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STEVEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Steven John. St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly says he's vetoing a comprehensive smoking ban passed by the city council. Kelly says Ramsey County is expected to pass a compromised proposal soon that would ban smoking only in restaurants and would take precedence over local bands.

Tomorrow's DFL primary might well choose the next state representative from Minnesota's Democratic leaning northeast corner. Incumbent DFL Representative David Dill is in a fight with party endorsed candidate Bill Hansen. Hansen says Dill votes more like a Republican than a Democrat, but Dill labels himself a centrist. He says party politics make little difference among constituents.

DAVID DILL: And when they call me on the phone, they don't say, hi, I'm a Democrat. And I need a solution to my problem. They don't call me on the phone and say, hi, I'm a Republican. And I need a solution to my problem. They say I've got a problem and I need a solution.

STEVEN JOHN: Dill is a well-known snowmobile and ATV enthusiast while Hansen is often associated with the environmental group he helped found. Hansen says there are more important issues to talk about, like health care.

BILL HANSEN: Everyone has a bad story about health care and we really need to take that in hand. I think the political will is here to do something to lower the cost of health care, make it more accessible, and make it available to all Minnesotans.

STEVEN JOHN: David Dill is shrugging off his recent brush with campaign spending law. He agreed to reimburse the state more than $6,000 overspent in his last campaign. The winner Tuesday will face Marty Breaker of Ely who has no challenger in the Republican primary.

Seatbelt use in Minnesota has reached record levels. The State Department of Public Safety says their new survey shows just over 82% of drivers and passengers are buckling up. That's up almost 3% from last year.

Mostly sunny, windy and warm. A wind advisory for southwestern Minnesota today. Highs near 90 in the south. That's news from Minnesota. Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: All right. Thanks, Steven. Six minutes passed 12:00.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. This hour, we're featuring two interviews from our Voices of Minnesota series with two of Minnesota's foremost artists-- actor and Jungle Theater founder Bain Boehlke and Ragamala dance theater founder Ranee Ramaswamy.

They work just a few blocks apart in Minneapolis's Lyndale & Lake neighborhood, but they come from very different backgrounds. One from Warroad, the other from India. One who got started during the Cold War while in the military. The other after leaving an arranged marriage and returning to an art form that she learned as a child. Here with today's edition of Voices of Minnesota is Minnesota Public Radio's Marianne Combs.

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MARIANNE COMBS: Bain Boehlke loved drama, even as a young boy growing up in Warroad, Minnesota.

BAIN BOEHLKE: I was a huge fan of magic tricks, and I built some of the big ones when I was a boy. I sawed my sister in two. I had her in the sword box.

MARIANNE COMBS: Boehlke went on to work in several theaters before creating his own the Jungle Theater. Ranee Ramaswamy gave up dance as a teenager to follow India's tradition of an arranged marriage. The marriage didn't work. And instead of expressing despair, her mother encouraged Ramaswamy to embrace her freedom.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: She didn't have it. So she, in her life, freedom was the most important thing in her life, and she wanted me to have it.

MARIANNE COMBS: Ramaswamy returned to dance and created the Minneapolis-based Ragamala dance theater. This hour on Voices of Minnesota, we hear from Jungle Theater founder Bain Boehlke and Ragamala dance theater founder Ranee Ramaswamy.

Seated in the lobby of the Jungle Theater on a settee that once belonged to his grandmother, Bain Boehlke sports a straw hat with the words Puerto Vallarta emblazoned on the front. Jungle Theater is 13 years old and spent the last five years in this particular building. But it's always been firmly entrenched in the Lake & Lyndale neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Similarly, Bain Boehlke is firmly entrenched in the Minnesota theater scene. Before he created the Jungle, Boehlke was involved in the beginnings of many Twin Cities theaters, most notably the Children's Theater Company. He's a director and an actor. On the walls around Boehlke are photographs of past shows for which he designed many of the sets.

The lobby itself is a visually rich and stylized space, a nod to theatrical eras gone by. For Boehlke, at age 65, the Jungle Theater is the result of a life's love of spectacle.

BAIN BOEHLKE: What you experience in a theater is like a cup of a little liqueur of life or something that you get to take a little drink of it, and it will stay with you. The memory of it will stay with you throughout your entire life and will enrich you throughout your life. The thing about the theater is you can't see that performance again. It is unique and special to that very moment.

And it may be something that we as performers-- I knew it as a child and as a young man, oh, with just a potent understanding of it, that the moment that we spend together in the theater, that me as an actor and you, this is the only moment we'll be spending together. This is not another performance tonight for me. This is me being with you people right now in something that is poetic and deeply human.

MARIANNE COMBS: As a young boy, Bain Boehlke's active imagination thrived in the remote town of Warroad, Minnesota, on Lake of the Woods, just south of the Canadian border.

