Behind the Lights

Bollywood Takes the Stage at City’s Dance Schools

Inside Stepping Out Studios on 26^th Street and Broadway, bright icicle lights illuminate the main studio as ballroom dance music is played. A woman wearing high heels and a red sparkly dress holds on to her partner as they slowly sway together.

Out of a small room in the right corner , Studio 4, emanates a different kind of  in energy where students are heel tapping and shoulder raising to Bollywood music.

From the graceful hand gestures to the emotion filled facial expressions, Bollywood dancing appeals to a cross-cultural audience. The dance is slowly gaining popularity in Manhattan as indicated by the rise in the number of schools specializing in Bollywood choreography.

Photo by John Coakley

In Chelsea, Bollywood Funk Dance NYC and Dhoonya Dance NYC offer lessons in classical dances like bhangra and kathak, and a more modern dance with jazz and hip-hop steps infused with the classical steps.

According to Priya Pandya, co-founder of Dhoonya Dance NYC, about 80 percent of her adult students come from a non-South Asian background, while most of her younger students are of South Asian descent.

Originally from Washington D.C., Pandya co-founded the school along with Kajal Mehta on May of 2009.

“I wanted to bring the school to the hub of arts and entertainment, so it was either L.A. or New York,” Pandya said.

And just like it was brought by destiny to Pandya, Danny Boyle’s award winning movie Slumdog Millionaire captured everyone’s attention and increased the interest in Bollywood dancing.

“It was perfect timing. I was in the right place at the right time,” Pandya said.

VIDEO: Bollywood Dancing

Vicki Aubin, a dance instructor in Bollywood Funk Dance, believes that awareness in Bollywood has always existed in the American culture but only in “small pockets and underground subculture.”

With her long black hair pulled up in a pony tail and a bright pink jacket and gray sweat pants on, Ayesha Khanna, the artistic director and choreographer of the Bollywood Funk School, takes out her iPod and begins to warm up her students.

“There’s a lot of infectious energy in Bollywood music. When you watch a Bollywood dance sequence, it has a feeling of ‘Why don’t you come join us?’” Khanna said.

A native of New Delhi, India, Khanna recently moved to the United States in 2006 and founded the Bollywood Funk Dance School in the summer of 2007. While she was classically trained in the Indian dance kathak, Khanna also has a background in jazz, ballet and hip hop.

As Khanna’s students join her with the warm ups, they all face the mirror to study their body movements and see a reflection of people from different ethnicities stare back at them.

Among the students in the intermediate level are Aki Goto, a traditional Japanese ballet dancer and Aubin, a beginner’s instructor with a background in Irish tap dance.

Aubin describes the Bollywood funk dance style as futuristic, one that evolves with people as they go through the constant changes in life.

“We incorporate elements of street jazz, funk and hip hop,” Aubin said. “But we’ll always have a Bollywood flair to it whether it’s some arm movement, a hand gesture or a head movement.”

In Khanna’s 7 p.m. Monday advanced beginner class, students from varying professions come in, leave their day job worries behind and learn a new dance step or two.

Michael R. Tom, a 34-year-old student from San Francisco, California, works in an architecture firm in Union Square. He first encountered Bollywood culture through the 2001 film Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. “It was a fantastic film, fantastic dance sequences; it kind of pulled me in like a vortex,” Tom said.

Along with the film’s choreography, the dancers’ synchronicity also appealed to Tom.

“The very fact that you have ensembles of anywhere between half a dozen to five or six dozen people who are all synchronized and doing the same kinesthetic movement is really powerful,” Tom said. “Especially when you catch it in film, it’s amazing. It’s almost like seeing a flock of birds move.”

Monica Khurana, a dance instructor at Dhoonya Dance, sees a similarity between Bollywood and Broadway.

“In Broadway, you have ballet, you have jazz and you have all these technical dances. Broadway kind of uses all those technical dances to put on a show and I think that’s what Bollywood is,” Khurana said.

For some students, a Bollywood dance class means reconnecting with their Indian culture. It is a cure for their nostalgia.

Nancy Malik, a 27-year-old student from Delhi, India, began taking classes with Khanna three years ago because she recognized her from her dance company back home.

“The moment I landed, I was looking for a Bollywood school and Ayesha was just starting at that time,” Malik said.

Malik stopped taking classes because of the time conflict with her job in banking. When the recession hit, Malik returned to dancing.

Similarly, Madhukar Raikar, a 35-year-old student from Bangladesh, expressed his longing for home.

“When I came here, I was really missing our dances,” Raikar said.

Raikar, who has lived in the United States for nine years and works in the computer industry, also saw the class as a more satisfying and fun work out.

“I find that fitness is the first reason why students take a class,” Pandya said. “Fitness is the gateway, but as they take more classes, they become more invested in the culture and the community.”

Heartbeats raise and sweat trickles down as Bollywood choreography mostly incorporates shoulder and hip movements with heel taps and toe taps.

What ultimately defines Bollywood dancing, though, is conveyed through dancer’s facial expression.

“In Bollywood, if you don’t emote it’s pointless. It has no meaning. The reason why people are so drawn to Bollywood movies is to see the expressions in people’s faces,” Khanna said. “They put a lot of emphasis on emotion and how important it is to express it in your face.”