The expressive movements in dance recitalshave long been known to arouse specific kinds of emotions in audiences. The current study aims to scientifically characterize the emotional responses elicited by excerpts of Odiya Abhinayas performed in the contemporary (stage) style of Odissi dance. The survey of excerpts of Odiya Abhinayas was done and compared between a participant pool of trained ‘dancers’ and non-dancers. 35 participants were made to rate the emotions they perceived from small, selected portions of famous Odiya Abhinayas on a 5-point Likert scale constructed using the Navarasa and Russell’s Emotional sphere. These clips were considered to convey a specific set of contrasting emotions. A unique concept of the present study is that the predicted class of emotions include a set of more than one emotion, as is common for any Indian dance performance. The average intensity corresponding to each clip and the relative percentage of elicitation of each particular emotion were computed. Several interesting differences were noted for the two classes of respondents chosen for our study, for example, in the second video, compassion was elicited alongside fear and sadness for non-dancers, which was not the case for dancers. The present study is the first of its kind which tries to scientifically investigate the emotional appraisal of the audience through the dance recital of Odiya Abhinayas.