Hi, everybody.

I'm Felicia Curry, and welcome to "WETA Arts," the place to discover what's going on in the creative and performing arts in and around D.C.

In this episode, an ancient dance form from India takes root in D.C.

I want my students to be able to be proud of who they are as Americans and proud of who they are as Indian Americans.

Curry: An artist investigates our relationship with technology.

Man: Technologies have great potential and are also a little bit scary.

Curry: And I talk with Thomas Luebke, the Secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, about what art and architecture is on the National Mall and why.

It all goes together under this idea of building a public environment that is worthy of the nation.

All these stories coming up on "WETA Arts."

In Potomac, Maryland, Deepti Mukund Navile runs a dance school out of her basement.

She teaches Bharatanatyam, one of 9 classical dance styles recognized by India's Ministry of Culture.

It's from Southern India, and it's a tradition almost 2,000 years old.

[Speaking Hindi] Bharatanatyam.

The word "bha" stands for power or emotion.

"Ra" stands for raga, or the tune that you dance to.

And "talam" is the rhythm.

"Natyam" means dance.

[Music playing] Curry: For her student Neharika Govindarajan, this is the final rehearsal before a big performance.

Tomorrow I'm going to be doing a show of 8 different pieces.

I'm going to be presenting about two and a half, 3 hours of dances on different gods and telling different stories.

In January if you told me this would be happening now, I would have laughed at you.

Curry: Neharika, Neha for short, will be performing her solo debut called Rangapravesha.

This performance demonstrates that the student has mastered the artform enough to perform on their own and teach aspiring dancers.

Navile: It's a tremendous amount of work.

It's a tremendous amount of practice.

It takes a lot out of you.

I feel that every child has to bring out something from themselves.

So I'm like, this is what I taught you.

Now I want to see what Neha is going to do for you.

Curry: Neha's mother Padma Venkataraman came to the United States from Mumbai where Bharatanatyam was an extracurricular activity at school.

Venkataraman: I love dancing.

Unfortunately, the way the study and the curriculum goes in India, if you don't start at a certain time point, you don't get to finish the whole thing.

I fell in that block, so I just wanted for my daughter to have the whole breadth Of experience.

When I was 4 years old, my mom showed me a picture of Deepti Auntie, and I was like, "Oh, my God, she's so pretty.

I want to learn from her."

Neharika came to me at 4, 4 and a half, this tiny little thing with two tiny ponytails over here.

She's the cutest thing, and she is an amazing dancer.

She's a beautiful dancer.

Curry: Navile's own Rangapravesha took place in India.

My mom always wanted to learn Bharatanatyam.

Learning dance at her time was a very expensive proposition, so she couldn't learn to dance.

I was 6 years old when my mother took me to her Bharatanatyam class.

My present guru, Dr. Lalitha Srinivasan, she would do only one Rangapravesha a year.

So I had to wait my turn.

I absolutely loved all the work that went into that, and I carry all that I was taught forward to my students.

Curry: The choreography is only part of the Bharatanatyam performance.

Neha's parents have hired professional classical Indian dancer Kasi Aysola to do Neha's makeup and hair.

The headdress is done with the South Indian style of [speaks Hindi], which is like a very ornate type of jewelry they wear on their hair.

Also, they wear a long braid, which is iconic of Indian women and the type of beauty aesthetics that are coveted in India.

They have long, drawn eyebrows and eyes in order to project their expressions when you're seeing it from the back of the audience.

Curry: And there is audience.

There are over 4 and a half million people of Indian ancestry in the United States, almost 200,000 of whom live in the Washington D.C. area.

Aysola: The community here in the D.C. area is a very dense, also diverse and welcoming one.

So it's very unique, I think, to have this level of support and constant performances, productions, collaborations that are happening within the Indian dance community.

Curry: Bharatanatyam dancing expresses Hindu religious themes and spiritual ideas.

We just heard stories about mythology, and we just accepted it and moved on.

When you learn through a dance, you're learning the core meaning instead of just the gory details that get depicted.

With Neha, I see her challenge why everything has to be this way, but I also see her willingness to accept what message is conveyed through that medium.

We consider Indian dance spiritual for that reason, that it gives us something that's beyond the world.

It's not tangible to us.

And the more you dig that and dig that and dig that, you can hopefully find meaning in it.

Sometimes when we dance, we dance to real prayers, and I've actually learned a few prayers.

So when I go to temple, sometimes I recite those prayers and it makes me feel closer to my culture living in America.

Curry: Navile came to the United States in 1992 to work in computer science.

I was working at NASA, and I started the dance school in '94.

I was doing both.

In NASA, where everybody of every race, I walk around the corners and people are talking in Greek, another corner people are talking in Korean.

