The dancing queens
These days NRI Indian girls learn ‘Bollywood dance, a generic term that spans the entire gamut of dance in Hindi mainstream cinema. Clearly India’s very own filmy dances have broken through the borders. Shoma A. Chatterji reports
Few Indians at home are aware that the globalisation of Hindi cinema has reached far beyond the screening and distribution of Hindi films abroad. For example, dances from Hindi films are being imitated, improvised upon, and performed to a live audience by young girls.
Over the past decade, says Sangita Shresthova, researcher and dance trainer, Bollywood classes have sprung up abroad in response to enthusiasm expressed by Indian and non-Indian audiences for dance movements they may have seen in films. The Nepali-Czech dancer has actually done her Ph.D. on ‘Globalisation of Indian dance’ from University of California, Los Angeles.
In Germany, instructional DVDs extol the cultural authenticity and health benefits of Bollywood dance. Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical Bombay Dreams brought Indian film dance firmly into the spotlight in London and New York. In the US, staged versions of Hindi (and to a lesser extent other Indian) film dances dominate South Asian and Indian cultural shows, where these dances become opportunities for the performance of diasporic cultural identities.
In India, cultural activists like Rustom Bharucha in The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theater in an Age of Globalization lament the inability of other performance traditions to resist domination by popular Hindi films while simultaneously suggesting Bollywood dance represents a rather novel site of film reception.
The click of your mouse will take you to the magic world that opens a window to over 200,000 theme videos on Bollywood placed on Youtube.com. You can watch slickly edited video clips from the film you want access to with self-timed re-choreographed sequences for the attention of the researcher in Shresthova who did the research sitting in the comfort of her room in the US. One video clip led to the next, with self-filmed re-choreographed sequences for her research.
Heroines undulate in wet saris in men's fantasy sequences. Star-crossed lovers waltz in dreamy duets in exotic locations. Conflicted communities escape the desperation of their everyday reality through dances reminiscent of folk festivities. In his illuminating 2003 discussion of Indian films, Vinay Lal (The Near Impossibility of the Outsider, or the Significant Other in the Modern Hindi Film," in Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi) identifies the song-and-dance sequence as “an integral part of the Hindi film,” which maintains “strong links with other narrative elements of the Hindi film.”
Sri Devi's legendary blue wet sari dance in Shekhar Kapur's Mr. India (1987), choreographed by Saroj Khan, ushered in an expansion in permissible movement as heroines increasingly performed movements previously reserved for the vamps.
According to Claire Wilkinson-Weber, the sexually explicit movements reserved for vamp characters of the 1970s became acceptable content for heroines as “the richest cascade of costumes continues to appear in song sequences, where the heroine can assert herself in a sexually charged manner of the old-style vamp.” In the Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai number in Khalnayak, Saroj Khan knowingly deployed these constructed borders between respectability and wantonness.
Seven-year-old Preeti of New York performed Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai at the 47th Indian Independence Day celebrations in New York City. The performance underscored how appropriation, authenticity, and imagination coalesce into circulated and performed dimensions of Bollywood dance. Though Preeti mimicked many of the original steps, including gyrations of her hips and flirtatious facial expressions, the potential vulgarity of her performance was consciously constrained. Her body was covered in a costume less seductive that the one Madhuri Dixit wore and some movements of Bharata Natyam were inserted into the orchestration and the choreography. This was probably designed to present her as a miniature of “Indian Culture.”
Preeti belongs to a middle-class Indian family settled in America. The parents claim to keep in touch with their Indian heritage. Shreshta writes, “She is also distanced from any possible morally questionable interpretations.”
Preeti re-established the dances' "authenticity" and respectability by constructing a trajectory to Bharat Natyam, an authenticized "national" dance form. Her choice of costume, venue, and movement content establishes Preeti's respectability through a process that echoes the mechanisms at play in Ganga's performance within the film's narrative.
“Yet, by attempting to perform a ‘Sanskritized’ version of the song, Preeti lays claim to the possibility that her version may in some ways become more authentic than the film dance.”
Indian cinema is an integral part of Indian Culture which includes the dances in these films. Why then, did the organizers of the Independence Day celebrations, the teacher who trained Preeti to dance and Preeti herself need to make the performance ‘respectable’ in an ambience in which the meaning of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘respect’ are as fluid and as fluctuating as the dance itself?
Notions of appropriation, imagination, and authenticity may also encourage alternative, socially transgressive interpretations of film dances. The polarization of Bollywood and Indian classical dance has been partly highlighted by the media which played a significant role in popularizing dance beyond Hindi films through television programmes and dance competitions.
Deepak, a student of a dance school explains, "People watch for a particular step and then join a particular academy." As audiences scrutinise the choreography executed by dancers and stars in Hindi films, which indirectly provide advertising benefits to the classes taught by the choreographers that created the dances.
The best example of the institutionalisation of Bollywood film dances is found in the way many schools that specialist in training aspiring students to dance ‘like Madhuri Dixit’ or perform ‘famous Bollywood film dances’ has mushroomed over the world.
One particular dance school based in Mumbai and founded in 1992 by a famous choreographer who trained in modern dance abroad, engages a broad range of activities including stage shows, film choreography, and dance instruction, as well as singing and acting. It also provides employment to hundreds of dancers in several Indian urban centers.
One of the largest, if not the largest, dance institutions in India, SDIPA organizes regular dance classes in sixteen locations in Mumbai. SDIPA also runs multiple classes in more than a dozen Indian cities including Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore.
In an effort to internationalise its operations, SDIPA launched operations in Vancouver and Toronto in Canada as well as in Melbourne, Australia, a few years ago. The Institute's managers envision a future when at any time of day or night "there will be a Shiamak dancer dancing somewhere in the world" as SDIPA consolidates its position as a global multinational dance enterprise.
(Shoma A. Chatterji is a National Award winning film writer)
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