Liquid Music Series

‘Let the Crows Come’

Ashwini Ramaswamy, bharatanatyam
Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, modern
Roopa Mahadevan, voice
Arun Ramamurthy, violin
Brent Arnold, cello + electronics

Evoking mythography and ancestry, Let the Crows Come depicts crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed. In a series of three dance solos (by Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, and Berit Ahlgren), with music by three composers (Jace Clayton, Prema Ramamurthy, and Brent Arnold), this work deconstructs, extrapolates, and retrogrades Bharatanatyam (south Indian classical dance) and Carnatic (south Indian classical music) to explore how memory and homeland channel both guidance and dislocation. Using these Indian forms as their point of inspiration, the artists explore deconstruction, iteration, and crossing cultures. Let the Crows Come layers Ramaswamy’s visceral interpretation of ancestry, ritual, and tradition with a genre-defying evolution of movement and music across cultural and corporeal boundaries.