So I never felt untoward at that time.

I only started noticing the uttering when my child started going to school.

From '94 to 2000, I did the job and I also ran the school.

By 2000, I was like, I'm not doing this anymore.

I'm only doing my dance.

I am teaching them the culture too.

I am as American as another person, but also I have a culture that I want to share.

I want my students to be able to be proud of who they are as Americans and proud of who they are as Indian Americans.

Curry: Aside from her passion for dance, Neha is a junior at Wootton High School in Rockville.

I'm 16 years old, and I like playing field hockey.

I like running and I like cooking a lot.

School stresses me out a little because I want to be a perfectionist and I want to take the hardest classes and the most I can, and I'm doing a hundred different things, and there are like 24 hours in a day.

There are a lot of people coming to watch me.

This is a lot of pressure.

I'm representing my culture, I'm representing what I've learned, but also it's fun.

So there's really no point in getting stressed, because if I do get stressed, I'm not going to have fun.

I'm stressed.

Don't be stressed.

It's gonna be good.

All right?

Sit down.

Curry: At the Jewish Community Center in Rockville, Maryland, there are just hours left to prepare the venue.

There are a lot of families.

Moms coming to help me decorate different parts of my venue.

I'm really scared for Bharatanatyam because yesterday, like the one going around in the circle wasn't on beat.

[Indistinct] Woman: But you caught up.

It was, like, off for a second, though.

Like, I don't want that.

Venkataram: The dads are there too.

They'll be there at the front desk.

I've actually voluntold my husband and my nephew to help decorate the stage.

Keep your head this way.

Right after that, I go into the takadimi.

OK. [Singing in Hindi] Venkataraman: These are flowers I just want to hang.

OK. Then I have the trellis.

[Both singing in Hindi] It's a family event, community event, and everybody puts in whatever they can.

Govindarajan: It's gonna be my fault that I can't enter the stage.

Woman: No.

Aysola: Why are you so worried about faults and blames and perfection?

Just it's a performance.

You just have to perform.

Curry: It's a performance that will stream live to relatives as far as Australia, Canada, and India.

After an offering in prayer called pooja, Navile blesses the ankle bells and Neha takes the stage.

[Music playing, chanting in Hindi] Navile: She would begin with the traditional offering of flowers to the god of dance, Lord Nataraja, who we believe is the cosmic dancer who harmoniously balances life and death on Earth.

And then she would begin with a--with an ode to the mother goddess.

The centerpiece is about Saint Poet Andal.

The penultimate piece is this dance where she is the young woman who is going to meet her lover.

Usually I don't teach it to the younger ones, but I knew she could handle it.

All Bharatanatyam programs end with a tillana, which is like a fast-paced music with a lovely rhythm pattern.

We end any performance just like we begin any performance, with a peace offering.

Venkataraman: She's understood what she's doing, so I'm very proud and I'm very happy.

Navile: It's a whole mind, body, soul thing, and I'm glad-- I'm tearing up, so.

I'm glad some of it transferred.

I know every time I'm tired, I look to my teacher, and she is still doing it.

So she's my inspiration.

So many of these young dancers, they do their debuts and they don't ever dance again.

I look back now and I'm like, whoa.

Like, I've come so far.

And it was my first understanding of what it means to do a performance.

And so I hope they all keep dancing after their first solos.

Govindarajan: I honestly can't imagine my life without it.

I just feel really happy that I get this opportunity.

Curry: If you want to learn more about classical Indian dance in the D.C. area, check out the Indian Dance Educators Association at ideadancers.org.

There, you can find teachers across the DMV and check out upcoming events.

You can learn more about Deepti Mukund Navile and her school at dance-dc.com.

D.C.-based artist Chris Combs is asking big questions with electronics.

We met up with him in his studio at Otis Street Arts Project in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

I make art with and about technology because I think that in general, technologies have great potential and are also a little bit scary.

So I like to make art about that kind of tension.

I want to point out the ways that things in our culture have changed in a way that we haven't necessarily noticed.

My background is in photojournalism.

I studied photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art, and I was a photographer for a while.

In my day job, I was learning how to build websites, and I thought that was really interesting, but I also wanted to rewind and learn something that I wanted to learn when I was a kid.

When I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, my dad gave me this electronics book.

It's a fabulous book, like it's a great way to learn electronics, but on page 3, it gets into the structure of the atom.

When I kid, this was too much for me.

So I looked at this book and was very impressed and set it down.

In 2013, as a New Year's resolution, I started learning electronics again.

At some point, I realized I could combine my art degree with my electronics hobby and start making electronics art.

So in 2017, I put a piece on the wall at D.C. Arts Center during their open hang, which is an amazing event, called "Wall-Mountables."

