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This page last updated:
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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How to do.. Bollywood dancing
Duncan built up quite a sweat, keeping up with the complicated dance moves. Pictures: David Lowndes
ALL I know about Bollywood is what I have seen from late night movies caught in a post-pub haze on Channel 4 – which as you can imagine does not amount to much.
So when I went to join a Bollywood dance class at the Hereward College Sports Hall, in Reeves Way, Eastfield, I only had a vague idea of what to expect.
Forget Hollywood and the West, Bollywood films are the biggest in the world, selling up to a million more tickets worldwide than the American film industry.
They differ greatly from modern Western films in their use of bright colour, song and dance which can be used to illustrate anything from epic romance to swashbuckling adventure, and revenge sagas to comic extravaganzas.
The group of young dancers I joined was practising for a public performance at this year’s Anand Mela, which is coming to the city next week.
I was lent some Bollywood-style dress to join in the dancers in what initially appeared to be some quite simple moves.
The dance we were doing was based on several minutes of lots of different moves and dances, borrowing from both salsa and traditional Indian dancing, such as bhangra.
It wasn’t long before I had built up quite a sweat trying to keep up with the younger dancers around me as they seemingly effortlessly danced to what seemed to be an impossibly fast piece of music following teacher Anand Bhalt, who is principal of the Desi Masti Academy in Leicester.
Swapna Muzandar, who has helped organise the Bollywood dance classes and hopes to carry them on after the Mela, said that the dance from the film Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham told a story in itself.
She said: “Emotions in the film are sometimes shown through song and dance.
“This is a classic kind of dance in the film. It starts with a question to a lover and ends with the answer they wanted. The movements and the expressions are matching the words of the song.”
A lot of the moves in the dance to You Are My Soniya involved pointing, shaking your head, walking away in a circle and coming back to the same spot, reflecting the emotions in the song.
It also had my old favourite of trying to move your limbs in different directions at the same time which meant I frequently started flailing around like a tubby windmill in a cyclone, not helped by the long scarf I had on my shoulders which seemed intent on wrapping itself around me.
The classes are all part of the Healthy Living Partnership and the East Family and Community Project, and are funded by Lifelong Learning.
The Bollywood class was open to all ages with many of the children in the class being joined by their parents for the warm-up at the start.
At his academy in Leicester Anand taught students from three years old up to adult. A former solo dancer, he loved Bollywood dancing for its “mongrel” quality – the fact it borrowed dance styles from all over the world and mixed them up.
He said: “Bollywood is never the same in any two places. Lots of this dance was borrowed heavily from the original film, but the dances can be as original as you want them to be, depending on what inspires you.”