Indian Classical Music Circle of Austin(ICMCA)

Description

ICMCA's activities aimed at fulfilling its mission have three forms. First, ICMCA organizes live music and dance events in the Austin area featuring artistes visiting the United States from the Indian sub-continent. These activities have historically been ICMCA's main focus, in terms of both resource requirements and organizational support, which includes negotiating fees, arranging dates and coordinating travel schedules with the artists, arranging for local accommodation for the artistes in local hotels, scouting for and settling on concert venues and associated fees, marketing the event within the local community, renting audio-visual equipment and associated technical support, and managing day-of-the-event activities. Second, ICMCA seeks out, actively promotes, and provides logistical and marketing support to local (i.e., Texas-based) amateur and semi-professional practitioners of Indian music and dance forms wishing to display their talents in a public forum. While these activities do require organizational effort and some resource commitments on ICMCA's part, those tend to be on a smaller scale than events featuring professional ensembles visiting from outside. As South Asian classical arts increasingly integrate into the local music milieu and an increasingly larger local audience develops for these forms (in no small part due to ICMCA's efforts over the last decade), ICMCA expects to significantly boost its activities in this category. Third, ICMCA works with the artistic and academic communities to provide opportunities for the public to learn, through workshops and lecture-demonstrations, the forms, structures and nuances of South Asian music and dance, as well as their similarities and points of difference with art forms from Western and other cultures. ICMCA strongly encourages attendance by the local community of such events, as they help provide a base of knowledge for music-lovers with which to better appreciate and understand South Asian music and dance.