We were thinking $30.00.
Apoorva and Sumathi, co-founders of RootEd Foundation, had sounded unyielding when they said it.
Stunned to silence, we exchanged side-eyes at each other on the Zoom call — if that’s even possible on an online group meeting.
$30.00? For a solo Bharatanatyam performance? Targeted at audiences that had never seen Bharatanatyam before? Yeah…no one was gonna show up.
The two of us jumped on a call right after the group meeting, and the vent opened:
Shows featuring the greatest Bharatanatyam artists of our time only charge $30, so who will pay $30 to watch us?
We were more than willing to perform without pay — something we were used to and had accepted. Like most other South Asian artists of a cultural art form, we were raised to believe that showcasing our culture was a priceless opportunity in itself. Charging a fee to perform, let alone charging fair compensation, somehow conflicted with its spiritual roots.
We had never paid more than $10 for a Bharatanatyam show in the suburbs where we grew up, most Indian classical programs were free.
Ironically, that was our mindset as an audience for our own art form. How were we supposed to convince others to pay?
Two months later, as ticket sales came trickling in, we were so relieved that we didn’t resort to our initial gut reaction of lowering ticket prices. We had the opposite problem…with one show selling out altogether!
RootEd Foundation’s One Step Closer Koncerts greeted an audience of 215 people across 6 cities and 7 concerts. Of this audience, 1 in 3 had never seen Bharatanatyam before and nearly 100% said they would watch a Bharatanatyam performance again.
What’s keeping audiences away?
While most of us in the Indian diaspora may have attended a friend’s Arangetram, scrolled past a #dancechallenge reel on Instagram, or attended a collegiate dance team performance, it’s no secret that Bharatanatyam remains out of the mainstream.
Bharatanatyam in its traditional format often feels like it can only be watched through a glass window.
When a new viewer attends a Bharatanatyam concert, they might hear something like: “The central piece of today’s margam is the well-known Tanjore Quartet pada varnam where the Nayika is in Viraha.”
That, right there, is a sentence that is filled with incomprehensible technical terms and assumed knowledge. Audiences encounter songs in languages unfamiliar to the ear – Sanskrit, Braj, chaste classical Tamil. It’s like watching Taylor Swift sing in Latin. The dance consists of complex rhythms and ornates gesturing, the code sheet to which one has not been handed. The culprit is often assumed to be a cultural barrier – I don’t get the point of Indian epics and mythology – what’s in it for me?
We are met with layer after layer of knowledge barrier, which makes us feel we can observe but never understand.
RootEd’s One Step Closer Koncert (OSCK) Series was created to address this exact problem:
To take Bharatanatyam, in its traditional grammatical format, one step closer to an uninitiated audience, by giving them the much needed code sheet and context to unlock the real deal – the dance itself!
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Becoming our own ambassadors
Targeting our outreach to audiences that had never seen the art form, let alone knew how to pronounce “buh-ruh-tuh-naa-tee-uhm”, took considerable effort. It took weeks of handing out flyers, advertising in coffee shops and yoga studios, posting on social media, and engaging strangers in conversations for us, as dancers, to become ambassadors for ourselves.
Creating and articulating the demand for ourselves and the art form was a completely new muscle we were building, real-time.
The less apologetic we were about engaging people in something they didn’t know about initially, the more trusting they became of us to teach them. We had to communicate our conviction in the art form, not our doubt about whether they would understand.
Sumathi, for instance, faced pushback from her pre-teen dance students, whom she’d asked to spread the word about the upcoming OSCK performance. “I can’t invite my friends… they don’t know anything about dance and will not come.”
After her Austin performance, the faces of the same kids who had begrudgingly dragged along unsuspecting schoolmates and neighbours were now brimming with confidence. Their friends not only stayed an entire hour from start to finish but were enthralled at the dancer’s ability to weave characters and narratives from thin air.
One of them said, “You will leave the theatre thrilled, and excited to get back to another one.”
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Crafting an Accessible Dance Experience
Our mandate as artists is to give our audience a visual experience. But now, as ambassadors for the art, we also have an additional responsibility to help the audience relish the details—to guide their minds to elements that will help them connect.
