Shall We Dance......

 

I have tried, but the courage to dance isn’t mine.  We were taught Indian classical dance in school. I recall quite vividly, how the whole class had to line up in the assembly hall, at Loreto Convent, Tara Hall, in Shimla and a male teacher would instruct us from the front, standing right below the choir benches that lined the width of the stage behind it. I hated that class. I was also no good at it. So, this meant that the teacher would have me right up front to keep a keen eye on my mis-steps, which made it even worse. I never got the steps or the rhythm right and the dread of swaying, twirling and moving awkwardly to music – basically jiggling my ample flesh, has tailed me right through my life, or most of it.

Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I abhor dance, I just dislike me having to prance around in that mode. I am not sure the exact reason for this but, it could stem from feeling that I was fat which made me reluctant to do anything with my human frame. The intellectual arts were more my thing. I played piano for the school assembly, I sang in the school choir, loved reading, analysing poetry, as also the classes we had in art and embroidery. But, I just didn’t find any joy in dancing. Not even the free-style disco stuff my fellow boarders enjoyed during the recreation hour after dinner. The gramophone player was kept in a corner onstage in the same hall where we had our dance classes. Everyone gathered there and did their own versions of bop. It was seemingly a favourite hour of the day for most.  I liked some songs by Roberta Flack, Simon Garfunkel and others from top of the pops (1970’s) that were played, even though I have always been more of a Bollywood buff (the old, sentimental songs mind you). But,  honestly neither did I like the music that much, nor  could I wiggle-waggle or boogie with my arms, legs and hips, as they did. I just watched them enjoying themselves and wondered.

I was tall for my years. At the age of ten, I would fit in dresses my elder sister who was five years my senior, had outgrown but a year or so ago. I was also at the tail of any class line and in addition to the height which made me slump, to try and fit in, I was also plump. My sisters used to call me fatty or fatso. Both were really thin and then, so was our mother. I was the chubby one. Taking cue from my siblings, my parents would  often call me the same. And this possibly led to developing some complex about my figure through the visual comparison of size, and the nickname which I tried very hard to ignore, but it stuck. Even when I was half my earlier weight, they would refer to me as ‘Fats’, ‘Fatty’ etc. When I married, my husband, now long an ex, used to buy me clothes that were too big and chided me for this. It was my fault – “for being so fat”. My particular physique was therefore not one that generated a confident or pleasant sensation in being. Much less jiggling around uninhibitedly with it!

When I moved into my Siolim apartment in Goa, about four years ago. I had a lot of time on my hands and thought that maybe now,  I could do something to rid  me of the inhibition that I’d carried regarding my body.  And wondered that, if I learned dancing,  maybe I wouldn’t feel quite so awkward. I was a few kilos lighter than I am today and didn’t feel  fat any longer, so that wasn’t an inhibiting factor. At least not consciously. The suggestion to learn came from some posters I had seen, further prodded during one of my monsoon walks with a neighbour, when we dropped into Sorro in Assagaon. There was a Salsa demonstration on. He knew of my hesitant interest in learning so urged me to try out with the instructors. It was too complicated, I couldn’t get the hang of it so was nudged into taking lessons and signed up with the Snaden Dance Academy in Mapusa. I would drive there every Saturday evening to learn Salsa. Why Salsa, well the timings worked best for me and the Bollywood jhatka type of dancing was really too much to begin with, wasn’t it? 

I enjoyed the classes. The instructors both male and female boosted my confidence. In fact, after a few weeks, there were no other students left and I would have the choice of partner from the best male instructors. A couple of months later just as I was getting into the groove, the classes were discontinued  as it wasn’t viable to hold class for just one person. Thereafter Covid dawned and with it lockdowns and social  distancing, so a dance class wasn’t where I wanted to be and therefore my  hang-ups regarding this have remained exactly where I started from. I forgot the complicated steps I had begun to master and also started gaining weight. Nothing I can do, at this point, is helping me shed it either. The hour long salsa class was quite a workout and these days I find many people advertising dance as an organic way to lose weight. I am tempted, but even if I lost the weight as I have done before - lots of it, bordering on my being skinny, the hang-up with my flesh, its abundance and sensuality didn’t go. Would  it now, especially if I danced alone, in isolation? Nah, the steps looked too complex anyway, I told myself. And when the advertisements came up on my phone, rather annoyingly, during my sedentary on-line scrabble games. I’d hold my breath till they finished their spiel with unrealistic demos of fat to thin in a matter of seconds. I am sure there are many feelings that I have kept buried under the busyness of each day, that a part of me does want to dance and be free about having a human body with all its quirks, but I haven’t quite yet got there.

