How real is the Virtual?

In social media, dancers are finding a delightful window of opportunity. But how much of the display is genuine?

Rare is that dancer today who doesn’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, an Instagram account and is NOT using all of it to the optimum. The journey of the dance from ritual spaces to proscenium arches of the secular stage may have taken a couple of centuries but its transference to the slim confines of the browser has been nothing short of a blitzkrieg — all in the space of half a decade. Just as a duck takes to water, the dancer is only too happy to find a window of opportunity in all that life and technology lay at her door.

In these troubled timses, it is perhaps social media that has helped many stay connected, stay creative and admittedly according to quite a few, the only way they have remained sane. Amid constraints posed by the lockdown, there are instances of dancers who have embraced the medium like never before and are taking to online teaching and performing via this interfacing. But, hasn’t the world seen worse situations? For instance, during the Second World War, dancers such as Ninette de Valois and her troupe of ballet dancers toured Europe and native Britain, often risking their lives, performing to build ‘morale’ while every second there was the threat of a buzz bomb, or a doodlebug as it was called those days, hovering overhead. These were truly times of isolation and real threat, unaided by anything akin to the social media, yet the world somehow did get by.

Today, however, when we are captive to an increasingly clued-in world, where everybody has something to say about everything all the time with remarkable sameness and uniformity, one does wonder how the world got by all these years without this information force-feed.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that purely from a sociological perspective nothing has redefined our lives so completely and irreversibly as social media. It is time then to hold off the dizzying onslaught of posts for just a moment and reflect on how this phenomenon has impacted our lives. Particularly the dance world.

The nature of dance is such that it begs an audience and requires patronage. Without an audience, the dance withers away. In the days of yore, the devadasi did not have to go seeking patrons for her art. They were embedded in the system. Devotees thronged the temple anyway and watched the dance that was part of the ritual, a quotidian performance of sacred duty. When she was invited to the court to perform, she had an assured audience. In the West, operas were often presented at the behest of the courts. Over time, dance moved to a more secular stage, delinked from both temples and courts where gradually a niche viewership evolved — a regular stream of connoisseurs or rasikas, just as there were balletomanes in the western world.

However, the world has changed much since and with competing platforms of entertainment making demands on people’s attention and time, mounting work pressures and distances involved in travelling from one place to another, it is no surprise that the already niche viewership of classical dance is being reduced to a trickle. We are in a peculiar situation where practitioners are mushrooming everywhere but the audience is a vanishing tribe. This is where social media platforms, hitherto the playground of the young, intended primarily to be tools of recreational engagement, have become mediums for building profiles — both artistic and personal — and hunting grounds for a virtual viewership.

Of course, the positives are all too obvious. These apparent benefits are also often sounded out by younger dancers. For instance, Akshiti Roychowdhury, an Odissi dancer from Nrityagram, points out that for dancers who are starting out on their solo careers, this is a very enabling medium that helps them get the word out about themselves. Kankana Singh, a young Manipuri dancer who has a public Instagram account among others, feels that this affords her the opportunity to interact with a wide range of people who often fruitfully engage with her regarding her dance.

No doubt, the platforms too are learning and improving alongside an entire generation that has gone from Orkut to Snapchat. There are now features that help artistes connect more easily, across continents, without expense! Facebook Live and Instagram Live are examples of these modifications that allow people to stream live content. Shweta Prachande, a Bharatanatyam dancer from Chennai, asserts that these features do make it easier, especially in times like these, for teachers of dance especially to continue interacting with their students or facilitate direct interaction.

There are artistes, who perform live and share their performances online via Facebook or even have live classes and talks that enable anyone to join in the sessions. Campaigns tend to catch on pretty fast too. Last year, as a run up to the 39th edition of the Natya Kala Conference, young Bharatanatyam dancers were invited to share on Facebook their own choreographic visualisations to a pre-composed musical phrase under the banner of ‘nirikshana.’ Without a doubt, it did drum up a lot of buzz among young sprightly dancers.

That said, there is more to it than meets the eye. Functioning as equalisers, these platforms have obliterated boundaries between the personal and the professional and in fact, that may be the reason for their popularity. While there are dancers of the old school who haven’t quite understood the potency of social media and whose posts are in keeping with the original intent of social networking sites, that of engaging with friends, family and acquaintances, the younger, emerging breed of dancers, who have grown up with social media as an extension of their identity and persona, are defining the new normal. Posts — images and videos — are strategically designed to draw maximum views and likes, and these can range from the mundane to the ultra-glamorous.

Facebook jargon too has been tweaked with time: ‘Friends’ are now ‘Followers,’ especially when one has a public account. ‘Followers’ then could range from a close circle of friends and family to rank outsiders, strangers even. They are thus privy to not just the dance related posts of the dancer but also moments that may otherwise fall under the realm of ‘personal space.’ This uninhibited mixing of the two worlds would have been unthinkable a few years ago but today it’s de rigueur.

“Gone are the days of the star dancer or a celebrity dancer, today anyone can become their own star. Social Media empowers you in that sense,” says Dr Katyayani Ganti, a Hyderabad-based Kuchipudi dancer, “but, I feel that there is also the danger of creative stagnation as an artiste, the moment one has a certain following one may feel that one has arrived, so to speak.”

Some reservations

To be sure, there is scepticism among artistes of the older generation as well. As a senior and renowned choreographer and dancer of the country, Sharmila Biswas is not altogether gung-ho on the subject. She has her reservations with respect to indiscriminate posting of exceedingly private moments or irresponsible comments, all of which may be damaging to the dignity of art and artists. She also makes mention of ‘cleverly edited’ videos that can often be misleading. Ultimately, she says that ‘virtual dance’ has the danger of making audiences and dancers lazy. “Accessiblity is a boon but also a curse. I see a few young students today who are full of information. They are walking telephone directories with no in depth knowledge, wisdom or creativity,” she says.

Similar misgivings are expressed by Dr. Anupama Kylash, senior academician and Vilasini Natyam dancer from Hyderabad who wonders, given the laissez faire nature of a Facebook or Instagram, where memes are the order of the day, where are the checks and balances to vet the veracity of the claims being put out: ‘There is a lot of content uploaded by the dancing community. It is difficult to sift the good from the not so good. A carefully cultivated and nurtured profile may hold out a lot of promise when viewed through embellished posts, thus leading to a build-up of expectations but the proof of the pudding is in its eating. Ultimately, does the reality match up to the dazzling window display?’

Social media in effect is the mouthpiece of the dancer, and so effective a mouth piece it is that one can say whatever it is one wants to say about oneself and everybody else too and what you say will, in all probability, be ‘liked’ — remember there is no feature on any of the social media platforms to ‘dislike’ anything. So there is little fear of being reproved. Social media in fact obligates approval.

“I underuse social media as I feel it can disturb my mental peace. I feel the exclusiveness and richness in a dance can only come from real communications, physically, not virtually,” says Sharmila Biswas. Since moderation is key to everything, we could do well by taking a leaf from her book.

Source: Read Full Article