On a Sunday night, just a few days before term started, the unthinkable happened: A concert hall full of OSU employees jumped to their feet and waved their arms and danced in the aisles, seemingly unencumbered by stress or exhaustion.
Such is the power of Red Baraat, the band that performed for this year’s employee appreciation night at PRAx on Sept. 21. Band leader Sunny Jain kept both the musicians and the audience in near constant movement as he drummed away on the traditional Indian dhol hanging around his neck.
“It was a moment of spontaneous joy,” said Carolyn Warfield, director of academic HR strategies in University Human Resources. The musicians onstage were still hewing to careful rhythms and time signatures, but appeared to be unleashing “thoughtful chaos,” playing and experimenting in a way that felt unplanned and exciting.
“For me, that’s part of what universities are about,” she said. “You explore new things by allowing for some randomness. And seeing that encapsulated in a show, and watching some of our folks get really into it and lose themselves in the music was super exciting. It fills up your bucket again.”
While OSU has other university-wide employee appreciation programs throughout the year, like the 25-Year Club for long-time employees and the New Employee Breakfast on University Day, the PRAx events are open to everyone and are meant to be less formal.
“It’s about community,” Warfield said. “It’s not just doing the things you have to do; it’s what you contribute with your whole self while you’re here at OSU.”
This is the third employee appreciation event at PRAx since the center opened in spring 2024. Each time, Peter Betjemann, PRAx executive director and associate vice provost of arts and humanities, aims to choose a band that will bring high energy and a unique style of music.
“Fun is one of the key criteria,” he said. “Universities are fundamentally cerebral places, so it’s really meaningful to provide the campus and the community with embodied experience. This is why we really like dancing and why we like people to stand up.”
In spring 2024, PRAx hosted the Canadian-Celtic rock group Derina Harvey Band. In fall 2024, the artist was Ranky Tanky, a South Carolina Gullah band drawing on the musical culture of the Carolina lowlands. Red Baraat combines North Indian rhythms, hip-hop, funk, ska and jazz and plays with the goal of “Manifesting joy and unity in all people.” More than 350 people attended the Employee Appreciation Night show, though it was open to the public and not all were employees.
Betjemann’s opening remarks before the performance challenged the employee audience to match the energy level of the previous night, when Red Baraat gave a show for 700-plus OSU students who “blew the roof off the place.” (That performance also included lighting cues designed by new students who participated in a Learn by Doing experiential learning activity at PRAx earlier that day.) When Sunny Jain called everyone to their feet after the first song, they listened.
“It filled me with joy to see folks feel free to move and be involved in the music in that way,” Warfield said. “It told me they felt safe in that environment to be themselves and to express themselves, and that’s such a huge part of who we are.”
The employee appreciation performance is just one of the ways PRAx is working to fully integrate the arts into the OSU community, and to overturn the idea that the arts are a “decorative sideshow” to the main work of the university, Betjemann said.
“For me, observing what was happening in the hall felt like the realization of how PRAx can powerfully contribute to the many ways of knowing the university is responsible for, and one of those ways of knowing is through the body,” he said.
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