„You have to concentrate! Now we take our right arm and lift our right leg in order to…“ Akshay is facing the mirror while talking to us – a group of University of Denver students on their interterm-class exploring the secrets of Bollywood. If you follow my blog you already know that I started my trip to India – with a short stay in London on the way – in mid November. During one month I transitioned from a German grad student in the US to a solo-female traveler in Rajasthan to an interterm-student in Mumbai and a student group traveler in Delhi and Ajmer.
At the moment I find myself at the acting studio at the Film and Media School Whistling Woods International. This studio is the best equipped on campus for executing what we read on our itinerary for this morning: Bollywood Dance. Akshay has been a dancer for several decades and recently opened his own dance studio as an instructor. He teaches us parts of the choreography of two songs: Zinda Banda from the film Jawan which is quite fast and really makes us move and Kaavaalaa (no, I did not fall asleep on the „a“ of my keyboard – this word just has this many „a“s 😉 a choreography that went viral and includes a lot of storytelling in its movements.
If you are curious to watch or want to try it out by yourself, find the dance here.
This was not the only time we came in touch with Bollywood dance. Since music and movements are such a big component of Bollywood films, we exchanged about this theme in several lectures and discussions, such as the guest speaker talk by Ansum Rajabali, a famous screenplay writer in the Indian film industry. Learning that you can understand the story of a film only by watching the dance scenes was equally interesting as realising how Indian filmmakers skilfully combine mass choreographies with storytelling in every genre – who could imagine a horror movie with colourful costumes and crazy dance moves in the middle of it?
For me both – learning about the elements of music and dance in Indian films as well as moving my body to the songs myself was a great experience that has definitely changed my way of watching Bollywood movies.
lilithpower 