Japanese dancers, Bollywood dance: finding authenticity at Tokyo’s Namaste India Festival

Abstract

ABSTRACT By sharing the stories of the Japanese Bollywood dancers at the Namaste India Festival in Tokyo, this paper explores their self-developed hierarchy of authenticity to argue that there are multiple ways to claim and access authenticity as it relates to the performance of Bollywood dance. The dance form’s base as global, hybrid, and commercial rejects authenticity as a concept, but its performance by these groups results in meaningful cultural exchange. The appeal of this Indian dance form in Japan provides an Inter-Asia reference point from which to explore the different ways this transnational yet national dance form functions as a sign of global modernity in these two different Asian contexts. The Japanese Bollywood dancers have developed a discourse that references and weights criteria such as heritage, source material, training and discipline, in-country experience, affect, imitation, cultural proficiency, emotion, and engagement as they rank themselves in relation to other dancers.