Sensory Screens, Digitized Desires: Dancing Rasa From Bombay Cinema To Reality TV

Bombay cinema incorporated songs, dances, choreography, staging, and costumes from a variety of traditional forms to mark a modern national identity. The pioneering figure for using dance in films was Uday Shankar in his experimental film Kalpana. Bombay’s spectacular song-and-dance cinema then moves through films such as Chandralekha to contemporary Bollywood and its byproducts such as dance reality shows. The search for aesthetic modernity in India is embodied in the concept of “desire” as it evolved from traditional aesthetics to contemporary culture and new media technology; to uncover its evolution from Bombay cinema to reality show, I first analyze the historically transforming cinematography and content through a few select musicals. Secondly, I trace the emergence of the “Item” numbers in Bollywood and their relationship to music videos; and third, I explore the current expressions of screendance on reality shows in India as expressions of class mobility and democratization of cultur

Dance-Off Or A Battle For The Future: Dance Reality Shows In India

The chapter examines the myriad meanings of dance competitions through the lens of Indian dance reality shows. It discusses reality shows such as Boogie Woogie, Dance India Dance, Naach Dhum Machale, and the production of new hybrid dances and remixes. The symbiotic relationship between Bollywood dance, reality shows, and the television industry creates the new aspirational aesthetics of “remix.” By combining ethnographic research and textual analysis of song-and-dance sequences of Bollywood films and reality shows, the chapter explores the transformation of the mythopoetic bhakti rasa of classical dances into the remix of Bollywood dances. It argues that “item numbers” and reality shows shape new gender codes in contemporary India and open up new debates on respectability, gender, and nation

Dancing Into Modernity: Multiple Narratives Of India\u27s Kathak Dance

Modernity, once a prerogative of the West, is now ubiquitous, experienced diversely by people all over the world. The changing notions of modernity are historically linked to the development of the public sphere. This article broadly attempts to map the discourse of modernity to the evolution of Kathak, a premier classical dance from India. The article has two threads running through it. One is the development of the public sphere in India as it relates to anti-colonial nationalism, the formation of the modern nation-state, and globalization. The other focuses on transformations in Kathak as they relate to changing patronage, ideology, and postcolonial history. I emphasize the latter to mark the transitions in Kathak as emblematic of Indian national identity and national ideology to a new era of cultural contestation. This emergent public domain of culture is coined as “public modernity” by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in contemporary India. It is linked to economic reforms, or “liberalization,” leading to globalization and a resurgence of communal politics. Both of these make culture, tradition, and identity central to the contestation of power among the diverse social formations in India.</jats:p

This Is How We Dance Now!: Performance In The Age Of Bollywood And Reality Shows

The cultural imagination of contemporary India is experiencing rapid change, especially among the middle classes. New communication technologies are being used to reach new audiences and spectators. This momentum of change has further facilitated blurring the strict boundaries between high and low, classical and folk, and Indian and Western cultural forms, creating multiple sites of amalgamation. One such ubiquitous form is the popular genre of dance reality shows on television. These Bollywood-inspired dance forms are arguably one among the most visible cultural products of India\u27s new economy. Using multiple theoretical perspectives from Anthropology, Performance Studies, and Film and Media studies, this book locates, historicizes, and analyzes the dance reality show both as an aesthetic-cultural product, and as a lived reality of a new generation of middle-class viewers and performers. The author argues that these reality shows play an important role in shaping the contours and ambivalences of India\u27s new public culture, and explores how a large emergent cross-section of young dancers and choreographers are struggling to stake a claim in the new culture industry of India