The Audience for Classical Arts: On Ashoka, SPIC MACAY, and learning to receive unfamiliar art

Before Vidushi Malavika Sarukkai began dancing at Ashoka University’s Black Box Theatre on September 7, someone had thought about where her musicians would sit, what she would eat, how she would be received, and what the room of her performance needed to feel like. Volunteers wore silk sarees and deep kajals, calling her “Mala Akka” rather than “ma’am.” Shawls were prepared for her and her musicians, replacing the branded water bottles usually handed to guests at Ashoka events. The mridangam and violin had to be placed correctly. Small details, easy for an audience to miss, had already shaped the evening before Sarukkai took the stage.

The recital, organised by Ashoka’s SPIC MACAY chapter, brought Sarukkai, a Padma Shri and Sangeet Natak Akademi Award recipient, to campus for a programme that moved through a Ganeshastuti, Ode to the Sun, Taalam, an Ashtapadi from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, Lalita Lavanga, and Vande Mataram. She was accompanied by Vidushi Neela Sukhanya on nattuvangam, Vidushi Krithika Arvind on vocals, Vidwan Nellai Balaji on mridangam and Vidwan Venkat Subramaniam on violin. Yet what stayed with me was less the scale of the booking than the attention surrounding it: the preparation required to receive an artist whose work has itself been sustained by decades of attention.

Dance makes that attention unusually visible. Classical dance can look effortless precisely because so much effort has been absorbed into the body. A dancer has to know where a foot lands, how a hand is held, where the body sits in relation to the musicians, how rhythm moves through the performance and when a gesture must change in response to what is happening around it. The same movement may be practised hundreds of times until its precision becomes almost imperceptible. What an audience experiences as spontaneity is often the accumulated result of repetition, correction and sensitivity to detail.

That sensitivity extends beyond the dancer. Tanvee Jitendra (UG’28), one of SPIC MACAY’s coordinators, described classical training as producing a particular kind of suspense. She pointed to details that might seem insignificant to someone unfamiliar with the form: knowing how instruments should be arranged, which musicians sit where, how an artist’s arrival might need to be handled, what food or refreshments should be prepared. “That level of attention to detail and anticipation of what the performer’s stream of action will look like is something that can’t be bought without some training in the classical space,” she said. “It can be learned, but it takes time.” The distinction Jitendra draws is not simply between the trained dancer and the uninitiated, but between observing a practice and being immersed in it. Care, in this sense, is a form of attention: learning to recognise what something requires, and responding to it before the need has to be made explicit. This was evident in the recital itself, as the intimacy of the Black Box also altered the relationship between performer and audience. Sarukkai changed parts of her planned programme after seeing the Black Box, treating the room as something that could shape the performance. When she went off script, her musicians had to be ready to follow her. The intimacy of the Black Box also altered the relationship between performer and audience. Rather than the distance of a conventional stage, the room allowed the audience to sit close enough to register small changes in expression and movement. Jitendra described it as “a receptive space,” one that could ask an artist for a greater degree of vulnerability and authenticity.

A September 14 account published by SPIC MACAY Ashoka, A Sunrise Is Never Old, similarly describes an evening in which the usual boundaries of a performance were unusually porous: sound checks and adjustments remained visible as the audience entered, and Sarukkai continued speaking with students after the recital. The chapter’s account quotes her speaking about honesty, vulnerability and “feeling more,” while describing the rasik, the person receiving the performance, as central to why she dances. The performance therefore depended upon a series of people paying attention to one another. The dancer listened to the musicians; the musicians listened to the dancer; the organisers listened to the artist and the room; the audience, ideally, listened to all of them.

This is also what distinguishes SPIC MACAY from much of student life at Ashoka. Lakshman Vinayak (UG’28), another coordinator, described the chapter as less concerned with producing something than with creating the conditions for people to receive something. “This is about creating a space and then just observing, watching, sitting,” he said. “We’re trying to give you a space to not create, just to come and sit.” The difficulty, however, is getting people to arrive at all. Vinayak recalled that some of the chapter’s earlier concerts had struggled with attendance. The artists could be among the most accomplished performers in the country, but that alone did not make students want to spend an evening watching them. “It’s never about just booking big people,” Vinayak says. “The students have to receive them and be excited to learn.” The chapter has considered open-air performances partly for this reason: placing classical performances somewhere students already pass through might allow them to encounter the work before deciding whether it is for them.

