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FILM over the last seventy-five years has treated dance like a dish on
an all-you-can-eat buffet table, to be sampled all piled together on the
same plate. The smorgasbord includes influences from all over the
world: Chinese, Burmese, Malaysian, African, American rock and roll,
jazz, Egyptian, Spanish, South American, Japanese, Hawaian, Latin
American and Calypso from the West Indies. Sometimes they come
second or third hand, from a pop song of that country for example.1 Are
these authentic? No more so than Gobi Manchurian. But that is not the
point.
Early talkies in Hindi were modelled on the stage plays of the time,
which incorporated the dance, music and the art forms of all the regions
where Hindi and its dialects were spoken. Once Hindi film became a
pan-Indian entertainment, it sampled even more freely from various
Indian regional sources: Tamil Nadu’s Karagam and Kavadichindu,
Bharatanatyam, Nautanki, Bhangda from Punjab, Mande from Goa,
Lavni from Maharashtra and so on.
The choreographers and dancers who enlivened these on the screen are
too numerous to mention and sometimes remained uncredited. But there
are some directors who paid special attention to the placement of song
and dance routines in their films. I will mention only three with
distinctive styles which influenced subsequent filmmakers.
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Over the years, there were many dancers, Helen being the most
outstanding and prolific. Many were trained in classical modes, like
Sadhana Bose in Manipuri, Sitara Devi and Gopikrishna in Kathak,
Vyjayanthimala, Kamala, Padmini in Bharatanatyam, but many times
this number were untrained but with a rare natural grace: Geeta Bali,
Rehana, Bhagwan, Nalini Jaywant, for example. Their dances in films,
good and bad, still captivate, without complicated movements or
footwork or even elaborate facial expression – they charm with a
natural fluidity of movement.
In this age of high level animation and expert digital trickery, where
anything one can imagine can be shown, it’s easy to forget that there
have always been special effects, done with masking and optical
printers. The first use of slow motion was in 1951, during the long
introduction to the song ‘Dhak dhak dhak’ by the director-producer-
cameraman brothers Jal and Fali Mistry, though the uninformed credit
usually goes to Shantaram for ‘Dil dil se’ a year later, perhaps because
it was shot with a specially imported camera and turned into an
especially fluid dance. In 1922, Dadasaheb Phalke managed to create
the effect of his young daughter Mandakini as Krishna dancing on the
many-headed serpent, while the moving-frame effect, where brief shots
are cut and spliced to music, allowed director Mehboob Khan in 1940,
to show his wife, who couldn’t dance, doing so divinely as Margina, in
Alibaba.
The well arranged drums, themselves an eyeful, each held two dancers.
It starts at a slow pace and continues as the heroine, played by
Rajakumari, the unattainable apple of the covetous villain’s eyes, enters.
The pace quickens as the movements slide between Kandyan dance of
Sri Lanka, Kathakali and Bharatanatyam. Reportedly shot over a month
by different cameramen in long and mid-shots, with a peppering of
close ups, it is a stupendous achievement of editing. There is no song
but the music thunders to an epic climax.
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It is a pity that no one has done an in-depth study of Bhagwan in all his
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When properly integrated into the medium of film, as was done in the
Indo-Russian co-production, Pardesi in 1957, it can be appealing. The
filming was done in Moscow. Unfortunately, the dance director from
India never showed up. In order to avoid huge losses, Padmini’s sister
Ragini stepped in and choreographed the dance with expertise and an
intuitive understanding of the constraints of each medium. Film allows
various techniques which the stage can’t use, such as quick and slow
motion, the camera angles, editing, 360 degree and overhead shots,
close-ups, panning and so on. If these are used or overused
unnecessarily, they come off as gimmicks and distract the viewer.
The same sore thumb rule holds true of Kathak. In Shatranj ke Khiladi,
Birju Maharaj stuck to his classical guns, making director Satyajit Ray
and cinematographer Soumendu Roy go to great lengths to give the
sequences the right filmi tone. They succeed only partly because even
the music by Ray toes the same ghunghroo line set by the Kathak
maestro.
