We are a University of Washington Bothell student organization dedicated to the proposition that great musicians deserve great audiences and vice versa. Our events will be first-come-first-seated, sans speeches, lamps, incense and garlanding ceremonies. Just artists and audiences interacting up close and personal. We will invite both master musicians who embody the best the tradition has to offer
as well as performers who are at various stages on their journey to that end. As our capabilities expand we will add other arts to our ouvre. No matter what else we do, our central aim will be to capture the je ne se quoi that pervades traditional music performances in India where living masters of the tradition perform for discerning and demanding audiences who help keep the tradition alive and evolving by paying the kind of rapt and mindful attention that makes the performer “walk the edge of the sword.” In this way, we hope to bring to the UWB community, and more generally to the Eastside and to the Puget Sound area, events that will create an aesthetic portal, as it were, into the contemporary Indian performing arts milieu where a two millennium old tradition is kept alive and evolving as each generation of performers and audiences celebrates, in its own way, the joy of being. The one promise we make to ourselves and to our audience is that we will feature performers who strive to keep the music fresh and real: by this we mean simply that we will not seek to re-enact safe and ossified routines in the name of tradition. The tradition we will seek to propagate is one that recognizes the vital necessity of reinventing itself with every performance. Like evolution, the process sometimes (indeed, often) may fail, but the program of trial and error must go on: In art, as in life, stasis is death. We will build on and contribute to the rich tradition of Indian performing arts sponsorship in the Puget Sound area by pioneering organizations like Ragamala and others too numerous to name individually as well as existing diaspora organizations that promote and nurture the Indian performing arts. We intend to complement their efforts by expanding the audience to include the UWB campus community as well as the broader Bothell and Puget Sound communities outside of the Indian diaspora. To this end we will work with institutions that cater to all ages: local primary and secondary schools and post-secondary institutions, community arts and cultural organizations as well as elder community organizations to include all of these broader, non-traditional audiences in an enriching, life-affirming and, ultimately, uplifting, dialog. Our ethos of organizing free events is motivated by conviction that the very best and most meaningful things in life, like great art, should be available to all. As such we will also be reaching out to the community for resources to enable us to achieve this somewhat utopian but ultimately human and humane vision.
