Dancing Women - Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema

A new look at Indian film dance, this book engages with the display and mobilization of the female dancing body to propose new models for theorizing film dance and music more generally. Author Usha Iyer offers a new understanding of how female dancer-actors impact narratives and the music composed for them.

About the author

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

Summary

A new look at Indian film dance, this book engages with the display and mobilization of the female dancing body to propose new models for theorizing film dance and music more generally. Author Usha Iyer offers a new understanding of how female dancer-actors impact narratives and the music composed for them.

Additional text

In Iyer's astute and nuanced choreomusicological analysis, we encounter popular Hindi film dance in all its ontological and epistemological complexity. Not only does this book map the divergent and often competing ideological significations of the female dancing body in cinema, it also complicates ideas about women's agency, visibility, and erasure in modern histories of South Asian dance. Dancing Women is an interpretive tour de force. It inspires us to read film corporeally, and to radically rethink what we understand as spectatorial engagement with dance in Indian cinema.

Product details

• Authors: Usha Iyer, Usha (Assistant Professor of Film & Media St Iyer
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2020
• EAN: 9780190938734
• ISBN: 978-0-19-093873-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Genres / Animated, PERFORMING ARTS / Dance / Folk, India, PERFORMING ARTS / Dance / Choreography & Dance Notation, Film Theory & Criticism, Art music, orchestral and formal music, Film history, theory or criticism, Non-Western music: traditional & "classical", Folk Dancing, dance; Hindi; cinema