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Magazine
SECOND LIFE
Art of de-stress
ANJANA RAJAN
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This fortnightly feature looks at little-known facets of well known personalities. Featuring Shovana Narayan this week.
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Shovana Narayan has been referred to as a dancer-bureaucrat so many times during her three decade-long career that it’s become something of a yawn.
Oft-repeated facts apart, it is not uncommon now, as it was when Shovana started off as a young Kathak soloist, to balance two demanding careers.
But there are other aspects of the eminent dancer’s work that she keeps well protected from the public gaze. One is her hobby of sketching. Reluctant to bring her pile of black and white sketches out of hiding, she says, “I’ve never thought of showing it to others.”
Left to herself, says Shovana, she would have thrown the whole lot away. “But my family preserved them,” she laughs, adding, “My son came this time and scanned them all.”
Triggers
Sketching, for this classical dancer, is a de-stress mechanism. A large number of her sketches evolved while she was sitting at her son’s hospital bedside over a decade ago.
“He was very ill. And I just kept sketching furiously. He was seven-eight years old, but I saw him as a baby. So there is a sketch showing just the eyes and forehead of the mother and baby.”
Besides personal troubles, other distressing events have triggered a sketching spell, as when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated.
Observation skills
She notes that while pencil shading can be very tedious work, it brings great depth. As a dancer she realises the heightened observation skills that can come from developing the habit of sketching from life.
But she prefers to sketch from memory. Often, though the work is figurative, it is symbolic too. Like the woman with tears coming down her face merging with the tree. “It’s just what I feel like,” she says simply.
Not formally trained in drawing beyond the usual school inputs, Shovana reiterates that family environment plays a major role in shaping an individual’s public and private persona.
So, while she owes her philosophical dance themes and open-minded approach to life to the Gandhian influence of her mother, she also remembers her artistic touches.
Early classes
“During the summer holidays my mother joined cloth painting classes, so I did too. I was only seven, and all the others in the class were ladies, but I just went along.”
Here she learnt fine detailing like shading and stitching, or sketching on cloth and painting on top of it to give it a realistic look.
Today, however, her medium remains black and white sketches on drawing paper. She never talks about it, though, saying, “I’m too ashamed of it!”
One of Shovana’s students, Sruti Gupta Chandra, has made a name as a visual artist. For Sruti, notes her Kathak guru, the dance has helped enhance her sensitivity as a painter.
“Dance means a lot of emotion,” she explains. Sruti’s canvases are doing fairly well on the art market.
For her dance guru, though, “It’s a very intuitive and unconscious thing.”
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