Our question switched from “Will they understand?” to “What can we tell them so they can see the larger picture without getting embroiled in the particulars of the recipe?”.
Instead of the typical:
We next present a Mallari in Ragam Gambheera Nattai, an invocatory piece about Lord Shiva from the temple traditions.
Would our audience appreciate instead hearing:
This is a piece about a processional march – do you hear the beat of the procession slowly building to a crescendo?
As the performer, I found this process of painstakingly curating our annotations exhausting. Yet, our audiences were walking away with a deeper understanding of the art form. They had passionate discussions about how the performance made them feel and advocated for concepts, artistic choices, and every “Aha!” moment they had!
In one post-performance discussion, an uninitiated audience member turned into a self-appointed ambassador and led a heated debate with a group of friends without the dancer even around.
Audience 1: Why was the same line being performed repeatedly?
Audience 2: I think it was because it grew in intensity each time and added another shade to her emotion. Maybe it was to qualify her urgency? I felt the urgency.
Audience 1: Why does the protagonist keep asking her FRIEND to go get her lover? Why doesn’t she go and get him herself?
Audience 2 : Dude, the Sakhi is kinda like the best friend in a romcom. She serves both the heroine and the story’s narrative.
This was beyond anything we expected. The impact we created extended well beyond an audience’s applause or a job well done –
Our art had taken on a life of its own
Apoorva and Sumathi constantly reminded us that the stories of Bharatanatyam are not irrelevant or disengaging. It’s rather the spaces and methods in which we present Bharatanatyam that are not ideal—it does not initiate an untrained eye, teach audiences of the syntax of the art form, or inform one of the dancer’s intent.
Our audience doesn’t want to be left behind. We, as artists, often do this without realizing it. When we relieve our audience of the pressure of understanding, we free them to experience potent moments that the art is capable of delivering, unaffected by presumed cultural barriers.
A Round of Applause
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The reviews said it all.
“…even though you may not know the dance form or may not know exactly what she’s saying, you can connect to the human emotion being depicted. That is one of the most surprising aspects.”
Without understanding the language, the music, or the technique, watching Bharatanatyam became an experience of shared human emotion.
“A feast for the senses.”
The audience could interpret what they were seeing with the tools they already had. The content was simply the medium through which this impression could be laid.
“I was blown away by how much story and emotion could be conveyed through dance.”
Despite being transported into stories and scenes from an unfamiliar cultural context, the audience felt that it was relatable in the ways that mattered for them to describe the experience and watch Bharatanatyam again.
Ultimately, we had two primary goals — we wanted to achieve through OSCK:
- Bring in audiences who were previously uninitiated in experiencing a Bharatanatyam performance
- Have them leave with a sense of wanting to come back and watch more.
How did we do?
From sparking their curiosity to keeping them captivated throughout and ultimately leaving them excited for another experience, we couldn’t have asked for better results.
Needless to say, they didn’t need an encyclopedia on Bharatanatyam to understand what they saw; they simply needed the space to experience it.
One Step Closer: To Ourselves, and You.
The journey of RootEd Foundation’s One Step Closer Koncerts has reminded us, as South Asian diaspora artists, of the power of believing in and advocating for the value of our art.
To artists reading this, instead of questioning, “Am I worth $30?” let us focus on, “How can I better articulate my art to convince my audience that it is worth $30?” One is a disempowered mindset, while the other can unlock so much more than what we constrain ourselves to. The success of OSCK 2023 is testimony to the fact that adopting an empowered mindset truly works.
To audiences reading this, if OSCK 2023 has shown us anything, it is that Bharatanatyam can offer a valuable contemporary experience, even for those unfamiliar with it. Would you, going forward, consider giving something seemingly distant from you a fair chance before dismissing it altogether?
Would you be willing to evaluate the price of something based on its promise to enrich you long-term? Would you be willing to place trust in the training, experience, investment, and wisdom of centuries that go into bringing a cultural art form to you and sign up to be an active partaker in discovering it? For a start, would you consider taking that first tiny, meaningful step closer to us? We assure you, you will not regret it.
RootEd Foundation’s next One Step Closer Koncert will be on November 9 across the USA. Buy tickets for a show near you.
