Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer Namrata Rele Sathe (bio) Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer. Oxford University Press. 2020. 288 pages. $140 hardcover; $38.95 paper; also available in e-book. In Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, Usha Iyer deconstructs the spectacle of the dancing body in Hindi cinema to reveal the industrial and material realities it conceals. Iyer’s project deviates from previous studies of Hindi cinematic song-and-dance, which have primarily focused on the ideological dimensions of these sequences. Instead, Iyer is more interested in the industry practices that, in her words, “[alert] us to questions of virtuosity, labor, and pleasure undergirding the production and reception of popular Hindi film dance.”1 Locating her study between the 1930s and 1990s, Iyer deploys the dancer-actress as an “analytical category” to explore the “construction of gender, stardom and spectacle” in dance sequences.2 Iyer decodes the star texts of various dancer-actresses, including those of Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, and Madhuri Dixit, to explicate the “social norms for female performance” that informed the reception of their dancing bodies and the ways in which these actresses sought to “challenge or subvert these through their movement vocabulary.”3 Iyer’s comprehensive and meticulous study is [End Page 199] strengthened by vivid descriptions of the dance sequences that the author analyzes. Take, for example, this elegant description of renowned dancer-actress Helen’s famous dance sequence from the film Caravan (Nasir Hussain, 1971), “Piya Tu Ab Toh Aaja” (Come here my love): “With her elegantly splayed fingers, [Helen] harnesses the camera into a crane shot that follows her as she traverses the space of the set, climbing stairs, sprinting into a gilded cage, gliding down a slide, and emerging in the next match-on-dancing-action shot before the ready, waiting camera to inaugurate the sung part of the song with her trademark sequin-encrusted shimmy.”4 In the introduction, “A Corporeal History of Hindi Film Dance,” Iyer presents the book’s central theoretical concept of the choreomusicking body, which the author defines as “the many bodies that produce the on-screen performing body.”5 The choreomusicking body concept brings into focus the collaborative work of the on-screen dancer(s) as well as off-screen professionals who contribute to what we finally witness on film. This is vital research, Iyer argues, as it serves to unearth the forgotten work of those performers who were part of authoring some of the most spectacular and memorable dance sequences in the history of Hindi cinema. These include classic sequences such as Vyjayanthimala’s sensuous turn in “Main Kya Karoon Ram” (What am I to do, oh God!) from Sangam (Union, Raj Kapoor, 1964) and Madhuri Dixit’s superhit dance number “Ek Do Teen” (One, two, three) from Tezaab (Acid, N. Chandra, 1988) to more recent hits such as the larger-than-life set piece dances of Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007). This chapter also provides an overview of the history of dance in Hindi cinema, starting from its pre-sound days, to demonstrate how Hindi cinematic dance evolved as a heterogeneous form derived from folk, classical, and international influences. In chapter 1, titled “Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body: Corporealizing Theoretical Frameworks of Film Dance and Music,” Iyer outlines a taxonomy of song sequence performances based on the activities of the on-screen actors and their relation to space and mise-en-scène. Iyer introduces the concept of dance musicalization, wherein the author argues that the “inclusion of dancer-actors may alter the music composed in popular Hindi films so that it responds to their dancing skills and bodily comportment.”6 The song-and-dance sequences are classified into two major types: the narrative number and the production number. Iyer’s focus is on the production number, an explicitly constructed dance spectacle that contributes to the construction of the female star text. The chapter centers choreomusicology as an analytical approach to posit that dance and music are not binary but instead exist as “two sensory planes [that] are seen as being in a state of mutual...