BAIN BOEHLKE: I became interested in theater as a very young boy. When I was, oh, I would imagine seven, eight, or nine, I looked around me. And I can remember. thinking that this was not going to work. The only jobs that I saw in my immediate circumference was working in the variety store, working in the mercantile, working at the lumber yard. And then my friends talked of being truckers or airplane pilots.

And I was simply not interested. And the world seemed so limited to me. And then I used to go on Friday night and Sunday matinee. I could go to the movies. And that was at the Fox movie theater. It was a little movie theater.

And so I would go there. Friday night would be for cowboy movies and Sunday was the musicals. And then Wednesday and Thursday were at nights were the adult films, not x-rated but like I'll Cry Tomorrow with Susan Hayward, Rain, it was Rita Hayworth.

And so I used to go. I'd sneak out away from home and I'd go down and sit in the back of the movie theater, and lay behind the movie theater and listen to the movies. But I was interested then, almost from my earliest memory in things theatrical.

I had a little theater in my basement or the basement of my parents' house. I did an adaptation of King Arthur and his magic sword, among other things. I also did summer musicals in our garage with the doors swung open. And then I was a huge fan of magic tricks, and I built some of the big ones when I was a boy. I sawed my sister in two. I had her in the sword box.

MARIANNE COMBS: Your parents must have been worried about that one.

BAIN BOEHLKE: Yeah. And then I also loved circus. I spent my summers with my grandmother in Buffalo Lake, Minnesota. And when I spent the summers with her, I was fixated on and addicted to circus. And I did tightrope walking. And I had a ghost house. And I built a ferris wheel.

MARIANNE COMBS: So did you have a sense then that you really wanted to become a theater director? I mean, it seems almost written in your destiny based on what you were telling me.

BAIN BOEHLKE: I wouldn't say a theater director. My real passion was acting. And when I was a sophomore in high school, I came down to the university for a summer theater workshop with Dr. Arthur Ballet and Frank M. Whiting. And that summer, I stayed at Dr. Whiting's house and he was a real mentor of mine. And I stayed with him that summer.

And I'll never forget when I came to the university theater. See, in those days, there were only four theaters in Minneapolis. This is before the Guthrie. There was the university theaters where the classics were done. And the Strib reviewed the university theater because that was the preeminent theater in Minneapolis.

And then there was theater in the round. There was the Edyth Bush theater and the Old Log. And other than that, there was nothing. It was really with the advent of the Guthrie and of course, the huge. Cultural Renaissance that visited Minneapolis in the '60s that brought the kind of cultural depth that we enjoy today.

But in those days, there was nothing. But when I came to the University that summer, they were doing a production of Othello. And I can remember sitting in the auditorium and seeing the. arches and the bed with the fabric flowing up from the pillows up to the crown. And I thought that I had died and gone to heaven.

And then I went backstage to see onto the stage to see more of what this was and around behind. And I saw the flats. And I saw that it was all illusion. And it was a tremendous revelation to me as a young man. I must have been 15. And I was bit big time.

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Marianne Combs. And today, we're talking with Jungle Theater artistic director Bain Boehlke. Boehlke spent several high school summers directing theater shows in a barn. He went on to the University of Minnesota where he also pursued acting. But he never graduated. Instead, he joined the Army.

BAIN BOEHLKE: This was the Cold War. And I know it sounds odd, but it was in retrospect, I think one of the best decisions I ever made. I went to Fort Leonard Wood. I was there for basic training. Then I went to Fort Devens where I trained in code breaking.

I was in the army security agency. And then I was sent to Berlin, which was a dream come true. And Berlin then, of course, was behind the Iron Curtain. So it was an island city, the island. The island city.

So I was in Berlin for two years and there I did my work for the army. But I really got to be with people in a way that was not educational. I got to be with people in a way of community and in a way of being young and discovering the world. And that was a great gift to me.

And also I went to the German theater. I went to the Schiller Theater. I went to London. And I went to Paris. And I went to Italy And on my leaves, I did a lot of plays also. Because the entertainment service, the army entertainment service, had a theater associated with it for the soldiers.

So I did The Fourposter, which I played in. I did oh my gosh, I did so many plays. I probably won't be able to think-- oh, I was in Pygmalion. I played Henry Higgins. I did The Heiress based on Henry James's Washington Square, played Dr. Sloper.

And I also directed The Seagull at the Berlin high school. And what was very so interesting about this was that I found a costume and prop shop for the German theater. It was up near the wall. And they had-- because Germany has a great history so they had furniture and the detritus of civilization from the Middle Ages.

Real stuff. It was like a museum and you could get armor. You could get-- I mean, it was unbelievable. So anyway, I told them I was doing The Seagull and they didn't have a seagull. And they went out and shot one. Isn't that terrible?

