Choreograph Your Classic: Reimagining Stories for the Stage
Thu, Jan 19, 7:30 pm
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
Moderated by Will McGrath
Join Ashwini Ramaswamy, lead choreographer of Invisible Cities, and Will McGrath (author, Everything Lost is Found Again, Farewell Transmission) as they discuss her process of adapting Italo Calvino's book as a multi-faceted dance performance (premieres January 27 and 28, 2023). Long an inspiration for artists of many disciplines, Calvino's 1973 novel is a meditation on the environments all around us. The Invisible Cities performance will evoke the book's themes through movement communicated via four dance traditions: Bharatanatyam (Classical Indian), Modern/African Diasporic, Breaking, and Gaga, as Syrian-American digital artist Kevork Mourad fills the space with live illustrations. Hear from Ramaswamy and the other lead choreographers Alanna Morris, Berit Ahlgren, and Joseph ‘MN Joe’ Tran as they describe their process of finding cohesion and harmony among the myriad perspectives they bring to their work.
Ashwini Ramaswamy is the lead choreographer and director of Invisible Cities. She has practiced the South Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam for more than 30 years; as a founding member of Ragamala Dance Company, directed by her mother Ranee and sister Aparna, Ashwini has toured worldwide. Her choreography has been a critic’s pick in The New York Times, and among the “Best of the Year” in The Washington Post, The Star Tribune, and MinnPost. Her work has been commissioned by The Liquid Music Series, The American Dance Platform, Macalester College, and The Great Northern Festival, among others; developed in residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, UNC Chapel Hill, Kohler Arts Center, the National Center for Choreography, the Bogliasco Foundation (Bogliasco, Italy), and the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France - 2023); and supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, National Dance Project, MAP Fund, South Asian Resiliency Fund, US Artists International, the Jerome Foundation and the McKnight Foundation.
Will McGrath is the author of Everything Lost Is Found Again, which won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography & Memoir, as well as the Dzanc/Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize. Kirkus Reviews called his new book, Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces, "a tour de force." His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, AFAR, Guernica, Foreign Affairs, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications.
Related event: