A Dancer Ponders: What Is Social Media Doing To The Soul Of Art?

By Vidhya Subramanian

It’s no longer just an elephant in the room. It’s the whole zoo, no, not a beautiful wild forest but a zoo with caged animals of all kinds.

I’m talking about social media.

As artists, we cannot function without it anymore. In a field where we don’t have enough funding to conduct elaborate marketing campaigns, social media has become a free way to attract eyes to our work, our thoughts, our progress.

The question is do we dance to post or post to dance?

By post to dance, I mean how much do social media posts lead to more audiences, performances, outreach, so that we can dance (perform) more? On the other hand how many posts are made up of dance that is manufactured just for the post? We dance to post in this case.

The byte size is growing smaller, the attention span has gone from watching full interviews and performances online, to clips that change in the blink of an eye! Words such as hook, bait, fade, brand, cover picture, collab, tag, hashtags, montages, reel, story, post etc. have become the focus.

But when we eventually go on stage none of this is going to make the tiniest difference. It is only hours of work, ideation, process, marinading, that produces art that affects the artist and the spectator.

And if it doesn’t affect you and reach out and touch others, why make art?

Sometimes I see live performances that look like extended versions of social media posts, but that’s for another conversation. Let’s take a moment to think about how caged we have become by the ever changing parameters of social media, how we are gazed at, judged, worshipped or criticized, made or written off within these vertical or “rotate your phone” horizontal cages. 

(Subramanian is an eminent Bharatanatyam artist. She holds an MA in Theatre Arts, and has enriched her artistic experience with forays into theatre and film as well. After living in the Bay Area for 30 years, she has currently made Chennai her home.)