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Be in step with
fusion dancing
I T isn’t close to bharatnatyam, kathak, Odissi or any of the other classical dances popular in India. Neither does it remotely resemble any known form of western dancing. Nor could you call it fusion dancing. It is actually a combination of all these and yet, none of them.Ever since Shiamak Davar and Ashley Lobo stormed the dance floors of cities like Mumbai and Delhi, a dance revolution has taken over the hip-hop generation in India. Of course, they are sticking to old familiar names — ballet, salsa, belly dancing, cha cha... but surely, there’s more to it than nomenclature. Take Sudeshna Giri’s dance classes in Mumbai, for example. Here tango is taught in three flavours: lusty Argentinian, flamboyant American and a meditative version. Every once in a while, flamenco is offered. And all this is passed as ballroom dance classes. "Ballroom dance is the foundation for everything else,"
the former kindergarten schoolteacher from Hyderabad points out.
"Earlier, dancing used to be a spontaneous thing at social gatherings.
Today, everybody wants specially choreographed numbers. My classes draw
students from age 12 to 60." |
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"The course is of three sessions, but once you have discovered the hara, you simply move in a different way," says Chowdhary. "You become more woman, more desirable, more sensual... The idea is to focus deep within and rediscover yourself rather than be exhibitionistic." So what is the hara? "It is the region three inches below your navel," she explains. "It lies in the centre of your belly and as you dance, you activate the chakra which is the seat of both peace and the powerful kundalini energy. So we alternate the dancing with deep meditative pauses so that the focus remains deep within." At a more esoteric level, there are the Gurdieff Sacred Dances taught in only a few places in India and are never advertised. The search to find these classes is an important part of the process, which uses the medium of dance to access deeper and deeper levels of the self. "The movements are like alphabets that tell the story of your life," reveals Akash Dharmaraj, a well-known psychotherapist who has been teaching Gurdieff for the past three years and takes off to a tiny Sicilian village every year for further training. In sharp contrast as the classes conducted by Fernando Aguilera, a professional choreographer from Argentina who came to India on a holiday in 1996 and has since stayed on. He teaches ballet, salsa, tango, jazz and foxtrot, but with his own "innovations and interpretations". "A lot of my students have started running classes on their own," he says in halting English. "Salsa is the hot favourite here. In this respect, there is a good deal of similarity between South America and India. We don’t seem to get enough of salsa." Indeed, many five-star discotheques in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore have begun holding Latino nights at least once a week. Amidst the flurry of cha cha, meringue, rhamba and samba numbers, salsa commands the highest popularity in participation. Also popular are shava dances, if Anamika Singh’s classes are any indication. Her speciality is wedding numbers (mainly inspired from Bollywood flicks) for which she gets brides’ mothers and grandmothers pouring into the second floor of her Delhi home till 11 at night. At times, she coaches entire families to prepare for an upcoming wedding. When she is not teaching wedding numbers, Anamika has her classes on Innovative Fusion Dance with pickings from salsa, jazz, kathak and zen. This is, however, targeted at a youngish clientele brought up on MTV and Channel V gyrations. "The dance scene in Indian metros has undergone a sea change in the past two years," observes Gill. "You now dance for yourself, not to show off. While classical dance holds its place and sanctity among discerning concert audiences, these new forms are more in the nature of self-expression and introspection. They also have a therapeutic effect in our stressed out lives." MF |
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