Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body

Chapter 1 presents a dance-centered taxonomy of musical numbers, which clarifies how dance promotes agency and authorship. Reconsidering the term “song picturization,” which suggests the primacy of the song as setting the agenda for the visuals, this chapter proposes that in the case of certain dance numbers or famed dancer-actors, a reverse process of “dance musicalization” is at work, in which a desired dance vocabulary precedes and influences the conceptualization of the song. This disruption of given logics of production and authorship spurs the conceptualization of a multi-bodied “choreomusicking body,” which directs our attention to the many on- and off-screen bodies laboring to produce the song-and-dance number, and fundamentally shifts ideological readings of narrative and spectacle in popular Hindi cinema. Employing choreomusicological theory, historical accounts of dancer-actors’ influence on musical composition, and spectatorial responses to the music-dance composite, this chapter proposes new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence.

From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform

Chapter 4 focuses on two Bharatanatyam-trained stars in the 1950s and 1960s, Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, analyzing changes in film dance alongside the canonization of specific classical and folk dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. By studying how dance training influences acting repertoires, this chapter calls attention to movement, gesture, and bodily comportment to enhance our understanding of virtuosity and technique, proposing a movement-based analysis of film acting grounded in kinesthetic performance and spectatorship. Rehman and Vyjayanthimala’s most ambitious production numbers speak to their own performative desires as trained dancers. Films featuring these A-list actresses as dancing protagonists evince a generic tendency, described here as the “melodrama of dance reform,” which combines the dance spectacular with the “social problem” film, producing in the process cinematic figurations riven with anxieties and aspirations around female sexuality, bodily movement, and economic independence.

Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?

With her vigorously libidinous dancing, her infamous “jhatkas and matkas,” Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated a whole new movement vocabulary for the Hindi film heroine. Dixit’s moves carried the unmistakable imprint of the choreographer who led her to stardom, Saroj Khan. With her six-decade-long career, Khan constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices in relation to dance performance and choreography. Chapter 5 delves into Khan and Dixit’s co-choreography of a new style of movement, reading choreography as an archival-corporeal system of transmission and transformation that articulates body cultures, industrial systems, and labor networks. A focus on training, rehearsal, and collaboration foregrounds the creative processes in their co-choreography that produced new techniques of the body, which both women continue to build on through richly intermedial careers in film, reality TV dance shows, and on web platforms.

Introduction

The Introduction sets up the primary analytic frameworks of this book, plotting, through the opening example of the spectacular dance number, “Muqabla humse na karo,” issues of labor, collaboration, and technology that film dance activates. Through attention to gesture, movement vocabulary, training, fame, and erasure, this chapter posits the need for a corporeal history of Hindi cinema that is peopled by many laboring bodies. Such a history takes into account acclaimed and invisibilized performers and celebrates a range of dancing women as co-choreographers of female mobility. The Introduction also provides a brief history of dance in pre-playback Hindi film, and a historical account of responses to the cine-corporeal transformations wrought by dance in Indian cinema.

Epilogue

The Epilogue extends this book’s examination of dance and female stardom up to the present and points to further areas of exploration that a focus on film dance opens up. It includes an examination of the changing role of the heroine as the “item girl,” Bollywood intertextuality through dance, and new modes of participatory fandom evidenced in reality dance shows. This is followed by a brief summary of how music- and dance-centered histories and theoretical frameworks help us think differently about cinematic performance, spatial organization, and labor networks. It concludes with a meditation on how this book’s sustained engagement with film dance produces an intermedial history of film, dance, and music.

Corporealizing Colonial Modernities

Chapter 3 focuses on Azurie and Sadhona Bose, once-famous, now-forgotten dancing stars of the 1930s–1940s, to excavate an intersecting, global history of early twentieth-century discourses on dance, featuring figures like Ruth St. Denis, Anna Pavlova, Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, among many others. Situating Bose, the Bengali bhadramahila, and Azurie, an Indo-German “dancing girl,” as co-choreographers of new mobilities throws light on cosmopolitan, transnational dance networks that intersected with nationalist projects of modernity. This chapter relates these dancer-actresses to the so-called revival of classical dance forms, which involved an appropriation of the cultural practices of traditional performers like devadasis and tawaifs by upper-caste, upper-class performers. By reading Bose and Azurie’s performing bodies and careers alongside each other, this chapter dislodges unitary accounts of the impulses and controversies around dance on film by a new class of urban performers.

Choreographing Architectures of Public Intimacy

Chapter 2 develops a body-space-movement framework that studies the spaces of dance, the movement vocabularies used, and the resulting construction of star bodies. This framework uncovers the production processes behind the fetishized space of the Hindi film cabaret, an “architecture of public intimacy,” whose spatial and choreographic operations arouse intense sensorial stimulation. Through a focus on cabaret numbers featuring the dancing star Helen, this chapter discusses the cine-choreographic practices that produce a collision of infrastructures, bodies, and spaces. The body-space-movement framework is also employed to analyze film dance in relation to Indian “classical” and “folk” dance forms. Borrowing from Indian performance treatises like the Natya Shastra and Abhinaya Darpana, this chapter deconstructs the dancing female body into three broad zones—the face, the torso, and the limbs—each of which is capable of a variety of addresses depending on the social connotations of those gestural articulations at certain historical moments.