addition to the solos. And personally, I want to dance to all the different kinds of music as do the other dancers. It's an exciting challenge.

PM: It sounds like some aspects of the piece have changed rather significantly since your initial conception of it. Where were you at in your life when you first thought of this idea?

AR: It's really taken a lot of twists and turns. First, the whole thing started when I was thinking about how a DJ takes a song and mixes it, changes it up, changes the beat, just even in the most basic way — you have an essence that is kept and then you have a new version. I saw a similarity to being a second or third generation Indian-American where you have facets of you that have to navigate. It's code-switching. What parts of yourself do you want to keep around for which conversation? How Indian are you today? How American are you? My own experience almost felt like a remixing of culture. So that was just something I was thinking about. 

Without any idea of a bigger project, my husband Zach actually suggested that I connect with Kate [Nordstrum, Liquid Music’s Curator]. I've known her for a while since she worked at the Southern Theater when I used to perform there all the time. I knew that she was working with the SPCO on Liquid Music projects and very well versed in contemporary composers, so I basically wanted to just ask her if there was any musician that I should check in with to develop something. She immediately suggested Jace. This was three years ago now. 

Since then, it's been a lot of building and lesson learning because I'm pretty new to choreography. This is only my second or third evening-length work and my first time working with non-Indian dancers. Initially, I think in my mind I thought the project would be a solo piece. But once we started talking to Jace, then the concept or theme of Let The Crows Come begin to overlay with what we were trying to do with the music. Then things just kept changing since we had the luxury of time.

PM: Which is so rare!

AR: It's been amazing because I'm also full time here at Ragamala and we have been creating work at the same time as I was creating Let The Crows Come. Sometimes it's nice to be like "I only have a year," but it was kind of nice to say: "we can see how the project takes shape as it should." And then once it became three dancers instead of solo it sort of seemed to make sense to have three composers instead of two. 

I always intended to have an Indian composer for my section — I wanted to use a Carnatic composer as well because there's so much to learn regarding traditional Carnatic compositional practices. I didn't want to put two things together that were so separate without having some connection musically to Bharatantyam. That connection is really important to me. About a year and a half ago was when we decided to add a third composer. It's all sort of been slowly working and re-working from there.

PM: Has it felt like too much time? Would you take another year if you had a chance?

AR: I would not take it. I think that'd be too much time!

PM: So now it feels like you're perfectly where you'd want it to be?

AR:  I would say yes. For the first year we were Liquid Music’s artists in virtual residency. We took that year and just talked a lot about the project. We got together three times that year just to see what would make sense.

PM: So it started off more inherently exploratory thanks to the virtual residency?

AR: Absolutely. At first, Kate was thinking it'd be a split evening: I would do half an evening and another artist would do the other. And then I said, “No, I want the whole evening!” [chuckles]

PM: In a way, it has kind of organically grown into that in its own way with the three choreographers and composers.

AR: Yeah, and I'm learning so much because I'm sort of the director of the whole thing. And, as I said, I'm basically being guided by personal aesthetics. It lets me ask, “What do you want to see? What do you want here? What do you want to do?” Sometimes it can be overwhelming to be like, "Well, what if what I want to see isn't what everyone wants to see?" But at some point, you can't fixate on that. That gut instinct is what you have to go with.

PM: Yeah, totally. And you can put your trust in your collaborators as well.

AR: Well, that's a huge part of it is: you pick people that you know are gonna kill it. 

PM: I read that there was an open call for dancers. What was your thinking behind just rather than just reaching out to people that you just knew or had worked with previously?

AR: I did some of that. But people are really busy and it was hard to figure out schedules so I decided that I would just put out an open call. I got a bunch of videos. Both [Alanna and Berit] came from TU Dance. I was drawn to the fact that they both have very different but very highly trained dance backgrounds, and they're both dance backgrounds that I really like to watch. Alanna I've known of and had been watching for a long time. We've both wanted to work with each other for a long time and finally, the scheduling worked out for this project. And then for Berit, I was actually on a grant panel and saw her work sample, and based on that I reached out to her. 