But I didn't ask for it. But it was so-- that was Chekhov's huge enlightenment moment. It was when he was hunt-- because he was a hunter, as most men were at his time. And he shot a seagull out of the air. And it changed his life when he realized the gratuitous violence that we take for granted in our lives. That is the socially accepted violence that we do.

MARIANNE COMBS: And here you are in the army during the Cold War.

BAIN BOEHLKE: Yeah.

MARIANNE COMBS: And they shot a seagull for you to put on display to talk about gratuitous violence.

BAIN BOEHLKE: So unbelievable.

MARIANNE COMBS: Boehlke returned from the army in the early 1960s and helped start Theatre on the Road, a touring company. Boehlke attributes great importance to the '60s, which he says both shaped his ideas and invigorated the local arts scene. He got involved in a number of projects, including making a documentary of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian leader in the resistance to Nazi rule in Germany.

Boehlke also spent many years with the Children's Theater Company, whose mission it is to create professional theater for younger audiences, a relatively unique concept in American theater at the time. But Boehlke doesn't describe himself as a political man or an activist, simply as someone caught up in the energy and creativity of the time.

BAIN BOEHLKE: Oh, I was very fortunate to be involved during the '60s and '70s with the Children's Theater Company. And John Donahue was the director and playwright. And he was a fantastic writer and wrote some of the most extraordinary plays that I was fortunate to star in. Things like Hang On To Your Head, The Old King of Malfi. Oh god, How Can You Tell, all kinds of them. I can't remember all of them.

But we also did-- his vision for the theater was so extraordinary. And I understood. And we shared, I think, the energy of that idea of a theater that was artistically complete for young people. My dream was not a theater for young people. That was John's dream. But I learned so much there.

We had an orchestra in the pit for plays when we moved into the new theater. Even in the old Children's Theater we did. And we did everything from plays for children, very small children like Mother Goose to Dickens.

And we did adult plays there. We did Shakespeare. We did Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped, a huge production of that really magnificent play, which very few people know.

We did Chekhov one acts. John wrote some adult plays that were extraordinary. And it was a very fertile time. But more exciting than that was what was happening here in the community. Theaters were being born everywhere.

The Guthrie came. The women's theater was born. Joy Walsh's a Minneapolis Ensemble Theater over at Walker church was our guerrilla theater. And that was going and Patty Lynch's Brass Tacks Theater.

And there were by the end of the '70s 100 theaters here. When before, there were only like four. So it was a time of tremendous creative energy. See, I like all this kind of stuff. For me, theater and art and plays are really community affairs. This is not like doing a play for me. I don't do plays. I'm a citizen and I'm a citizen first.

And I think that for me as an artist, that what I'm interested in is what does it mean to be a human being on the planet. What does that mean? And much of what that has meant is reflected in plays. And I think that that's-- I mean, for me, the defining definition I would say for myself as an artist is that it's really a means to discover my own humanity and to discover with one another what it means to be human.

MARIANNE COMBS: After the boom of the '60s and '70s, Boehlke says he was discouraged by the relative hard times for theaters in the 1980s. Many cut back their seasons, others shut down completely. He left Minnesota for Tucson, Arizona, worked for a friend in the theater business and made regular trips to Mexico.

It was while walking on the beach in Puerto Vallarta that Boehlke had a vision of the Jungle Theater. He could imagine the look of the place. And he had a distinct image of the billboard for the theater, but he couldn't figure out where it belonged. Perhaps Los Angeles, he thought, or Chicago, but certainly not Minnesota.

After just a few years in Arizona, Boehlke returned to Minneapolis. He was 50 years old and he was flat broke. His friend George Sutton suggested he start his own theater company. While walking around the Lake & Lyndale neighborhood, he saw a vacant space and his vision of the Jungle Theater returned. This time, it fit.

Boehlke got together with Sutton who took charge of administration. Soon after, the theater opened its doors. It was February 7, 1991, in the midst of the Gulf war. Boehlke says it was a huge hit.

BAIN BOEHLKE: It was like a little needle it was like in a haystack. Or it was like a diamond in the rough because the neighborhood was depressed here at that time. And you didn't really stop in the neighborhood. You drove through it to uptown from Whittier to uptown. This was not really not the destination it is today.

MARIANNE COMBS: How do you see the theater's role in changing the neighborhood over the years?

BAIN BOEHLKE: I don't see it. Well, let me go this way is that the theater was an immense success in that first year. People came from all over the city because the Guthrie wasn't that popular at this particular juncture in its history. And people were a little disenchanted. And I like a good old-fashioned play.

I'm not known as a great innovator. I really like to do plays that speak to the common man. That's sort of my thing. Although I do sophisticated work, I suppose I don't know what to say about that.

But at any rate, over the first five years, we started to see that things were changing. It is not that the theater was necessarily catalytic, however. I think it's important to know that this neighborhood was on the cusp of change. There were a lot of really great people living here.

