This Is How ‘The Spirit Of Art’ Can Apply In Management And In Everyday Life
Ms Swati Apte
Ms Swati Apte has a Masters from Oxford and an MBA from Harvard. She is a danseuse who has worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. in New York. She made an interesting presentation at the last meeting when she shared a dream of an idyllic world in which “the spirit of the arts” engender collaboration between people from diverse backgrounds. Ms Apte, who was introduced by Nandan Maluste, is spearheading the arts@work programme of “Junoon” promoted by Ms Sanjana Kapoor, formerly of Prithvi Theatre.
She said the group consisted of people from different streams of art who had grown up with “the spirit of the arts” and had been working hard at something in which they found meaning. Now, they wanted to share this “spirit” with others. They had decided to create a platform for people to experience the creation of art and not view just the final outcome. The passion with which artistes worked and their imagination would enable the non-active participants (whether engineers or investment bankers) to bring the same kind of passion to their work and to the manner in which they choose to live their lives. Ms Apte said “Junoon” had started with schools where children were given an opportunity to connect with artistes and scientists.
But “Junoon” also wanted to help change neighbourhoods. It had created “Mumbai Local” which was like an “adda” (in Bengal, a meeting place for tea and gossip). Artistes and scientists went to these places, not to give lectures but to allow people to “enter” their lives and share their passions. This would help the viewers to change their interactions with others. “We do this regularly, every week, and gradually our audiences grow… And so what starts off with an artiste being generous about his or her knowledge, experience and stories, grows into a culture within a community.”
Ms Apte said it was a given that while business was output-oriented, the arts were all about process and shied away from “outputs”. While business worked with data and decisions were made intellectually, the arts went by instinct and concentrated on building intuition. Somebody had to bridge these seemingly irreconcilable worlds. In her case, the arts had taught her to respect rigour and detail. While learning the violin and the notes, the drudgery was not very different from crunching numbers as an analyst. Besides, she had also learnt that the arts worked with energy. When an artiste went up on stage, it was not just to say what he had to say, but also to connect with his audience. He had to feel and understand that energy and draw from it. In other words, it was necessary to first establish a bridge with someone before saying what one wanted to say and to say it with conviction. An actor wearing a tablecloth and sitting on a box had to believe that he was the King of England.
Only then would he be able to perform with any kind of authenticity. Ms Apte said that her experience in both the arts as well as the business world had helped her build learning modules which were not classroom-based but involved theatre games and exercises. Requesting members to play one such “game”, she blindfolded three of the six who stepped forward. Each one of these three had a partner. She said the blindfolded persons would be the “drivers”, whereas the partners would be in charge of their safety as they walked around the room. Those blindfolded were Roda Billimoria (partnered by PP Pradeep Saxena), Pradeep Chinai (Jagdish Malkani) and Sitaram Shah (and a guest). The partners were only allowed to touch them on the shoulder, not to talk to them or to give them directions or instructions. At the end of about five minutes, Roda Billimoria, who was partnered by PP Pradeep, went around the hall, came back and sat in her chair.
Ms Apte said a simple exercise like that could say a lot about people’s individual management styles. “You may think that you are very liberal with your team and that you give them space, but here you are grabbing someone’s shoulder and not letting them go. Or you may think that you have a great deal of initiative, but you’re not ready to take that step when you’re blind… We look at art processes to explore the issues that most management professionals face and try and understand them instinctively and not intellectually.” What excited her most, Ms Apte said, was working with women leaders. Most of them struggled to understand their own leadership styles, how to build presence and to achieve the exact balance between being assertive and docile. She designed exercises to make women feel comfortable in the limelight and to understand the dignity of their own bodies with voice, breath and strengthening presence.
But the basic effort was to work on confidence, conviction and conversations with one’s self which often led to self-doubt. Ms Apte said she did not believe that there was any “right” way to stand, to communicate or to pronounce words. Instead, there was a right “place” to speak from – and that place was one in which the woman felt centred, focused and calm. “Junoon” also used dance practices, taking from the grammar of the Kathakali dance form of Kerala. The grammar of Kathakali was about understanding the physiology of emotion, of fear, of being calm and so on. “We actually reverseengineer that. We teach people that grammar so that they know what they are feeling at that particular moment and are able to move from one emotion (which might be fear or nervousness), to a space that’s calm and centred. We believe that once you are there, you can communicate effectively.” She had worked with some women at Cisco in Bangalore.
Another project was with the Indian MNC, the Aditya Birla Group, in which all the participants were Indians who were leading their businesses in other countries. They were helped to tackle cultural differences and to lead a team that was totally different. Recently, “Junoon” had started “Arts that Care” which involved going into hospitals and care centres and thinking up art interventions to change the experiences of the people in those places. The first pilot project was with St. Jude’s, an NGO working for children with cancer. The effort here was to help both the children and their care-givers to deal with their feelings of anxiety, fear and boredom. Some art interventions could help address their problems and perhaps also help them to once again experience their childhood for a while.
“In conclusion, I want to take you back into that world of our imagination, of being able to imagine a world where we all live with passion, with rigour, with hard work, with respect for practice and process and with a sense of the value that each and every one of us brings,” Ms Apte concluded. Answering questions, she told Mudit Jain that “Junoon” also had a for-profit company that worked with corporates; as for public programmes, these were either funded by the for-profit company or through public funds. PDG Gulam Vahanvaty wondered whether there was any attempt to assimilate children of different communities. Ms Apte said once privileged and under-privileged children got together, there was no discrimination. They wore the same T-shirts and nobody could tell the difference. In one exercise that lasted an entire day, art explorations through music, dance and theatre targeted the theme of water because, depending on their position in life, their experience and understanding of the use of water was very different.
This approach helped break barriers and created bridges for children to understand each other’s perspectives. Finally, when Jagdish Malkani wondered how Ms Sanjana Kapoor’s experience in theatre had helped “Junoon”, she said Ms Kapoor’s experience had been a big asset. Her network within the artistes’ world and their faith in her, all these had allayed their reservations. “There is a lot of capacitybuilding that artistes have to do to be able to work in these spaces, whether reaching out to children or developing corporate learning programmes. It is something new for them and her credibility with them is of huge value to ‘Junoon’,” Ms Swati Apte added.