When Applause Precedes Performance: Celebrity, Nostalgia and the Changing Audience for Indian traditional Dance

The standing ovation started before I could decide whether I believed it. I was still sitting. Something about the applause felt familiar…automatic. And I found myself asking: were we applauding the dance, or the actor we already knew?

That question stayed with me throughout Bhav, staged in Perth on 15 May 2026 at the Churchlands Senior High School Auditorium. The sold-out performance, presented by renowned artist Shobana and her dance ensemble, drew an audience eager to experience one of India’s most celebrated dancers and actors.

The evening began with something worth acknowledging. At around 6:50 pm, Shobana herself announced that the audience should be seated by 6:55 pm and that the programme would begin at 7:00 pm. And it did…on time, precise, intentional.

But the audience told a different story. People kept entering even after the performance had begun, some as late as 7:45 pm. Each entrance fractured attention, not dramatically, but enough to remind you that live performance depends on shared silence.

Then came the phones. Despite repeated requests, recording continued. At one point, she stopped mid-performance and firmly asked people to put their phones away, making it clear that if filming continued, she would stop dancing. Some found it strict. I didn’t. Because something gets lost when a performance becomes content. Bharatanatyam doesn’t survive distraction easily; it needs attention the way breath needs space.

Bhav explored the history of Bharatanatyam (though inaccurately), vrittis, navarasa, koothu, folk elements, film songs, and more. It was a mix of many themes. At one point, visuals of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya appeared on screen, an image that today carries strong political resonance in India.

But something else was already in the room long before the first step of dance: memory.

Shobana is not just a dancer; she is also a popular South Indian actress. Beyond her own performances, her legacy is also evident in the work of her students, who continue to reflect and extend her stylistic influence in Bharatanatyam in the ensemble performances. At one point, she danced to her own film songs. When she appeared as Nagavalli from Manichitrathazhu, the audience cheered enthusiastically.

Cultural memory doesn’t behave politely. It overlaps. It interferes. It edits what we see in real time. Research on autobiographical memory suggests that nostalgia doesn’t just recall the past, it softens present judgment while amplifying emotional attachment. So, we don’t just watch a performance; we revisit a feeling.

As a Bharatanatyam practitioner, I think a lot about abhinaya, not just expression, but presence. The kind that is built internally before it is shown externally. Watching, I kept drifting back to her older recordings: the precision, the intensity, the stillness between movements.

But memory is a dangerous reference point. It doesn’t update itself. It idealises. Psychologists describe this as temporal comparison bias – we unconsciously measure the present against a heightened version of the past.

If the exact same performance had been given by an unknown dancer, would the response have been the same? Would there have been a standing ovation or would we have quietly critiqued what we now generously overlook?

Part of the answer lies in what psychology calls the halo effect. If we admire someone in one domain, we tend to extend that admiration into others. Celebrity intensifies this even further. We don’t arrive as neutral observers; we arrive already invested. Research on audience perception shows that familiarity and emotional attachment can significantly influence how we evaluate performance, even when the performance itself hasn’t changed.

And then there are the others: hundreds of Bharatanatyam dancers performing every week across the world – technically strong, emotionally refined, deeply trained, but unknown.

They perform without film memory following them into the auditorium. Without nostalgia softening the lens. Without a legacy preceding them. Would they receive the same response? Or are we, without realising it, rewarding recognition more than performance?

There was a time when standing ovations were rare, reserved, earned. Now they often feel expected in certain contexts, not always because of what happened on stage, but because of who is on stage.

Sometimes applause is no longer about evaluation. It is about recognition. About gratitude. About memory. None of these are wrong – but they are not the same as judgement.

This isn’t really about one performance. It is about how we watch, how we remember, and how easily memory reshapes attention.

Because, at its best, Bharatanatyam asks us to respond to presence rather than reputation. And presence cannot be inherited; it must be witnessed.

So perhaps the question is simple: are we responding to the performance in front of us, or to everything we brought into the room with us?