How should we live? Artist Reflections on Invisible Cities
In preparation for Ashwini Ramaswamy and Kevork Mourad: Invisible Cities premiering Jan 27 & 28 at The Cowles Center, we invited Ramaswamy and dance collaborator Joe Tran to reflect on Italo Calvino’s expansive metaphysical novel and their relationship to the text.
photo by Amanulla
Ashwini Ramaswamy:
As a Bharatanatyam choreographer with a deep interest in literature, texts are often the first source of a new project. This reimagining of Italo Calvino’s metaphysical/philosophical novel of the same name is told through interwoven cultural perspectives. As a South Indian artist, my work synthesizes myth, spirituality, and texts, aiming to resurrect a relationship with the past and reprocess that past into the present.
The Invisible Cities performance extends beyond the kinetic realm with live, interactive projections created by internationally renowned artist Kevork Mourad, a long- time admirer of Calvino’s book. Mourad employs his technique of live drawing and animation, developing a collaboration in which art, music and movement harmonize with one another. Both haunting and hopeful, ethereal and full of depth, Mourad’s visual architectures provide a dynamic and unpredictable dimension to the performance.
What first drew me to this book was the title. The phrase Invisible Cities conjures so many images and ideas, then you start reading and it feels like a puzzle that keeps growing more intriguing and mysterious. This classic philosophical novel deals with matters that are as prescient today as they were when it was published; that relevance, combined with the potential for artistic and ethical dialogues about built environments, natural environments, and how humanity can share this world, are what inspired me to spearhead this project.
Invisible Cities is set up as a dialogue between the aging emperor Kublai Khan and the explorer Marco Polo. Polo describes the fantastical, beguiling cities that are part of Khan’s vast empire, places where things are never as they seem. Each short chapter describes a different city, 55 in all.
In this adaptation, the bulk of the choreographic ideas come from these conversations between Polo and Khan rather than the descriptions of the cities themselves. I worked closely with each lead choreographer (Berit Ahlgren, Alanna Morris, and Joseph Tran) and visual artist Kevork Mourad to pull out the images and philosophical ideas that define each section of the evening.
The Bharatanatyam section is the only one that is inspired by a city, the city of Andria:
ANDRIA WAS BUILT so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city’s calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other. Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city’s life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria’s citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time. They looked at one another dumbfounded. “But why? Whoever said such a thing?” And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo grove, a shadow-theater under construction in the place of the municipal kennels, now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague victims were cured, and – just inaugurated – a river port, a statue of Thales, a toboggan slide. “And these innovations do not disturb your city’s astral rhythm?” I asked. “Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly,” they answered, “that any change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars.” The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova’s explosion, or a remote point in the firmament’s change of color from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city and the sky never remain the same. As for the character of Andria’s inhabitants, two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky’s pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.
In keeping with the celestial theme of Andria, and to connect this city with Indian spirituality, mythology, and philosophy, the choreography revolves around the creation of the universe through a Hindu lens:
In the beginning there was chaos. Everything existed in a formless, fluid state. Brahma, the creator of this universe asked, "How do I bring order to this disorder?"
He created the magnificent Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, wisdom, music, arts, and spiritual consciousness. The goddess uttered, “Knowledge helps man find possibilities where once he saw problems." Under her tutelage Brahma acquired the ability to sense, think, comprehend and communicate. He began to look at the chaos through the wisdom he had acquired and saw the beautiful potential that lay therein. The cosmos began to acquire shape and structure. The sky was dotted with stars and rose from the heavens, the sea sank into the abyss below and the earth materialized and stood still. The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the tide flowed and ebbed. Seasons changed, seeds germinated, plants bloomed and withered, animals migrated and reproduced as randomness gave way to the rhythm of life. Brahma thus became the creator of the world with Saraswati as his wisdom.
The choreography of the section was co-created with my mother Ranee Ramaswamy and sister Aparna Ramaswamy (Artistic Directors of Ragamala Dance Company), and layers this mythological tale with imagery from Andria. Kevork will illustrate celestial bodies and the cosmos/universe in the video projections and live drawings that accompany this section.
I leave you with a reflection on Invisible Cities by author Eric Weiner:
At some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Calvino's cities — like all cities, really — are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought experiment, or, as Polo tells Khan at one point, ‘You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.’ The question that Calvino seems to be asking is a big one: How should we live?
This is a slim book, only 165 pages, but it's not the kind you devour in one sitting. I find myself pausing every two or three pages to process what I have just read. Not because Calvino's writing is difficult to penetrate, but simply because he packs so much into each sentence. There is so much there there. It's best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveler — slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world. Calvino ends the description of one city, Tamara, with a warning: "You leave Tamara without having discovered it." So it is with Invisible Cities. I leave it, again and again, and yet never discover it — never really know it. That is precisely what keeps drawing me back to this strange and wonderful little book.”
photo by Isabel Fajardo
Joe Tran:
The entire book is an inspiration for me so it is difficult to pinpoint a specific chapter or passage that influenced my work. The novel did allow me to meditate about my own life and society as a whole. I believe that each chapter and conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are designed to make the reader reflect. For example, each city has an essence that makes it unique but almost always comes with a price to pay, while the conversations with the protagonists can be interpreted as having a conversation with oneself. I read Invisible Cities at the beginning of the pandemic and while crimes against Asians in America was increasing. I am a second generation Vietnamese American who was born and raised in Minnesota. My dad immigrated here in the 1970s and supported my family by running a very successful business working with electronics—he is the definition of living the American dream—a true entrepreneur who "pulled himself up by his bootstraps." He is also literally the most generous and selfless human I know. However, during the advent of COVID-19 and stereotypes against Asian people which led to an increase in racism, my dad advised me to be "invisible" wherever I go. He told me that when he goes anywhere, he keeps his head down, minds his business and leaves as quickly as possible. Hearing this from him made me extremely sad. It forced me to further examine and reflect on how disproportionate opportunities are for not only people of color, but how much good work often goes ignored in general (from who America designated as "essential workers" and how unbalanced the treatment of those workers were, to the overall inequities of the United States).
Invisible Cities to me is about the people that truly make a city what it is. My work is to highlight and celebrate not only the selfless work my dad does for myself and his family, but to all the people that you can't or don't see. The ones that grind, work overtime, perform thankless jobs and do the best they can—all the while not complaining and getting the job done—because it must be done.