Events
RAVENS: Upcoming Event
RAVENS is a new dance production from nATANDA that reexamines our perception of the crow. With technical expertise and soul-born intensity, Sri Lanka’s premiere modern dance troupe forces us to see beyond our vague conception of a “bad” bird with a black coat, revealing a dynamic being with feathers traced in cobalt, lavender, silver, and midnight blue.
Divided into eleven parts, the performance follows a group of ravens struggling to coexist. We watch the dancers give birth to crows and then we watch the crows give birth to a world where the birds become not just “bad” and not just “good.” This is an outside world, a world of flying dust and smoke and stray dogs, a world of hopscotch between the broken glass and half-eaten curry packets and sewage streams and burning trash, a world of blood-stained beaks and bones along the train tracks, of sea breezes and thieving perched atop the rusting razor wire, of shared shiny plastic scraps gathered from the city’s scarred pavement, of making love in shanty alleys, of sleeping in the long arms of Nuga trees, of migrating from garbage tower to garbage tower, of living together, of always messy living.
RAVENS mirrors this mess, but does not simply imitate. Though the dance’s vocabulary owes as much to the observed movements of the crow – the staggered flutter of a wing, the frantic twitch of an eye, the sensual brush of one feathered neck against another – as to the techniques of modern composition, the essence of the drama, its blood, is as human as is it animal. Sometimes hostile, brutal, violent, sometimes gentle, selfless, loving, the raven remains divided, back-and-forth, like us, but still always finding new ways to survive.
Dostoevsky once wrote, “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
Yes, it is through infinitely adaptable eyes, the eyes of crows that RAVENS compels us to see our own contradictions, the pain and the mystery, the ugliness married to the sublime.