There were like the Greeks. It's Greek to me. They had been here already almost I think 13 years before we came. Denise and Eris and John Meldahl was in the neighborhood. And there was a little neighborhood association. There were some really great little residential neighborhood south of here.

When the Jungle came, I think that it gave it a catalytic kick. I will say this that it brought an attention to the neighborhood. People came into the neighborhood. At first for many people, it was sort of, if you will, going into a dangerous zone to see theater, which it wasn't really at all. But people have perceptions that make things what they are.

MARIANNE COMBS: You mentioned earlier that in the '80s that there was this huge cutback in funding for the arts, that there were so many theaters that closed their doors. But now, you talk about the corner of Lyn-Lake neighborhood and how the arts seem to be reigning supreme here. There are so many different arts organizations, along with the restaurants that are holding office in this neighborhood.

Do you think we've done a fairly good job of bouncing back from the '80s? How are we doing in terms of the arts and theater?

BAIN BOEHLKE: I think it appeared as if we were. But as you know that the funding climate is terrible and that symphony orchestras are closing all over the country. Theaters are in trouble. I mean, if we want only the television set in our living room, if that's sufficient, that's simple.

If you want to have the live performing arts in the community, if we think that's important, then we have to go to them. And we have to support them. And we have to make sure that happens. We have to make sure that our politicians know that the arts are important to us as a culture. And from my point of view, if the arts aren't important to us as a culture, the live performing arts, the live arts, then I think that there's not a lot of hope.

MARIANNE COMBS: When you go about putting together a season, what are the sort of things that you look for in plays and in putting together a year? Because you've managed to do rather well for a theater in about town--

BAIN BOEHLKE: Rather well?

MARIANNE COMBS: Rather well. Rather well.

BAIN BOEHLKE: We did the best.

[LAUGHS]

MARIANNE COMBS: What process do you go through in putting your seasons together?

BAIN BOEHLKE: Well, I look for a variety. And I myself personally am more drawn to dramas and to comic dramas than I am to comedies. It is difficult for me to find really good comedies.

Sylvia that we just did is one that I think is a really great comedy. But I try because I know the public likes to laugh. Laughter is good for us. We like that the best. But I'm also very drawn to plays that speak about the challenges of being human and how we either grow or break.

MARIANNE COMBS: Set design has been a pretty big passion for you over the years.

BAIN BOEHLKE: I like to create the world that I see. I'm highly visual and I like to create the world that the characters live in. Because a set is not a backdrop for actors. And actors are not memorizers of language.

Plays are not language. Plays are poetic realities that have to do with the world we live in. And so all of the elements that go into making a theater evening are essential. It's not the play. The play is like an architectural drawing or something that needs to be fleshed out. And the real life of a play surrounds the words. And those are the things that have to be manifested and brought to life.

And I like doing that. So then I found out that I was really a director. And then I found out that I really was keenly interested in the world of the play. What the walls are like, what the floor is like, what the shoes are like, what all aspects of it are like. Because I have kind of holistic view of things.

I like to see how things fit. See what is actually-- what is the purpose of something. That may not be our purpose. There may be another purpose revealed if we can see the parts of things that have been blown apart, maybe.

MARIANNE COMBS: I have to say I've always been impressed with your seasons as being a mixture of, well, somehow combining the traits of thinking man's plays that have mass appeal.

BAIN BOEHLKE: I wish the masses felt that. I would love it if our plays that I select had mass appeal. I think that anybody who comes to the Jungle, no matter who they are, would enjoy themselves and will see something of quality and something of poetic flights and be pleased.

But that's the hard part is how do you get yourself to the theater, to a theater. I'm the worst. I mean, to get me to go to a play is very difficult. And part of the difficulty in going to a play is you have to believe in a really potent way in the future. Because you can't just go to a play on a whim. You have to make plans.

So therefore, you have to call the box office. You have to make a reservation. You have to put it on your calendar. You can't forget to go. You can't plan something else for that night. So that means that you have some kind look to the future. You're not living in the tiny little moment. But you are expanding your moment a little more to include tomorrow that yes, Virginia, there is a tomorrow.

And most of us in our culture we live in tend to go on the spur of the moment. We like to go to a movie, you don't have to have a reservation. You can go to Red Lobster. You don't need a reservation. But on the other hand, culture and real authentic, I think, community where we are together requires a little more deeper grasp on future being together somehow.

I mean, watching TV in your house is not-- it looks like we're together because it gives us the illusion of being together because oh, there's so many different people on it and everything. But they're not in the room. And that is something that is so cool about the performing arts, I think, is that the performers and the people are all in the same room. And it's all happening there. And it is, when it works, it's unbeatable.