PM: So Berit works within the Gaga framework. What school of dance is Alanna coming from?

AR: She went to Juilliard. And she's got a lot of Graham, but she also has roots in Trinidad and so she's been working with Afro-Caribbean dance. And then of course TU Dance has an Ailey lineage. All that sounded interesting to me. 

It kind of worked out perfectly, because before I had dancers cast the whole structure was: one dancer will do an extrapolation of gesture which requires long lines and flow, which Alanna has beautifully. The other was: we'll watch my choreography in reverse and see what sticks out as interesting — what looks odd and what looked beautiful. Gaga is a form I am fascinated by and works very well for this purpose. That reversal is actually part of their process: they learn movement in reverse so that the body has a greater grasp of what it can do. So when I brought it up with Berit said: “oh yeah, we often do that in class.” And so she really took to that.

Ashwini Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren at The Parkway Theater for a work-in-progress conversation in early 2019

PM: To step back a little bit maybe give some context for Bharatanatyam. Are there a few words that you feel really capture Bharatanatyam?

AR: Well this would probably apply to all styles of dance worldwide, but there are just so many subtle and vastly different schools of Bharatanatyam thought and technique. So I can only speak to the very specific lineage that we [Ragamala/Ramaswamy family] come from. 

Our teacher in India, Smt. Alarmél Valli, has done something which I find unique within Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam is a very spiritual dance form, that is pretty common throughout all of the styles. But our teacher takes the idea of where it came from (which is depicting Hindu mythology) and will find poetry from a variety of sources, not just Indian poetry, that speaks to her deeply and her own truthful emotion. Texts that she can understand and she can feel and she'll layer meaning on top of that so that you what you end up with is not simply a retelling of an old story, but a personalization of something that feels really true. It's not a regurgitation. It's not: "I went to the park today." It's: "When I went to the park today, I saw this flower which reminded me of my grandfather..." and so on. 

It gives you this place of depth and texture and meaning that is very difficult to get to. But if you are able to achieve it, it's very defining in our lineage of Bharatanatyam. True emotion and being able to get people on board with that on stage, coupled with a very rigorous physicality and dexterity of feet and hands. When it all comes together, it's just a very complex, multidimensional form.

PM: It's so fascinating to hear that her practice is so rooted in extrapolating sources through her own medium, which seems to be at the heard of Let The Crows Come.

AR: Exactly. So it's a way of creating work that I think we have absorbed just as being her students for all these years. We've seen how she layers and recontextualized sources while staying true to the technique in the form that she's learned from her teacher. You get a really personalized version of an ancient form. I think all art *is* contemporary in that way. It's just how she chooses to do it.

PM: So for someone that doesn't know anything about Ragamala or Bharatanatyam can you talk about how a work is created within your specific lineage?

AR: I would say there are two different tracks that work ends up being created: One is when you are introduced to or you meet another artist you want to work with and you build the work around that. Maybe a musician or another dancer that you seek out. The second track being a theme that you really want to explore. You take that theme and usually add other sources to it, layering music and other poetic, theatrical, or literary texts. Bharatanatyam is inherently multidisciplinary. It is meant to bring to life sculpture. It is meant to bring to life psychology, theater, and music. Whatever you start with, you will eventually build it to become multidisciplinary. 

The initial inspiration for Ragamala's last work, Written in Water, was a board game called Paramapadam, which the British made into Snakes and Ladders. It was a game meant to teach children about destiny and fate: if you roll this one way you may go to upper a ladder to heaven or you may go down a snake. And because all of these myths and all these games and ideas have multiple meanings and varied ways of thinking about them, it's not all literal. So it's mining their subtext. The music ended up being a combination of classical Carnatic and Iraqi maqam created by composer/trumpeter Amir ElSaffar. We commissioned original projections from Keshav, an artist in Chennai, India. Everything was layered to become this multimedia work. 

PM: So when you travel back to India to study with your teacher is she teaching you choreography that ends up in Ragamala’s work?