However, not wanting to tango, not liking the way my bulk moves and stuff like that doesn’t make me hate the art-form. On the contrary I love watching people move on stage and in the disco, marvelling at what some can do with their bodies  as they sashay to tempi and melody. As a student in  London, in my twenties, I would be a frequent visitor to Sadler’s Wells Theatre and Covent Garden to watch concerts from traditional ballet to contemporary performances. Later, when I returned to Delhi, I was fascinated by Indian dance – the very classical modes I had shunned in school. I watched a lot of recitals. Over the decades I have been inspired by many professionals including Pina Bausch, Merle Parks, Rudolf Nureyev, Birju Maharaj, Sonal Mansingh, Daksha Seth, Chandralekha, Maya Krishan Rao and her mesmerizing performance in ‘Khol doh’, Aditi Mangaldas, Leila Samson, Allarmel Valli and many others whom I have had the privilege of watching perform live,  to consider dance as a metaphor for living. 

Watching these graceful personas, I began thinking of the  idea that if I could live like a dancer, moving through one mood or moment into the next whether it was rushed and chaotic or quiet and contemplative and also expressing emotively, with the elegance they did on stage,  then wouldn’t life be well lived? I aspired to inculcate the grace of these people – that could move with extraordinary speed and skill and then transition into slow and mesmerizing abhinaya or emotion, through facial expression and minimal limb gestures. With this in mind, I made a concerted effort to watch as many performances as possible and eventually ended up drawing the dancers in the darkness of the auditorium. And, instead of directly learning to live like a them through their mode of expression, what emerged was the idea of sketching spontaneously. 

The year was 1994 and I was at IIC in Delhi. The auditorium was dark. It was my first attempt at drawing during a performance but I couldn’t see the pencil moving on the page. How could I possibly capture these complex movements in such dim light I chafed, but elected to stop trying and just watched. As I focussed on the dancers and listened to the music, I began feeling one with the artistes. After about ten to fifteen minutes I felt like drawing; opened the copy book with plain pages and just allowed my pencil to move with the performer. Upon looking at the depictions during the interval, I was pleasantly surprised, therefore continued. Not just then but, I drew all the dance-forms that Delhi could show me and filled book after book of cheap paper in ‘Bittoo’ school copy books with a blue Staedtler pencil  I still have with me – all these years later. 

An insight I had through this exercise was that when I let go of all preconceived notions of depicting dance or drawing as I was used to; if I surrendered to the music, the rhythm, the movement, and the story behind the choreography– becoming so totally one with it all, that without even trying, each form’s characteristics became highlighted through my very simple line representations. Oddisi had the sensual curvaceous line, Bharatnatyam was very angular, Kathak magically acquired the quickness of footwork. Somehow the marks on the page, drawn in relative darkness, without being able to see what I was doing,  were able to bring these facets to the page. And that too without my even knowing or understanding what I was doing at the time. Or perhaps that is why it was even possible.

I had tuned into the idea of spontaneity and was amazed to see how, in letting go of the idea of trying and clinging to my known ideas of drawing and therefore identifying with this, I had found a totally different way to draw. Allowing myself to be spontaneous and going with the flow actually help me achieve my goal. Not only to draw dancers in a novel way, but in understanding that being in the flow, enables one to be more open, creative and, as a result, a happier human being. I know that I was thrilled with those drawings and they have been the inspiration for much of my life and work. Something that I return to again and again.

However, this wasn’t the first time that I was portraying dance, or rather working creatively with it. As a student in London in the 10980’s, I lived in Crosby Hall, on Cheyne Walk in South London. It was an international hall of residence where people from all walks of life and from all parts of the world resided while they studied and trained. I made friends with pianists, historians, art historians, economists and ballet dancers. In the beginning of the second year of my textile studies at Central School of Art and Design (presently CSM), we were given our first creative weaving assignment and I persuaded my friend Vivian, who was studying at the School of the Royal Ballet, to pose for me. I didn’t sketch, I took photographs while she pirouetted in the basement. She educated me about ballet and the ballet choreography notations called Benesh, excited me. I recollect designing a woven fabric with a cotton warp, loosely threaded through the sixteen or twenty-four shafts of a table loom, with a random threading plan. With no repeat in the entire width, but following my diagrammatic lines from the photos of Vivian’s steps and postures of cabriole, jete, arabesque and more. I took this warp plan from the bottom of her Pointes (ballet shoes) as she moved  – creating a single, undulating line which became the threading strategy. The resultant fabric with a chunky silk weft was strangely attractive but I never experimented with this further. And my creative output through this artform got relegated to the background until 1994, when the idea of dance as a metaphor for life, surfaced in my mind.

