sumati ram-mohan
Sumati Ram-Mohan, a Boston-based bharatanatyam dancer, learned this style under Smt. Jothi Raghavan. To better understand bharatanayam's historical and cultural context, Sumati began learning the temple repertoire of the late Smt. P. Ranganayaki from her student Dr. Saskia Kersenboom. Sumati conducted fieldwork with Dr. Kersenboom in Tamil Nadu during the UNESCO-certified residency programs YATRA (2017) and BHOGAM (2018). Upon realizing the need to continue this repertoire as an oral tradition, Sumati committed to a long-term goal of carrying its embodied practice forward for future generations. Sumati has made three visits to Dr. Kersenboom's residence in Hungary for one-on-one instruction supplemented with continued learning online. This project positions Sumati as the latest in a lineage of 5 known generations of oral transmission.
Several presentations have resulted from this work. Most recently, Sumati provided the dance demonstration for Dr. Kersenboom's multimedia presentation at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in November 2024. Prior to this, Sumati received the Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation for her 2019 multimedia presentation MANGALAM, in which she merged performance with images from her fieldwork to situate the repertoire in its temple context.
abstract
Smarana: Ritual Dance of the Tiruttani Temple
Poster
This project focuses on the ritual repertoire of Smt. P. Ranganayaki, a former devadasi of the Subramanyasvami Temple in Tiruttani, Tamil Nadu. Her student Dr. Saskia Kersenboom learned and documented this repertoire from 1977-1988, making it one of a few recorded examples of a devadasi temple ritual dance and music tradition. The primary objective of this work is to sustain this repertoire as living, embodied knowledge. A practice-based research approach was used to learn this repertoire from Dr. Kersenboom through fieldwork residencies in India and apprenticeships in Hungary. This work contributes to the continuity of a five-generation oral tradition lineage.