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Dancing Women
Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema
by Usha Iyer
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Book Presentation:
Dancing 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. 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. 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. 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 formal analyses of cine-choreographic "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 corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
About the Author:
Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
Press Reviews:
"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
"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. 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. With evocative detail and fresh troves of research, Iyer makes an enthralling case for embodied movement in film as the torque force shaping cinema's mise-en-scène, narrative and cultural politics. And somehow, even as she recasts Indian film history from the perspective of its famous dancers and dances, Iyer captures the sheer joy of Hindi cinema's spectacular numbers. A delight of a book." -- Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space
"In Iyer's astute and nuanced choreomusicological analysis, we encounter popular Hindi film dance in all its ontological and epistemological complexity. Not only does this book map the divergent and often competing ideological significations of the female dancing body in cinema, it also complicates ideas about women's agency, visibility, and erasure in modern histories of South Asian dance. Dancing Women is an interpretive tour de force. It inspires us to read film corporeally, and to radically rethink what we understand as spectatorial engagement with dance in Indian cinema." -- Davesh Soneji, University of Pennsylvania, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> On a related topic:
Beyond Bollywood (2022)
2000 Years of Dance in the Arts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan Region
Dir. Forrest McGill
This is How We Dance Now! (2017)
Performance in the Age of Bollywood and Reality Shows
Centring Women in Bollywood Biopics (2024)
Empowerment and Agency in Contemporary Indian Cinema
Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema (2023)
Looking through their Gaze
Bollywood's New Woman (2021)
Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies
Dir. Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora
Changemakers (2018)
Twenty women transforming Bollywood behind the scenes
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