AR: No, Ranee and Aparna choreograph all of Ragamala's work, and I began choreographing with them in 2015. We go back to her for technique and to keep gaining knowledge. It's somewhat like going back to graduate school to get a creative writing MFA: you need to do your research, do your reading, hone your craft, and then you can create your own work. It's very much like that. We often compare it to writing because people have a hard time grasping that the choreography is new even though it is created within our lineage of Bharatanatyam -- it's like having a vocabulary that you draw from instead of having to create a completely new language every time you start developing a new work.

PM: I can't think of like a parallel to the academic rigor that there seems to be at the heart of Carnatic music and dance. Do you have a good way of describing the “Carnatic Academy” and Indian society’s relationship to it?

AR: Well, it's daunting to be from someone who's from America because all the people who grew up in India, all that cultural context is just absorbed in them. So it's interesting when my mom and sister and I get together because my mom has cultural knowledge of the music, customs, rituals, traditions, and language deeply embedded within her-- everything is second nature to her. My sister was born in India and came here when she was three so she has had a deeper connection to India than I do having been born here. But I have influences and experiences here that they don’t have. So we work in this continuum. 

But it is complicated. There's so much knowledge out there that you will never attain. And I think part of the appeal of practicing this art form is that you are never going to be a master. I think more people should embrace that because you could be great, but you are probably never going to be the greatest. You never know everything, and that's an important and humbling and very central to Indian & Hindu philosophy. You have a guru. As long as your guru is there, someone knows more than you. That is very important.

PM: How would this work be viewed from the Academy setting in India?

AR: People are experimenting with genre, dance, and music all over India too. It's definitely not just people in the West. Ragamala has toured in India, and people seem to really appreciate the fact that we don't change the core of our dance practice. What we prefer is a subtextual, nuanced, and subtle approaches to creating our work. 

There's a lot of social justice slanted work in the contemporary Bharatanatyam realm happening in India and other places. I think that what we feel is that just by creating work you are guided to hopefully feel a certain way but not told what to think about the work at all. We try to give our audiences a little bit more agency to take from it what they want. 

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We try to give our audiences agency to take from it what they want. Creating work as an immigrant woman is in itself kind of radical. That's kind of the space that we encompass, which is not to tell you what to think about this or that issue, but rather if this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.

PM: So it's not necessarily building a work around a politic, but that the process of making it work is inherently instilled with politics.

AR: Yeah, I think so. There's nothing wrong with any of those approaches. It's just a personal preference, like any other creative approach. We want our audience to take from it what they, and hopefully keep thinking about the piece for a while after seeing it. 

PM: Do you feel like you have to make sure that your technique is perfect to be taken seriously?

AR: Well, first of all, we have a teacher who is very exacting. She will do something a thousand times — and it's not even about perfect technique. It's about feeling like you won't get that truth out of a performer if they don't 100% know their stuff. You gotta know your stuff! Only then you can start exploring and improvising. So I think that is more of where we're at: It's not about "you have to have perfect technique." It's: "If you haven't done the work to make it the best it can possibly be, then what business do you have?" I do think that in order to showcase our art and have it taken seriously here, there should be no doubt that you put in that work. I think that about all art forms.  

PM: I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between Carnatic music and “Western” music (for lack of a better term) — I find it fascinating that Carnatic music is able to create so much tension with rhythm and melody alone as opposed to Western music’s reliance chord changes to create tension and resolution.

AR: I like that the musicians can manipulate the rhythm to the point that the listener won't quite understand where the beat is. It adds a lot of excitement to the dance. But also the ragas you choose, of which there are probably infinite, have a huge effect on the performance. I find I'm drawn almost exclusively to Ragas that don't feel resolved, that have a "minor" quality and aspects about them that sound a little haunting, and even end that way. And every time I say I like a raga it will have some sort of minor or some kind of key jump that doesn't ever feel resolved or sweet, it's more haunting or something. And so the combination of picking a raga or these times signatures in the way that you can play with them just gives so much opportunity for... not necessarily tension but surprise, which I like.