MARIANNE COMBS: Bain Boehlke, artistic director of the Jungle Theater at the intersection of Lake & Lyndale in Minneapolis. I'm Marianne Combs. Up next at the Jungle, Recent Tragic Events by Minnesota playwright Craig Wright. It's about two young Minnesotans on a blind date on September 11, 2001. It opens September 17.

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Time now to move from the world of theater to that of dance, specifically southeast Indian dance and choreographer Ranee Ramaswamy. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Ragamala dance theater founder Ranee Ramaswamy came to this country from India 26 years ago with her husband. The United States was seeking engineers from abroad, and she encouraged him to find work here. Ramaswamy had given up dance to become a housewife. She returned to dance when the first marriage dissolved.

An Indian cultural group heard by way of the grapevine that Ramaswamy knew traditional dances and asked her to perform. The rest is history. Ramaswamy rediscovered her passion for traditional Indian dance. 12 years ago, she created her own dance company to showcase the art form.

Ramaswamy is in constant motion even while sitting. Her hand and arm gestures punctuate sentences. Her energy is bottled up in a dancer's physique that is barely 5 feet tall. She sits shoeless on a folding chair in a large mirrored rehearsal room. Ramaswamy is on the third floor of an office building at the intersection of Lyndale Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis.

Ranee Ramaswamy was born into India's highest caste. She learned dance as a child. Later, an arranged marriage meant she would follow the path of her mother and become a housewife and parent.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: I was born in the Brahmin community, Brahmin caste, which is there are four major castes in India. The Brahmin is the highest caste. And the Brahmins used to be teachers and priests. And then you have the business caste, soldier caste, and then the lower caste.

Being in a caste is by birth. So you cannot change your caste. So what happens is that because the arranged marriage system worked for all these years, you are married to a Brahmin. The child that's born is a Brahmin. But if a Brahmin marries another non-Brahmin then the caste system is gone. What caste would that child be born?

So it is changing in India, that caste system. A lot of people have started to marry love marriage, which is not arranged by their parents. So what happens is then the caste system will eventually break down because the only thing that the caste really works now is in marriage. Because you cannot discriminate. It's discrimination when you say I'm not going to give this job to this person because this person belongs to a caste.

Now, caste and how rich or poor a person is not combined. So a Brahmin can be very poor. And there can be a very rich, untouchable caste. So say a shoemaker caste is an untouchable caste. This person could be an owner of a shoe factory making millions of rupees. But he's still an untouchable caste. So a poor Brahmin, generally speaking, will not let his daughter marry a shoemaker caste, even though he's a millionaire because he's poor.

DAN OLSON: But it is changing. You say that there are, in fact, as you put it so well, love marriage is more common these days in India. But arranged marriage is still--

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Probably 20%, 10%, 15% in a billion of people. So it's not that much. But again-- and everybody is proud of their caste. Among the lower castes, there are many sub castes. And each one, just like you say, I am this such and such a person. This is my job. People will say this is my caste. And most of the people have their names that they'll tell you what caste they belong to.

So I don't think it's not going to just go away like anything just like that. So that's all it is. There are many, many Brahmins. And there are very poor Brahmins and there are rich Brahmins.

DAN OLSON: Did you know when you started dancing, were you already aware even as a kid that, well, I'll have fun with this for a period of time and then I have to get on with the business of being a young woman in Indian culture?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Yes, absolutely. My parents, they were sure that-- they made sure that I knew that this was not going to be something that I would do forever. So when I turned 17, I stopped dancing. But I actually stopped performing at the age of 14 because the older people in the family thought when you're a girl and you're performing on stage, you're looked at differently as you get older. And they don't want you to be watched that way.

DAN OLSON: Really? What way? What would you be seen as?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Well, the time I grew up, this was a long time ago when I was a child.

DAN OLSON: Not so long ago.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Of course it is. Men and women didn't mix as much. I went to a girls' school. I went to a girls' college. You had a girls' bus where the students-- if you were a female, you took a separate bus. There were women's compartment in the train, in the railway station, in the trains.

Because of the segregation, you have a fear of men. That you shouldn't get-- men shouldn't watch you as probably a sexual object, which probably nobody would say. But that's what I think people were afraid of.

DAN OLSON: So when you were 8 and 9 and 10 years old, did you see adult women dancing? Did you have any role models of somebody you could look at and say, wow, look at that. That's what I want to be when I grow up.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Well, there were very prominent dancers, women dancers. But actually, the family that I grew up-- I grew up in a joint family system where I grew up with my parents, my two uncles, my aunt, and my grandmother. We all lived in the same house.

So in those days, it was very hard for my mother to just leave the house and go to a performance, nor for my dad. And so I don't think growing up, I really didn't see any performances. I remember seeing probably one maybe. But you read and you see pictures of them.