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Dream sequences are a recurrent feature in Hindi films but they should
really be ‘year-marked’ as BA and AA, being either ‘before Awara’ or
‘after Awara’. The impact Awara created and the influence it has had
since can’t be overstated. Everything came together because of the
overall vision of director-producer-performer Raj Kapoor. In the story,
Raj and Rita are childhood friends. After a long gap they meet in the
bloom of youth, she the adopted daughter of a rich judge, and he a
small-time heel in the clutches of a criminal. He aspires to escape this
hell and enter heaven holding her hand. All this is brought out in almost
nine minutes, choreographed by Madame Simkie, who was at one time
Uday Shankar’s partner.
Uday Shankar’s own film Kalpana did not cut ice with the audience,
and there were no art house cinemas in those days to promote this kind
of film. Taking part were Lalitha and Padmini, known as the Travancore
Sisters, Usha Kiran and her sister Leela, and Lakshmikantha who
played the vamp, and Anil Chopra, the last two went on to become
familiar in South Indian films. The film was shot at Gemini Studios. For
months, Uday Shankar rehearsed in a rented hall in Madras, where
interested people came to observe and perhaps imbibe some of his ways
of thinking about movement. This may account for those who said S.S.
Vasan copied Shankar in Chandralekha, a statement for which there is
no evidence.
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for a few popular Hindi films. In Baazi, she created a song which acts as
a warning to the hero: ‘Suno guzar kya gaye… Hear what the bird sings,
time is fleeting.’ This became such a popular conceit that many such
sequences followed.
Others who were with Shankar at the dance school he started in Almora,
such as Guru Dutt and Sachin Shanker, got into film as choreographers.
Guru Dutt choreographed Lakharani in 1945, but as it is no longer
available, the speculation that he was influenced by Shankar can’t be
verified. I assert that Dutt’s later song picturizations are strictly his own.
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Kamal Haasan and Silk Smitha were both known as good dancers; they
came together only once, in Sadma (1983). The costumes are minimal
and tribal looking, showing off especially Silk Smitha’s sumptuous
curves and athleticism. It is a modern, uncategorizable pas de deux, the
two bodies sinuously curving around each other without reference to
any specific genre. Kamal Hassan shows off his more Bharatanatyam-
ish moves, but put together with a minimalist sensibility and when the
two bodies come together in rare moments their mutual tension is
expressed in writhing, disjointed poses. Silk Smitha’s power is in looks
that hit you in the space between your ears, where you feel it the most.
The words of the song ‘O babua, yeh mahua’ don’t light any fires but
Asha’s singing of Ilayaraja’s music is velvet-covered steel.
More recently, often artifice substitutes for art, with dances dependent
on huge sets, ornate costumes, ensemble choreography. Sometimes this
deployment of forces works.
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Now Hindi film dance exists as a genre in its own right, with
conventions, movements, postures and tropes that define it, so much so
that it is one of the categories on the popular US TV show So You Think
You Can Dance. Now Hollywood borrows from it in movies like
Moulin Rouge and Slumdog Millionaire. Bombay cinema shows no sign
of losing its taste for music and dance in the movies. Glory be!
Footnote:
1. Cesar Romero’s ‘Chico chico’ as the character Cuban Pete of the 1940s, became
‘Ghore ghore o banke chore’ in C. Ramchandra’s Samadhi ten years later; ‘Rassa sayang
sayang re’, a Malay pop song, was used with the same refrain and tune in Shankar
Jaikishen’s Singapore (1960); Carmen Miranda’s ‘Mama eu quero’ from Down
Argentine Way became ‘Mamma mari’ in Mangala; a snatch from Bizet’s opera Carmen,
the gypsy chorus, became ‘laraloo laraloo’ in Jadee by Naushad (1951); ‘Rock, rock,
rock’ became ‘Lal, lal, gal’ in Mr X by N. Dutta (1957); ‘Hey mambo Italiano’ became
‘Hey bambo bambola’ in Mausi by Vasant Desai (1958); Harry Belafonte’s ‘Jamaican
Farewell’ became ‘Do chamakti ankhon mein’ in Detective by Mukul Roy (1958). This
is a far from exhaustive list.
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