Dancing Women by Usha Iyer, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Popular Hindi Cinema, the first book engaging with 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 the popular Hindifilm. 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, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly-performed movements, privatetraining, 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 formalanalyses of dance-driven "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 corporealhistory co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women. | Dancing Women by Usha Iyer, Paperback | Indigo Chapters