A dance for a world in crisis: Ananya Dance Theatre presents ’Antaranga: Between You and Me’
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This is one of the last rehearsals for the big show.
People walking down University Avenue peer in the wall of windows at the Shawngram Institute for Performance & Social Justice in St. Paul.
Inside is a whoosh of activity. Nine dancers spiral as one, legs and arms akimbo. They leap and hold tender embraces and sculptural poses. They laugh, cry and howl. Their flexed feet slap the floor, a percussive trail into another world.
The music cuts and someone yells blackout. After 90 minutes, the dancers are done.
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“Very nice,” says dancer Ananya Chatterjea, catching her breath. “Everything is always getting better. We just have to make sure ‘Honey’ feels good, rehearsed.”
Ananya Dance Theatre has been working on this piece for a year. On Sept. 27 and 28, the St. Paul dance ensemble will premiere “Antaranga: Between You and Me” at St. Catherine University’s O’Shaughnessy theater.
The piece was created by Chatterjea, artistic director and founder of Ananya Dance Theatre. She calls it a feminist mythology, set in a world where most people have lost the ability to care for one another. A select few with heart-opening powers must try to heal it. They began working on it right after the Hamas attack on Israel.
“When we really began the process, it was just days after Oct. 7,” says dancer Kealoha Ferreira. “The world broke open, Israel invaded Gaza and that was the doorway.”
Chatterjea describes the dance theater as an ensemble company of BIPOC women and femme professional dance artists. The dance theater has been around for almost 20 years and all their performances are rooted in justice, she says.
“What does it mean to make art at a time of so much genocide, so much war across the world right now?” Chatterjea says. “How are we making dance? We have to respond to that.”
In “Antaranga,” each dancer plays an archetype: the wind weaver, the wound carrier, the lightning striker, and so on. They move through three different worlds — the Shadow World, the Mirror World and the Honey World.
“It’s not a realistic story at all, but I want to make sure that we know that the worlds that we are traversing are a response to every day,” Chatterjea says. “We’re a social justice company, which means the art has to draw from what is real.”
Chatterjea has tapped others to help world-build. Longtime collaborating composer Greg Schutte wrote an original score. Dramaturg Sharon Bridgforth wrote the text for an Oracle, who is heard throughout the piece. The performance also includes compositions and vocals by Mankwe Ndosi, Pooja Goswami Pavan, Aida Shahghasemi and Thupten Dadak. Costume designer Annie Cady and scenic designer Mina Kinukawa created the visuals.
The dancers tell the story through a dance technique called Yorchha. Chatterjea, who is also a dance professor at the University of Minnesota and trained in traditional Indian dance, created it. Yorchha combines the Indian traditional dance orrisi, the martial art-inspired dance chhau and Vinyasa yoga. Chatterjea says she created it so performers can be both soft and intimate and bold and warrior-like.
The foundation of Yorchha is what Chatterjea calls the “banana flower foot,” which uses a flexed foot with toes spread and the big toe peeling away.
It counters “the tyranny of the pointed foot,” Chatterjea says. “We are somehow socialized to think ballet is the ultimate training. It’s a great form. So are other forms.”
The banana flower foot is about finding a deep connection with the ground and it is a constant percussive element of the dance. The dancers build up hearty callouses.
The dance also requires intimacy and abandon. The choreography uses long embraces, athletic lifts and caressing each other’s faces. The dancers also perform unhinged laughter, weeping and a series of yowls and yelps.
“There’s so much rawness that comes out in that vulnerability and intimacy as well,” says Ferreira, who has been with the ensemble for 11 years. “Knowing each other through rhythm — it’s a particular part about being in Ananya Dance Theater.”
Dancer Noelle Awadallah says it’s about trust.
“We’re trying and retrying and messing up and running into each other and getting frustrated,” Awadallah says. “This is the role and the work we're choosing to do, being in an ensemble, and it takes extra effort to navigate amongst a collective that you can't do alone.”
Over the next two years, Ananya Dance Theater will tour “Antaranga: Between You and Me” to Wisconsin, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s only part one of a two-part story series. This fall they will begin work on crafting part two, which will premiere in 2025.
