Dancing Women does nothing short of offering a new corporeal taxonomy of Hindi cinema, to revise how we think about female star bodies, gender, sound, nation, caste and community in film. "Here finally is a book that gives us the conceptual vocabulary and historical imagination to grasp the politics and pleasures of dance in Hindi cinema. "Drawing thoughtfully and insightfully on a wide array of sources (archival, popular, anecdotal, and visual), Iyer turns spectacular dance numbers in Hindi cinema into complex historical inscriptions of production logics and human labor." - Sudhir Mahadevan, Film Quarterly 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 corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women. 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 formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. 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. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, 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. 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, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public HealthÄancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of 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 popular Hindi cinema.
HINDI DANCE SHOW SERIES
Oxford Commentaries on International Law.