Nations United by a Tale

In a world enriched by countless epic myths, “Ramayana” crosses the boundaries of time, distance, language and religion with amazing alacrity.

In Hollywood parlance, it’s got legs--seven-league legs, in fact.

You can find this Asian equivalent of “The Iliad”--with its titanic battles, supernatural heroes and noble lovers--engraved in stone and painted in rich murals at the Royal Palace in Bangkok, Thailand. Puppet performances and native opera retell it in song throughout Indonesia. In India, where it originated as a Sanskrit poem, it’s seen everywhere from street corners to stadium spectacles during Ramlila, a major Hindu holiday, and has inspired numberless dramatic adaptations--including a TV miniseries.

And everywhere that “Ramayana” exists, it’s danced, often in masks but invariably in the most elegant classical idioms that have evolved in each culture.

As those cultures are remarkably diverse, so are the versions of “Ramayana:” On its 3,000-year journey across South and Southeast Asia, the story and characters have gone native, transformed by local beliefs and customs in each new location.

This diversity will be spotlighted by two cross-cultural “Ramayana” dance-dramas staged in the Southland: one at USC today, the other at Cal State Long Beach in July. Enlisting some of the same locally based companies, each performance will retell the central part of the epic in installments drawn from the dance traditions of India, Java, Bali, Thailand and Cambodia.

In the three-hour USC performance (part of a daylong festival), six companies will divide the story into sequential chapters, each displaying its distinctive narrative approach and style of movement, music and costuming.

For instance, the two groups representing North and South Indian traditions will showcase the speed and rhythmic flair common to many Indian idioms, but the Southerners will use what we might call a typical dance-drama (role-playing) format to depict scenes of marriage and banishment while the northerners will appear as dance-storytellers, enacting many roles and episodes in sync with the accompanying song-texts.

Two Indonesian companies will end the USC narrative--with the Javanese dancers’ classical style imitating the movement of flat, leather shadow puppets, according to Pak Djoko Walujo, director of the ensemble. However, Balinese style comes from another source: a 14th century idiom called Gambuh, explains I Nyoman Wenten, who will participate in both the Javanese and Balinese episodes.

“The style in Java is calmer and more elegant,” he says, “and in Bali, it’s more dynamic and exciting.”

The central portion of “Ramayana” is the part of the epic that nearly a billion Asians know intimately: a saga set in motion by a beautiful woman’s abduction and culminating in a long, brutal war. In most versions, the character of Rama is portrayed as a vulnerable hero fighting to regain his lost wife, Sita. Their reunion, largely secured by the monkey general Hanuman, sends the audience home believing in happy endings.

But characterizations and the choice of scenes can vary widely from culture to culture. Questions of sexual dalliance, for example, loom large when discussing Hanuman. “For us [in predominately Hindu India], Hanuman is a celibate god who serves as an inspiration to anyone who wants to succeed because of his incredible power and determination,” says Ramaa Bharadvaj, a specialist in the South Indian dance form Bharata Natyam, which she will present at USC and in Long Beach.

Bharadvaj says she learned only recently that Hanuman indulges in romantic escapades throughout Southeast Asian versions of “Ramayana” and laughs as she describes incredulously confronting the head of the Cambodian company performing at USC. “What?,” she asked, “Our Hanuman is celibate--and you’re going to make him a ladies’ man?”

Less startling differences between traditions can help reveal the themes that each culture prizes in “Ramayana” and heightens in its adaptations. Devotional issues inevitably dominate in India, where complete adaptations of the 24,000-stanza original text show Rama as a god in human form sent to save mankind from extinction.

In Java, the large Muslim majority interprets “Ramayana” partly as a study of family values, with the conflicts and responsibilities of the brothers of the hero and villain emphasized in shadow puppet versions and the large-scale dramatization presented annually at the ancient temples of Prambanan.

New values also arise from the influence of recent history on audience perceptions. When the Classical Dance Company of Cambodia performed “Ramayana” at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, for instance, it was inevitable that Americans viewed the epic in terms of the holocaust that the dancers and their countrymen had endured: “Ramayana” as a parable of survival in a time of killing fields.

However, the largely Buddhist public in Cambodia focuses on the symbolic meaning of the characters, says Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, who will embody the floating serenity of Angkor classicism at USC and in Long Beach. “Cambodians look at ‘Ramayana’ as a story that takes place in a person’s mind,” she explains.

“Sita represents the body, Rama represents the good thought and Ravana [Sita’s abductor] the bad thought. And you can see that sometimes the bad thought takes over the body and other times the good takes over.”

Centuries of war and trade between Thailand and Cambodia, along with a shared religion, give their versions a similar perspective on the characters and content of “Ramayana,” with Thai performances especially noted for the dazzle of their bejeweled costumes and intricate movement style--to be illustrated in both Southland productions by performers from Vibul Wonprasat’s Thai Community Arts and Cultural Center.

To Harihar Rao, India-born director/co-founder of the Music Circle, the Pasadena-based cultural group that is presenting “Ramayana” at USC, the juxtaposition of multiple performance traditions and interpretations dramatizes “a common thread” in the cultures on view.

“That’s what we want to show,” he declares, “that ‘Ramayana’ in its bare bones has a certain integrity of theme but, after that, there are so many variations, even in India.”

Those variations include radical experiments. Since no living tradition is static, you can find innovative and even controversial stagings of “Ramayana” flourishing alongside conventional versions.

In 1985, for example, the Royal Thai Classical Dance Company presented in Bangkok a “Ramayana” told completely from Hanuman’s point of view. It incorporated scenes usually cut and cast multiple masked dancers as Hanuman to allow cinematic cross-fades between scenes. Just as one Hanuman would begin to exit, for example, another would appear in a different costume or headdress to begin a new episode.

Five years later, the contemporary Indonesian choreographer Sardono W. Kusomo brought to the India International Dance Festival in New Delhi his nonlinear, Expressionist “Ramayana ku,” which drew upon Javanese classicism but emphasized images of terror, pain and death: the great war of “Ramayana” told from the viewpoint of its victims.

The challenge of taking traditional art into a distinctly nontraditional context has long fascinated Anjani Ambegaokar, who was born in India, has raised a dancing daughter in Southern California and will open the USC program with a danced summary of “Ramayana” in classic Kathak style.

“I think that as a traditional performer, there are two sides to what we do,” she says. “We always have a certain blind faith because the work is part of who we are and we believe in it deeply. But there’s a side of us that will always question everything because we’re also educated artists in touch with the ideas of our time.”

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* Music Circle “Ramayana,” Bovard Auditorium, USC campus, downtown. Performance today, 3 p.m. $2-$15. (626) 405-9759. Traditional folk artists will have food and crafts on sale 11 a.m.-7 p.m.

International “Ramayana” Festival, Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Cal State Long Beach, July 5, 3 p.m. $8-$12. (562) 985-4274.