A curator approached me and said, "Would you like to do a show?"

And I said, "What?

Yes, I would like to do that."

And maybe I should make this a serious practice in my art, which is not a thing yet.

Curry: Combs' technology needs are so specific, he designs his own circuit boards and writes his own software to run on them.

Combs: This, like, shining thing that is a blank circuit board, I solder electronics to it.

They tend to be very small components.

Many of the things that I'm working with are one millimeter or smaller.

I put them in enclosures that I make or found objects, anything that kind of speaks to me.

I really enjoy industrial objects.

This is a piece called "One-to-Many."

I'm using all of these individual little clock displays, and the kind of images that I'm hoping to show are things that should inspire anxiety in the viewer.

So, like, countdowns that never quite reach zero, geometric increases or bouncing balls, and then 8 and then 16 and then 32.

All these things for me are the idea that automation may reach such a point where not only the work of humans has been replaced by automation, but maybe the machines might take over.

Curry: Another work is called "Iteration Transmission IV."

Combs: The imagery that it's showing is a combination of star fields and these geometric tiles.

All these star fields are the star clusters towards which a radio message was sent from Earth to try to contact alien life, and this attempt may be successful.

We don't know.

And we will not know during our lifetimes because many of these star clusters are so far away that if we did receive a response, it would occur 500 years from now.

So I find that really interesting, the idea that anyone with a big enough radio can send a message that will have no effect on their lifetime.

This piece is called "Demon Core," and it's a steel box containing a shiny hexsphere fear of stainless steel held from the bottom by a square magnet, and above this is an LED display pointing downwards with green lights.

What those letters are are portions of a message called the Sandia message, which are designed to ward people 10,000 years in the future away from a nuclear waste storage site.

The message includes things like this.

"We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

"This place is not a place of honor.

"No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Nothing valued is here."

And these words are intended to ward future people away from raiding what might look like a really fancy tomb.

Curry: Works like "Lepidopterism," which pins a drone in a frame as if it were a butterfly, and "Impressions," which lights up only as you pass by, are intended to pique an exhibit-goer's scrutiny.

Combs: I would love for someone to go away maybe making slightly different decisions or having a little voice in their head that says, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't enable the location tracking "on this particular free app that I just downloaded "because that enables a corporation to do something scary with it."

I don't expect that everyone will walk away from the art that I make changed, but if there's a way to just make a little tiny changes in one's life, I'd be very happy with that.

You can see two of Combs' pieces in person at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, through December 11th.

He has a solo show coming up next spring at Prince George's Publick Playhouse.

Check his website for details.

Most cities have a commission that reviews proposed changes to buildings and spaces of historical significance.

In Washington, that commission doesn't just evaluate an old building's proposed window renovation, it reviews changes to places of national significance like the Mall and its monuments, memorials, and museums.

It's called the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and Thomas Luebke has served as its secretary since 2005.

He's an award-winning architect who leads the design of hundreds of projects every year involving urban design, new buildings, historic preservation, and public art.

Hi, Tom, welcome to "WETA Arts."

We are so happy to be here with you at the National Building Museum and at your offices of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Tell us a little bit about what you do here.

Well, thank you.

It's a real honor to be part of the show.

The Commission is the design review body.

We have a panel of 7 experts in the arts, and they advise the federal government and the District government on the built environment in this city, whether it's architecture, parks, public art, coins and medals of the mint.

We review private sector development in areas where it's considered of federal interest-- around the Waterfront, along the Mall, up Rock Creek Valley.

We review Georgetown as well.

It's a huge range.

The part you may have heard about mostly is the big national projects-- museums, memorials, things on the Mall.

Curry: we took a walk by the Dwight the Eisenhower Memorial, which is one of the newest monuments here in the city.

Tell us a little bit about how the memorial itself came to be.

Luebke: This Eisenhower study started in 1999, and it wasn't actually dedicated until 2020.

Congress has to authorize it to be studied, then they got to decide to go forward with it, then they got to pick site, and there's a design development, and then we really reviewed it.

Other bodies also were involved, and eventually it goes into construction.

It can be 10 years on the inside and a little bit longer.

Curry: Tell us a little bit about the art behind this particular memorial.

The memorial was intended to commemorate Eisenhower as the man, and then his role as president in general.

So you've got two sculptural figures, one of him at D-Day.

And the other in the White House.

There's one more sculpture which is of him as a 15-year-old kid imagining his life ahead of him.

There was an invited competition.

The winner of the competition is Frank Gehry, who arguably was in the top handful of the world's most prominent architects.

It came through the Commission many times.

There was pushback from Congress on the scale and cost.

There was pushback from activists who didn't like the more modern or contemporary character.

Probably most importantly is that the family was very concerned about it.

