A classicist casts a spell and breaks it

A dancer, choreographer and company leader of extraordinary talent and imagination, Ramaa Bharadvaj played many roles during her “Raja Mandalam” program of South Indian classical dance at the Aratani/Japan America Theater on Saturday.

With a brilliant mastery of traditional Indian mime and an expressive intuition all her own, she could switch in an instant from embodying downtrodden humanity to murderous animal fury, could show us a proud woman humbled by love, or a Hindu deity in fully glory.

Unfortunately, the one role that didn’t suit her was that of diva, and she played it too often. Entering at the top of a staircase during a group ritual titled “Dawn,” she reduced the members of her Angahara Dance Ensemble to abject worshippers down below -- this in a piece supposedly depicting freedom from subjugation (“no lover, no teacher, no priest”).

She also made the audience sit in the dark during a lengthy costume change, dramatically opened a box of steam or smoke as if it were magical rather than just another example of the hot air in overabundance on the program, and endlessly yammered homilies about dreams -- hers, ours and Lord Vishnu’s.

Curiously, her dances never looked liked dreams but rather formal classical showpieces on such traditional themes as a woman waiting for her lover. Featuring lush original music by Rajkumar Bharathy, they made the most of Bharadvaj’s fabulous interpretive range and it was easy to fall under their spell.

The program didn’t say which pieces were danced in the Bharata Natyam idiom and which in Kuchipudi, but unmistakable contrasts developed between such dynamic, percussive choreographies as “Animation” and softer, more lyrical ones such as “Lost and Found.”

The evening’s highlight came early, in the “Avatar” duet: 10 tales described in words, outlined in mime and then danced by Bharadvaj and her daughter Swetha in a nonstop stream of shifting images and identities that needed no barrage of program notes or dream-theme speeches to connect the viewer to the wheel of creation.

Maybe Bharadvaj’s dream is to be a diva, but florid self-glorification is unnecessary when she can dance like this: fusing body and spirit in a way that brings us close to something ancient and eternal.