DAN OLSON: Now, very soon, I imagine, as you got into your teen years, the life of being a young, high caste Indian woman became very clear. You had an arranged marriage. How does that work?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Actually, even today, there are lots of marriages that are arranged. There's no other that's the only kind of marriages that took place in those days. So when a daughter is born and she comes of age, everybody is a matchmaker. All your friends and uncles and aunts, they would say I have a friend whose son is an engineer. His horoscope probably would match your daughter's.

So the basis of an arranged marriage is horoscope. And it also depends upon families. The family that I come from-- I come from a very educated family. My dad's an entomologist. My great grandfather was a doctor. Everybody in my family-- men were all educated. But they all believed in horoscopes. And they were very orthodox traditional believers.

So there is usually a family astrologer, just like we have our family doctors. And his job is to collect horoscopes. The parents decide as to what age their daughters should get married. They decide what the age difference between the boy and girl should be. So my parents said, well, up to 10 years is OK. So they always wanted the boy to be older than the girl because they would take care of them.

DAN OLSON: The courtship in an arranged marriage in India, Ranee Ramaswamy explains, is often very short and very formal. Ramaswamy encouraged her husband to find work in the United States. They started a family.

When the marriage ended, Ramaswamy was torn. She returned to India every year for long visits with her family and at one point considered staying in India. But her mother told her to return to the United States and follow her dreams of becoming an artist.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: We saw each other for 15 minutes along with family. So you have the boy's parents and uncles and friends sitting on a chair. And you have myself and my mother and the women sitting on the ground. And you're asked to sing.

I mean, this is-- I still feel young. I'm old, but I feel young. But I can't believe that it's been that many years. And I was still at an age when they were doing that. So, I mean, not that there is anything against it. But now coming here, looking back, I had to sing, I had to sing two songs.

And they usually did that because that gives a chance for the person to sit there and everybody can look at you. And if you have a speech problem, that comes out. And I know of people who have been taken outside to see if the color was right or the height, how the height works. You serve coffee or tea because then you want to know if the person has any-- you don't know the person any other way. So this is the only way you test it out. It's like buying a car.

DAN OLSON: So no dating, no phone calls, no dancing, no movies?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: No, no, nothing. This is it. At 17, we had this girl seeing ceremony. And at 20, we got married. So I was engaged for almost three years, but no contact.

DAN OLSON: But you got to know each other a little bit and no? No you don't.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: No. My parents got married that way. And everybody in my family has gotten married that way. And my cousins are still getting married that way. For my mother, who belongs to a different generation, it was different. For me, I thought that I would be-- I would lose all my not my independence, but the vibrance, the vibrancy that I have in my life would be completely destroyed if I was in that situation.

I'm not blaming anybody, but when it's a-- when it's a bad match, somebody has to be trampled. And being the youngest person, I would have been the one to lose it. And my parents, since my mother had the same experience, they actually encouraged me to leave. Even though I was their only daughter, my mother said freedom is the most important thing in life.

DAN OLSON: Wow, that's a wonderful thing for a mother to say.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: She didn't have it. So in her life, freedom was the most important thing in her life. And she wanted me to have it. And so I pushed and we left with my daughter.

DAN OLSON: Ranee Ramaswamy, the founder of Ragamala dance theater in Minneapolis. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Ramaswamy says her company's dance style is based on a traditional Indian dance that is earthy. Unlike ballet, the dancers wear no shoes. She says dozens of facial expressions and gestures convey meaning. So starting with the hands, as you move your hands, what part do they play in telling the story?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: In this style of dance, it's a 2000-year-old art form. It has two distinct aspects. There's completely rhythmic dances where the body, the feet are used like a percussion instrument. It's like tap dancer also acting out with their hands.

But then there is another aspect, which is completely storytelling. We have 28 single-handed and 24 double-handed gestures. Each gesture can mean several things. We have four ways of interpreting-- through body, through emotions, through costumes, through words and songs. So all the four has to combine together in order to make it what do you call, an effective storytelling technique.

DAN OLSON: You talked about the feet, and I don't know that you can do it sitting down. So if you can't, I'm happy to stand up with you here. And you're talking about the percussive effect.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Yeah. We have very complex rhythms. And if you can do

[FEET STOMPING]

So you use your feet in a very strong-- it's a very earthy kind of dance. As ballet is up, Bharatnatyam is down. So you are in this position. And you use your upper body along with the feet to interpret very complex rhythms. It is very much like a tap dancer, but no shoes.

DAN OLSON: But no shoes.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: No.

DAN OLSON: And the costume, are we talking-- I see off in the corner of the studio here, we're talking in your third floor uptown Minneapolis studio. You have costumes. But the colors apparently send a message as well.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Actually, in this dance coming from-- because it comes from the southern part of India, that's a place where most of the beautiful silk saris are made. So color wise, people are used to wearing brilliant colors in India. So you can pick and choose any colors you want. Colors, we don't use the colors to mean anything. It's just that you can find brilliant, everything looks brilliant when you're doing a traditional dance.