The family finally supported the memorial with this image of the French Normandy Coast.

So it's still an Eisenhower story, it's just more focused on the wartime experience.

Curry: When we talk about monuments, I imagine they go through lots of changes from the beginning of the process through the end of the process.

They do.

Some more than others.

The FDR Memorial started with a competition in 1957, I believe.

And it went through 3 or 4 major design ideas until it got the current design, which wasn't completed until 1997.

So it was about a 40-year period.

That one is in some ways one of the most interesting stories of it all.

Already in the fifties, they wanted to do something to commemorate him.

By this time, we are in a period where modern design ideas are really at the forefront and you have all sorts of amazing, kind of wacky ideas.

You know, one of them looked a lot like Stonehenge.

It had a lot of quotes from Roosevelt on these big, huge slabs.

The family didn't like that.

Then another one came back that had big triangles and a pinwheel.

The Commission of Fine Arts rejected that.

The thing goes on hold.

Eventually, they say forget it.

But then it got revived.

By this time, it's the mid-seventies.

What's different about it, it's no longer this idea of the abstract object.

It's actually about experience.

So that's where you get the sculptures that you can touch, the scenes that you can enter, the movement that you go around.

It's a very different kind of memorial.

So you go through this unfolding landscape of spaces.

It's organized around the 4 terms of his presidency, but it's really about bringing the experience of this great man down to the subjective experience of the visitors.

This has to some extent become not necessarily a blueprint, but a conceptual change for memorials.

The World War I Memorial was a fascinating project.

It's down on Pennsylvania Avenue in what was Pershing Park.

After the Memorial was authorized, then there was this discussion about where should it go.

And rather than do another on the Mall memorial, they said, we've already got the park.

It needs refurbishment.

So there's going to be this 60-foot long bas relief of a soldier going off to war and leaving his family, and then the craziness of war, and then his rehabilitation and coming back home.

It's a really interesting arc.

It creates this lovely end piece to the park.

So that was another one that we just had such a great conversation trying to get it to the right place.

So what are the next big national-level projects?

Luebke: Desert Shield/Desert Storm would be the next one in full development right now.

It's on a site very near the Lincoln Memorial off of constitution at 23rd.

It's got these nested battered walls that are reminiscent of the dune landscape of Kuwait, and there's going to be this lovely central fountain piece that actually a shield, reminiscent of Desert Shield, with all the names of the participating countries on it.

Then sculptures of an American eagle and a falcon, which represents Kuwait.

We've got two new museums, which have been authorized now to exist.

Which one is the Smithsonian American Women's Museum and the other is the National Museum of the American Latino.

Location right now, I think, it's a really hot and difficult topic because they're really--they're virtually no empty sites in the Mall.

One of the things we've long talked about is that there's that 10th Street Corridor that goes right from the castle down to the newly redeveloped waterfront.

You have enough room to put 3 or 4 museums there, which is right next to the Smithsonian and could be a really great place to do that.

Curry: We've talked a lot about monuments and memorials, but I know your commission has its hand and involvement in lots of different projects here in Washington DC.

We're dealing with literally, you know, 700 or 800 cases a year in areas where the federal government has decided it wants to review this.

The redesign of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is now 40-, 50-year-old project.

The redo of their arena stage down in Southwest on the waterfront.

The Kennedy Center did a tremendous expansion called The Reach.

Occasionally there's little interventions that can go in.

We call them triangle parks.

Sometimes there's two of them, so we call them bowtie parks.

It's really about supporting public value in the public space.

What really is the end game for a commission like yours?

What are you trying to provide to the public?

And why is it so important?

Luebke: The underlying DNA of Washington DC is that it's not a big high-rise commercial city like so many others.

The emphasis is in the public space, the big avenues, the street squares and circles, the public buildings.

There's this sense of trying to provide something that is inspirational or expresses that there's a common good that we all can agree on.

Tom, thank you so much for talking to us today about what the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts does.

It was a pleasure having, Thank you.

Thank you for coming over here.

And it was a real pleasure to be able to just talk about some of the issues that we face and what's going on right now in the city.

Curry: Although the bas relief on the World War I Memorial isn't completed yet, you can see the rest of the memorial now.

It's on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest between 14th and 15th Streets across from the Willard Hotel.

You can find the Eisenhower Memorial on Independence Avenue across from the Air and Space Museum.

And if you want to check out what's new with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, go to their website at cfa.gov.

Here's a quote from Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Leonard Cohen from his song "Anthem."

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

Thank you for watching this episode of "WETA Arts."

Be well, be creative, and enjoy the art all around you.

I'm Felicia Curry.

Announcer: For more about the artists and institutions featured in this episode, go to WETA.org/arts.