Projects

Ramacharita

Ramacharita was my first effort to use stylized performance techniques to tell the tale of Rama’s victory over Ravana. It was produced on a shoestring budget and was designed to tour to different dorms on campus as part of President John Hannah’s vision that the huge new dorm complexes on campus should be centers for both living and learning.

Written for the stage by Larry Jorgensen, Ramacharita was a pared down version of the vast epic from which it was adapted. Its chief virtue was that it brought students together for the first time to deal with material from a totally different cultural perspective. We used stylized gestures and speech in the work and introduced a short segment of classical bharata natyam dance. Betty True Jones, a trained dancer who had studied bharata natyam in India, taught our students a short dance segment. Betty and her husband Cliff later published Kathakali: an Introduction to the Dance-Drama of Kerala. Subsequently, Kay Poursine, one of the young student dancers, went on to study with the legendary Balasaraswati and made classical Indian dance her career.