FOR THE GRAM

Once upon a time, learning a new skill meant indulging a hobby, stimulating yourself creatively, or just enjoying getting your hands dirty. Now, we do it for that final perfect social media post. Is striving for the perfect optic diminishing the art? Creative professionals - a choreographer, a table stylist, and a pottery teacher – weigh in

- SAMREEN TUNGEKAR

During the pandemic, when baking banana bread, creating our own sourdough starter, and getting on Duolingo to learn Spanish became our way to keep our sanity, choreographer Enette D’Souza started online dance workshops – essentially pop-up two-hour classes, where one can learn the routine and choreography of one song. She teaches semi-classical, a fusion of Bollywood with kathak in her case, and scores of people from all over the world rushed to sign up. “I used to take regular classes too, which were more about learning the fundamentals and techniques. But at least in Mumbai, the charm for learning dance as a regular student is lost. And even if they run, they have very low numbers,” she shares.

Among many other things that social media teaches us, including how to perfect a winged tip eyeliner, there’s a certain pace and patience that art forms such as dance require, which social media has taken us away from. “If I want to do a reel, all I have to do is just learn a routine. I don’t really need to learn the technique because in a way, Instagram has brought this on people where you can get famous even without training.

Virality doesn’t look for technique,” D’Souza adds.

Up north, Lakhan Kaushik runs The Cold Mountain Studio in Dharamshala, a pottery studio that offers residential courses with a curriculum to learn pottery. From beginners to intermediary, all kinds of artists come to this studio. “When we decide a workshop or a class, our intention behind it is, of course, to provide what the student wants, and delivering how they want to learn. But our aim and intention is also for them to understand that pottery is not what social media has made it to be,” Lakhan explains.