The Indian classical dance field is a highly competitive one, and with the advent of social media, it only seems to have become more so. This feeling is not mine alone, countless conversations with dancers have revealed the same anxieties on opening a social media app like Instagram or Facebook. And even if I were largely content with how much I was dancing and where my life was going, these posts would make me jittery, and self-doubt would inevitably creep in. I would scroll through, and ‘like’ countless pictures of exquisitely talented dancers, watch snippets of their videos, unknowingly make mental notes of performances coming up, but mostly, I would leave feeling more miserable than inspired. Periodically, even before the pandemic, I would stop wanting to open my Facebook account because all I would be greeted by each day was a barrage of photos, videos, performance reviews, announcements of upcoming performances of the dancers on my friend-list. What started as a trickle has been in full spate since the lockdown was announced. Classical dancers found a pliable platform in social media to increase their reach and audience, and took to it keenly around five years ago.
In the case of artists, the need to remain in public memory drives the curation of what is uploaded. We must constantly remind ourselves that the curated lives we see online are but the tip of the iceberg that like John Berger noted of the photograph being an image selected by the photographer over an infinite array of images that are possible, the lives we present online are equally selected and uploaded for a reason.
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