That observation gives the question of Ashoka’s relationship with classical arts a more specific shape. The problem, according to SPIC MACAY’s organisers, is not simply that students are uninterested. Vinayak spoke about the difficulty of getting students without classical training to attend, while Jitendra described the perceived barrier of entry to Indian classical arts as high. The chapter has tried direct conversation as well as more conventional publicity; Vinayak recalled that speaking to students in person could make someone who was initially uninterested curious enough to come to the Black Box. The organisers are also wary of turning unfamiliarity into a moral failing. Jitendra described “an immense pressure to like” classical art, but argued for “faith and also the space to not like it.” She has encountered instruments she dislikes and concerts she would rather not sit through. That, she argues, is part of receiving art too. Vinayak’s version is about repetition. A trained Bharatanatyam dancer, he described teaching himself to listen to Carnatic music over time: “I’ll listen to it once, twice, thrice. Fourth time it’s okay, fifth time I like it.” “This kind of an art form demands you to not judge it five times,” he said, “and we need to create a space where people will give it five chances.” Then he put it more simply: “We require faith rather than judgement.”

The second time, Tanvee added, is often the hardest.

There is a parallel here with the discipline of dance. A dancer does not learn by demanding that a movement become meaningful immediately. The body repeats it until something begins to happen. Attention accumulates. Familiarity changes perception. What first feels awkward becomes legible; what seemed monotonous reveals structure; what appears excessively formal begins to contain variation. For an audience, repeated encounters can work in much the same way: what is initially unfamiliar can, with time, become more legible. 

That patience was visible in the small acts surrounding Sarukkai’s performance. Jitendra, who has trained in both Kathak and Bharatanatyam for over a decade, sprayed rose-scented air freshener across the space before Sarukkai arrived, joking, “Akka is coming! Rose everywhere.” Rangolis were drawn outside the Black Box; volunteers considered where people should stand for photographs and prepared for the inevitable backstage mishaps. When something went wrong, people moved to fix it without waiting to be assigned a task. Jitendra traced this instinct to classical training, where one learns to notice the smallest details: “hair, clothes, where to stand.” There is something revealing about understanding these gestures as expressions of love. The feeling matters less here than what it teaches you to notice. To care for a person, a practice or a community is to become attentive to its particular needs, to recognise what is required and respond without having to be asked.

For Ashoka, perhaps the more interesting question is what happens when that attention is extended beyond the things students already know they care about. Societies have deliverables, events have attendance numbers, applications have deadlines, and even leisure can become another activity to optimise. Students here are capable of intense engagement, but that engagement is often directed toward what is already familiar, useful, fashionable or immediately legible. “Ashokans are willing to watch other Ashokans”, as Lakshman says. SPIC MACAY’s challenge is different. It asks students to encounter something whose vocabulary they may not know, whose conventions they may not immediately understand, and whose value may only become apparent after repeated attention.

The Sarukkai recital offered a concrete version of that possibility. The dancer’s discipline depended upon repetition and responsiveness. The organisers had to anticipate before they could receive. The musicians had to listen closely enough to change course. And the audience had to sit with something that might take time. For Sarukkai, that room was the Black Box. She arrived with a practice shaped by decades of performance, but allowed the particular space and audience to alter what she had planned. What emerged was therefore specific to Ashoka: a performance shaped by the willingness of an artist, musicians, organisers and audience to listen and adjust to one another. Perhaps the most fitting image is the one Sarukkai herself offered during the evening, when she spoke about the sunrise. There is no old sunrise, she said. Each one arrives as though it were the first. The point is not that something has to be entirely new to deserve our attention, it is that attention can make the familiar available to us again.

SPIC MACAY is asking for something similar. Come to the Baithak. Sit down. Listen. Come again if you did not understand it the first time. You may not like everything. You do not have to, but you must stay long enough to find out. (Edited by Nikita Kalra. )