PM: There’s a paragraph in Uproot that I thought might resonate with. Jace is talking about DJing at The Loft in NYC in the 2000s:

“Those late nights at the lofts taught me never to take an audience for granted. It's not something that just materializes and passively consumes your creation. Especially in the visual arts, there's this sense that an artist makes his or her work, installs it in a gallery and that's it. Little consideration is given to who's going to see and how they might engage with it. Whereas up in the Loft, engagement with the audience was everything: the crowd responded to the energy of the mix and the DJs fed off that creating a tight feedback loop. The audience became a form of intelligence and expression in of itself. The people in the room were never entirely separate from the performers.” (pg. 11, Uproot)

How does like listening to the music and then in performing for audiences in such tightly structured work like Bharatanatyam relate to that?

AR: It's interesting because in its original state Bharatanatyam is a solo dance with live music. So it's not as tightly constructed as you might think because the dancer has practiced so much that they can kind of follow the musicians and vice versa. So the dancer won't do it the same every time. 

Photo by Tanner Young

Indian Arts have a philosophy called Bhava and Rasa, Which is the relationship between audience and viewer and that it's reciprocal, that you need each other, which I very much believe. There is a conversation happening there. In India the audiences are much less formal than audiences here. People will walk around and talk, and you know, "Aha!" and "Bravo," basically talking to the performers and clapping whenever they want. It's much more of an active participation. Which is cool in some ways. But also in some ways, it's also like, sometimes you don't really want people walking around or talking during your performance. But they feel comfortable, which is nice. 

I've always been fascinated with DJs having to read a crowd and change what they're playing based on what they think people are going to respond to. I think it would be really hard. It seems like sometimes people think that a DJ is just hitting play on a recording but it's very much like being a live musician. That's part of what we're playing within this piece: we've got this tradition of Carnatic music, where they're playing instruments live and improvising. You should feel the same way about what the DJs are doing.

PM: It seems like the word “improvisation,” at least in the way use that word when talking about American music, doesn’t really capture what you are talking about here.

AR: It's hard. So much of this is a language barrier. That's part of the whole practice and technical proficiency thing we were talking about earlier. If you do a piece three times a day, even just in a very basic way spatially, you start figuring things out. Like if you go to this part of the stage and turn this much. You might do it a different way that feels equally good and then feel much freer because you know all of the options and you can fully explore any of those options. You have to practice that much in order to get that improvisatory feel, which I think might be counterintuitive to some people, but to me, it makes total sense. 

A lot of improvisation in Bharatanatyam has to do with space: taking up more or less space or where you're going and then having this vocabulary to draw from. Specific hand gestures definitely mean certain things, but you have multiple options for each word or each meaning that you could potentially draw from and change as long as the musicians know this is what I'm going to do to finish it up, and then we can go onto the next thing.

PM: It seems really difficult to capture in words how improvisation works within Bharatanatyam — I’d imagine that a lot of folks see it as very “tight.” But at the same time, the mridangam player is basically doing calculus to resolve on the correct beat while improvising and reacting to the dancer.

AR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for improvisation in dance from a Western perspective also sometimes feels more "free in a space" or like "jamming" — it doesn't feel as "set." What we do is more "set" like in the traditional sense of the word. There are still a lot of rules. We just find the rules very freeing. It's technique and when you're able to follow rules in some ways you can play with them more. 

PM: Are there any aspirations for this piece to live on past this initial tour?

AR: Well it will definitely tour for the next two years. Who knows about what will happen after that! I'm definitely interested in continuing this idea of using other dancers who don't do Indian dance — working with them on some of the principles of the dance form and kind of manipulating and extrapolating on them.

PM: Has any part of the creative process in developing this piece been especially surprising or has it all felt very organic and intuitive? 

AR: I mean... at this point, I literally have no idea what it's gonna look like because we have never all been in the same room...

PM: Is that exciting or terrifying?

AR: I've seen all the sections on their own, so I know it'll work. And the Lab is going to be an interesting space for it because you can't really hide in there. There's no wings or anything. So we're just gonna embrace that and not worry about trying to disappear and be in that space together. It's going to be fine [chuckles].

