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Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms - cinema and dance - historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including
devadasis and
tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the
Natya Sastra and the
Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles,"
Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
List of contents
- Introduction: A Corporeal History of Hindi Film Dance
- 1. Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body
- Corporealizing Theoretical Frameworks of Film Dance and Music
- 2. Choreographing Architectures of Public Intimacy
- A Spatio-Corporeal Approach to Hindi Film Dance
- 3. Corporealizing Colonial Modernities
- Azurie and Sadhona Bose as Co-Choreographers of New Mobilities in the 1930s and 1940s
- 4. From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform
- Folded Corporeal Histories of the Dancer-Actress in the 1950s and 1960s
- 5. Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?
- Saroj Khan and Madhuri Dixit as Co-Choreographers of 1990s Bollywood Femininity
- Epilogue: An Intermedial History of Hindi Film, Dance, and Music
- Index
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.