DAN OLSON: The dancing, as you've said, is really explosive here in Minnesota. What accounts for that do you think? We're kind of in flyover territory here. Why would dance be so prominent here, do you think?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: I think the-- personally, I think that the funding is much-- it's very good in Minneapolis, in Minnesota. And we have had a few dancers move from New York to Minneapolis to be here. It's a very vibrant dance community. We have not just-- we have not just ballet, but we have many ethnic dance styles here that are thriving. There are lots of young companies that are starting up, many young choreographers. So it's a very vibrant dance community.

DAN OLSON: I'm wondering how you started integrating your ideas of art into this climate, this culture, this environment?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: At the beginning, it was the desire to dance again. And then it was you are not just listening to Indian music. This is a culture and country where you are surrounded by various cultures, various art forms, various music. So I'm like seeing everything and just absolutely trying to take on as much as possible.

I go to a tap dancers concert. And I want to see how I can collaborate with this person. You hear African music and you're so excited. But I'm not trained to do tap or African or ballet,. But I know that my art form is so versatile that what I want to do is to see what I can do with what I have.

How can I work with this person? Music, the same way, jazz music, ballet, all kinds of music. But then the major collaboration was with Robert Bly, the very first time I used English poetry. And then it went on from there. Again, I take it as a challenge because as I said, it's such a versatile art form.

DAN OLSON: Ranee Ramaswamy was raised in the Hindu religious tradition, but went to a Catholic elementary school in India. The centuries old dance tradition that guides the philosophy of her dance company was part of religious observances at one time in India's history. Then it fell out of favor when some thought it was too provocative and secular.

How does dance as an art form contribute to people's life? How does it make us better people or happier people or more interesting people, do you think?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: I can't talk about generally in dance. But I think there is a lot of spirituality in what we do. And when people come and see Ragamala, they just don't see only entertainment or just athleticism. But they go back with very high spiritual feeling because that is part of what we do is very devotional in nature.

DAN OLSON: Really? Like meditative?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: It's because of the emotional nature of our dance. It's not just moving your feet and hands. When we dance, there is a word called rasa and bhava in our technique, which is the bhava is a feeling that the dancer has. And rasa is what the audience feels.

For example, it's like when a chef is making food. The chef puts in all the spices, but the person who eats it will feel, will taste everything. Just like that, because of the storytelling nature of our dance, whatever the dancer feels, their ability to emote it, to make the audience feel it. So the audience feels this devotional aspect of the dance or whatever story, that nature of the story that we are emoting.

So they don't just-- it's like watching theater, but it's dance. Theater and dance combination. So people always express the feeling of spirituality and devotion and joy and sadness or happiness, whatever we feel as a dancer, they feel.

There's just one little thing that the theory of Indian dances that a Bharatanatyam dancer-- Hindus believe in reincarnation. But the Bharatanatyam dancer lives an entire lifetime in each of her performances because she goes through all emotions. So a Bharatanatyam dancer is only born once. She doesn't get to reincarnate because she's feeling everything in a lifetime in each one of her performances.

I love that because I think it's true. And you dance emotions. You not just dancing, but you dance out emotions. And that's easy to transcend from the dancer to the audience.

DAN OLSON: Are you a religious person? Do you follow your upbringing of religious training?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: I think I'm a very spiritual person. I am a Hindu that I believe I was born and raised. i probably will never change religions because I just believe-- but I believe all religions is the same. I believe all gods are the same. And I'm deeply religious. And I probably-- I'm not a ritualistic person, but I pray every day. And I strongly believe that I have somebody who takes care of me.

DAN OLSON: You are not judgmental, then, about your religious beliefs in comparison to other people's religious beliefs. So you feel people could come to your performances. And even though it sounds like a very religious experience for you, they could take out--

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Absolutely! Because I would say when I say religious, if I'm dancing to Krishna, the devotional aspect of it could translate to any gods. And no, I'm not at all judgmental about religions. And I grew up Hindu, but I went to a Catholic school all my life. And I would run to my little-- what do you call that little church in school? It's called--

DAN OLSON: Chapel.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: --chapel and pray to get more mark in my math. I would say in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Ghost, amen. So it doesn't really matter who it is. I think the divine is the same. All of us look at it with different eyes.

DAN OLSON: Your views are interesting because, in fact, there are a lot of people out there who are quite judgmental about other people's religions and who might see, for example, your art form as too provocative. And OK, I'll put words to it. Women dancing in very suggestive ways that some people would interpret as very suggestive ways and might say, Ranee Ramaswamy, that's far too provocative for young women to be doing on stage and conveying who knows what kinds of messages that might be misunderstood.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Yeah, but the 26 years that I've lived here, I've never had that ever happen. So probably what we are doing on stage doesn't make people think of it that way. There's a subtlety to everything. And if you're doing it that way, and you're not trying to preach religion through your dance, that's not what we are doing at all.