I have used those line drawings of 1994 for countless projects as a textile designer – from prints for dress materials and sarees, to painting sarees with these wonderful fluid lines that had opened up something in me.* In 2009, fifteen odd years later, when I moved from Delhi to Gurgaon, they became the impetus for embroideries and textile collages that depicted the frenzy of my harried self. Living in such close proximity to hundreds of people, where I could hear all sorts of noises from neighbouring apartments in the condominium, impinging on my need for silence and quietude, was harrowing.  More than finding refinement of the restrained kind, the exercise of outlining body movements in the darkness of an auditorium, led me to being more and more unconstrained – especially with regard to  my work  and expression as an artist. And, it has taken me years to really understand that this above all, is the key to finding grace in life: practiced spontaneity which is the essence of any performance. Years of practice have gone into learning their art and only then is the performance seemingly effortless. As Oscar Wilde said “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”

Allowing what we know, to lend confidence and not become something we assert - being unimpeded by such conditioning has an enormous impact on the mind. It frees us from shackles of convention and inhibition. Living with the result of such liberty requires as much courage as does drawing or living without the hindrance of a habituated psyche. Over the many years of teaching design, fashion marketing and communication students about visual arts, as also conducting embroidery and textile art workshops, I would find ways to open up the students to being more creative, to be able to express themselves with greater ease in shorter and shorter spans of time. As the classes got larger and less time given to each student and, workshops were also only of a few hours duration instead of days, I started devising exercises which were fun and would get unusually creative results. 

This eventually led to the Spontaneous Drawing Workshop that I began conducting in 2020, through WhatsApp. Starting with simple assignments I gradually built up the challenges and on Day 7 of the workshop, I ask participants to draw from three different dance videos. I have chosen a Guru of great repute for the Indian classical form of Oddisi, The Bolshoi Principal Ballerinas for Ballet and a couple of Modern Dance videos for more contemporary movements. I spent a great deal  of time sourcing these videos because I wanted, not just the different artistic forms, I needed them to be short clips with  definitive movements that participants could illustrate easily.

The more the sketches that emerge from these workshops, the greater my amazement at how this kind of exercise inculcates spontaneity so effortlessly. And the drawn results range from cute and childlike to amazingly accomplished. But, by far, the most interesting ones are those where the students have really managed to let go of the familiar and known, allowing themselves to be swayed by the music and rhythm and the human form moving to carefully choreographed steps,  as well as the visual and aural feast that a dance performance is. By indirectly trying, they achieve far better results than by trying by means of a directed effort. **

Yes, there are always some who have a hard time letting go of their skill and that is the challenge for them in all the exercises but mostly this one. The thing is that the more effort one makes to be creative, the less creativity and spontaneity result. The two are synonymous and not something to be pursued, but rather, that which comes when all effort-making and sense of self is put aside – when surrender.

Some participants have never drawn since childhood. Others are accomplished artists or designers who don’t find it quite so easy to unlearn and ‘look’ afresh. But most come from other walks of life  ranging from the writers, photographers, corporate executives and life coaches to home-makers and retired bankers, who want to rekindle a childhood passion of drawing,  have fun and be spontaneous. And honestly, they are the ones that surprise me the most!

Challenges get us into the flow. They make us mindful and this brings about spontaneity in both art and life. The Inspiration of those moments can be fine-tuned into something  masterful, or rejected. But, holding onto what we know – especially the experiences that pain and apprehend, is one thing I am reminded of again and again when I see the drawing  output of this exercise. And I realise that even though I did this drawing exploration first in my thirties, it is equally valid in my sixties.  The process inspires grace in life as well. Not by becoming a dancer or emulating them, but by being in the flow and enabling spontaneous responses to the moment, to situations and more. And no reminder is enough to ensure one remains mindful and in the flow. 

*   www.gopikanath.co.in

**Drawings on Instagram @_spontaneity_with_gopika 

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