Flight of imaginations.
Classical or ballet dance is one of the best introductions to contemporary art. Although a dance form, like Kathak for instance may have a story to tell, it does so only in an abstract form, through movement and gestures. The beauty of the human body in motion is the basis of its appeal and, whatever the mood or theme of the

Thus comes the astonishing dance form of the spiralling, whirling dervishes. In this dance the dancer has as if held up the mirror to those states of being that suggest the ecstatic human soul. Here art has out through to the vitality beneath and interpreted it in movement,sound and colour.The poignancy here is in its yearning for the universal or the Brahmand.
In her joyfully whirling dervish series artist Surekha sadana offers an analogy between dance and painting. The movements drawn upon the canvas by her brush strokes are activised from work to work and the peak of them is when the realistic figures evaporates into a cosmic rhyme with the head as a hub or a revolving pivot. Here a static reality gives peace to speeding energy, which in turn grips us completely.

The beauty of the movement expressed in abstract terms is all poise, grace and vitality. Through which the Surekha’s dervishes express the movement of flight into the unknown of a vast sky. This same order of flight at times has been expressed in modern art by abstract wire sculptures as say by Naum Gabo in his space and spiral works. In theses sculptures quite like her dervishes, there is a thrust of a spreading skirts as perfectly as a divine movement. Such have been Surekha sadana’s flight of imaginations.

(Keshav Malik is a renowned Indian poet, art critics, art scholar and curator)