PM: Another quote from the book that seems relevant to our conversation: 

“Sampling can forge cultural links just as easily as it can sustain a stereopype … more and more I saw sampling used to maintain cultural distance.” (pg. 184, Uproot)

It seems like you use the words “extrapolation” and “interpolation” to describe the process of the other two dancers interpreting your choreography. It might be another failure of words to describe art, but can you differentiate “extrapolation” from “appropriation?” 

AR: I'm working very closely with the other dancers — they are directly taking from my solo, right? Every movement that the other dancers are doing I've directed in some way based on what I'm doing. So I still feel like it has to do with my personal feelings of having different experiences as an American. I take what I want from being Indian, and use it in different ways -- it's a lens into a crazy multicultural experiment. Though I do want to be careful with what we're doing. It's definitely not "I'm giving you this thing and you're just going to do what you want with it." I'm very much overseeing everything and making sure that I feel like it makes sense and that it feels like me.

PM: Yeah. And it's a two-way dialogue. It's not taking, it's sharing.

AR: Right. Exactly. So they all feel like it's them too. I've definitely never wanted to teach another non-Bharatanatyam person to do Bharatanatyam — that was never the point. It was more like: "you're amazing" and "what does this, what does this remind you of?" and then we work from there.

PM:  Do you foresee this style of collaboration being a big part of your work in the future?

AR: Yeah, I think so. Maybe a goal would be to see if someday a non-Indian company would want someone like me to set work on them. It doesn't really happen like that for culturally-based forms in the way it does for other dance forms. You see that there are all kinds of non-ballet choreographers setting work on ballet companies even though they're not trained in ballet. I'm not sure I'd be interested in that specifically, but it is something I'm thinking about. 

PM: It seems like having self-produced all of your own work you've developed a director brain that is valuable in so many different performative art practices, even outside of dance.

AR: There's a lot more to learn too. I'd like to keep expanding on these ideas, maybe starting with solos and going into more group stuff. It's very stressful at the beginning and then it becomes kind of fun as long as you don't worry about it being a huge failure [chuckles]. And in some ways, it's like, why are we doing this if we are not trying new things?

PM: Can you talk more about the symbology of the title of the work, Let The Crows Come?

AR: I had been reading an article about crows, and realized that I never really thought about crows. I think it was a short article in The Guardian about how crows are very misunderstood. They're very communal; they defend each other and can make tools— and more of these cool little stories. I had always thought of them as a nuisance or creatures that predict doom. 

In Hinduism, there is a belief that crows play a major role in linking the living to the dead. In this sense, they bring to vivid life the spirits of the past. Pitru Paksha (meaning fortnight of the ancestors) is a period when Hindus pay tribute to their ancestors so that the departed souls can rest in peace. After burning a mixture of sandalwood and camphor, rice is offered to the crows. 

I developed the visual language of Let the Crows Come from a variety of textual sources, including the epic poem Ramayana, second-century Tamil Sangam poetry, and ancient Sanskrit texts called the Brihatsamhita and Kakajarita. These sources allow us entry into a world where the human, the natural and the metaphysical — as well as past, present and future — are forever engaged in sacred movement. 

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Buy Tickets to Let The Crows Come

Read more about Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton’s Virtual Residency on the Liquid Music blog:

• INTERVIEW: BRENT ARNOLD ON "LET THE CROWS COME"

• ARTIST IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE: ASHWINI RAMASWAMY, ENTRY #2

• LIQUID MUSIC ARTIST IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE: JACE CLAYTON

• LIQUID MUSIC CONNECTS: STUDENTS VISIT "VIRTUALLY" WITH ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE ASHWINI RAMASWAMY AND JACE CLAYTON AKA DJ RUPTURE

• LIQUID MUSIC ARTIST IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE: JACE CLAYTON DJ/RUPTURE

• LIQUID MUSIC ARTIST IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE: ASHWINI RAMASWAMY

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Website: http://www.ashwini-ramaswamy.com/
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Follow Jace Clayton:
Website: jaceclayton.com
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Twitter: @djrupture (twitter.com/djrupture)

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