For the life of me I can't understand why an artist would practice yoga. Actually, I can't understand why anyone at all would practice it. It's an awful lot of work and what do you get for it? You get to be rubbery. Since when was being rubbery so special?
What really needs to be explained to me is why artists would be interested in it. Am I the only one who's noticed that yoga poses are ugly? Why would an artist try to cultivate ugliness? We're the people who are supposed to make the world more beautiful!
Honestly, I think yoga goes out of its way to be ugly. Ugly poses occur far too frequently to be caused by random chance.
Even traditional Indian art ignores yoga. The dancing Shiva is beautiful by any standard and the Kama Sutra is informed by something resembling yoga but not dominated by it. I know nothing about Indian history but I'll hazard a guess that yoga came to India fairly recently, maybe only a few centuries ago.
India must have had a charismatic Richard Simmons-type who convinced everybody to dispose of tradition and adopt ugliness instead. Who WAS this malevolent person? Why would he do such a thing? Why did people listen to him?
Yoga not only violates traditional Western ideas of beauty, it flies in the face of an international consensus. Everywhere you go outside of India the people have developed some kind of aesthetic fitness training.
Whether it's hula or karate or tai-chi or hip-hop, the moves are all intended to be beautiful. Only yoga defies the aesthetic standard. OK, that's my take on it. I'm going to get a sandwich.BTW: DJ, a long time yoga practitioner, wrote a thoughtful comment to this post which is worth reading. He says yoga has roots that are at least 4,500 years old. Give it a read!