We are interpreting songs. And because Ragamala's mission statement is always to make Indian dance accessible to non-Indian audiences, to those who don't understand language, the language or the story of the material that we are dancing to. I think it's very clear because we use a lot of English in our performances.

So there's things that people do and we have done-- the last show that we did a couple of years ago was my daughter's choreography of Hildegard von Bingen's poems with Andal, who's a south Indian poet. Again, we don't say worship my god. We are only saying God's great or this experience of being in front of this is fabulous.

So that could mean everything to everybody. It doesn't have to say come over here and pray to my god. It's not the message that we give at all.

DAN OLSON: Are you more judgmental about our culture that we live in? American culture, we're extremely oriented towards entertainment culture, the television set, escapist culture. I guess dance could be considered escapist too if it gives us pleasure and takes us away for a few minutes. But I mean, do you have any judgments about the quality of the culture we're living in right at the moment?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Well I think that having lived in this culture for 26 years I have taken good things from both cultures. I can sit here and say a lot of things that doesn't make any sense to me in Indian culture. But I think the lack of concentration, I think, would be something that I see in young people. Because again, it's a culture that is used to doing things quickly.

DAN OLSON: So you see this in schools apparently. You're either on stage or performing in front of people, and you're watching faces. And your performances might be, what, 45 minutes, an hour and a half?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: 45 to 50 minutes. And so we have to keep it going so that we are not sitting on one subject for more than a few minutes. Because you can tell that when kids lose interest, you've lost them. But we are in their territory. So we have to make sure that we make it interesting so that we can capture their attention.

DAN OLSON: So a longer attention span would be better? Why do you think?

RANEE RAMASWAMY: For example, when we go to schools, we do not only just dance, but we do a lot about Indian culture. So we have one of these artistic things that I do is doing floor drawings of South India. It's done with flours, with rice flour. It's done every morning before sunrise. And you make this drawing to welcome the goddess of wealth and prosperity.

Every home, every office, every factory will have these drawings in the morning. That's nowadays done by maids because everybody is working. So the maid comes in the morning. She'll wash the front. But I grew up learning how to do this. At least when I was young, everybody learned how to do these things.

Each one is a mathematical puzzle. Like you make 5 times 5, you connect it a certain way, you get a pattern. 25 reduced to 2, two at a time, you get a different pattern. And it's done to bring good luck. And people walk on it right away as soon as it's done because things of beauty don't last forever. It blesses those who-- welcomes those who come and it blesses those who leave.

So the women make sacred space in front of their home. Now, to make the dots takes patience. So when I was a kid, you had to make 25 dots, reduce it by 1 to go to one. And it would be crooked. It won't be straight. But your mom tells you, you do this and I'll buy you candy.

So you're doing it. You're doing it. You just know it develops patience as a five-year-old, six-year-old. And now when I go to school, I make the dots for the children and they connect it. But if I tell even a ninth or 10th grader, you make the dots. I'll make it on the board and you make the dots. And you find that it will be starting to the left of the page or it goes down. And there's oh, I don't want to do it.

So sometimes I think I'm so thankful that my mother taught me this because it has taught me patience. And mind you, I'm not a very patient person. I move on also. But there are certain things which requires a lot more commitment to last for a longer time in order to produce better results for yourself and for others than something that is just brushed off as finished.

DAN OLSON: Are there parts of Indian culture that you miss very much and that you wish you could just reach out and transplant from your homeland to the United States and have them here? Not only for your enjoyment, but for everyone's enjoyment.

RANEE RAMASWAMY: The things that I most enjoy most is respect to elders, gratitude. I think these are the two most important things for me in my life. And I think that older cultures have this a lot. And I think it's just amazing to have that in your life.

DAN OLSON: Now, for balance, is there anything from US culture that you think would be interesting? Aside from our entertainment and Hollywood and film culture, anything of value from our US culture that you would like to transport to India that--

RANEE RAMASWAMY: Oh, I have so many beautiful things in this culture that I-- first of all, I think this culture is-- and you can't generalize. There are so many people I know. And in some ways, I associate myself a lot with the artistic people, which is a lot of people are so non-judgmental. And I love that.

And there is a lot of things that are not expected of. Everybody is so into doing what they are doing that they don't constantly look at other people and say and worry about what that person's doing and how can I constantly interfere in somebody else's business.

DAN OLSON: Ranee Ramaswamy, the founder and artistic director of Minneapolis-based Ragamala dance theater. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

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GARY EICHTEN: And that does it for our Midday program. I'm Gary Eichten. Thanks for tuning in today. And we hope you'll be able to join us for Midday tomorrow. It should be an interesting program. Howard Dean, former presidential candidate, he'll be on at 11:00 over the noon hour. We're going to hear from former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

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