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Indian Bollywood Style Belly Dance


The spectacular style and choreography of the Indian movie musical industry. One of the world's most popular dance genres, Bollywood fuses Indian classical and folk forms with hip-hop and modern movement.

While hypnotizing on screen, the intricate hand movements and high speed dancing can be the ultimate workout challenge.

Music and dance are an essential ingredient of Bollywood films(a reference to the Indian film industry). The dances combine Indian classical and western styles expressing the inner emotions of the dancer. It has universal appeal due to its combination of styles making it fun and accessible for all levels of ability.

Bollywood dance consists of various Indian and Western Dance forms, primarily inspired from the music in Bollywood (Indian film) Industry. Our dance classes consists of an expressive dance style incorporating a fusion of Indian classical, folk- bhangra, arabic, latino & hiphop/funk styles with a touch of pure Bollywoodcheese to top it all off! Bhangra is a folk dance originating from Punjab in North India. Today Bhangra music has been remixed with all types of music from hip hop, r&b to Latino and has become extremely popular in the UK and beyond. It consists of very rhythmic and powerful music with fantastic ‘dhol’ beats!

This is not your run-of-the-mill boy-meets-girl story. It's boy meets girl to the beat of half a dozen songs plus many dancing friends, multiplied by all the cheering fans.

These days, Indian parents who once dragged their grumbling kids to Hindi lessons and Bharatanatyam classical-dance classes are spending their Saturday mornings watching their children, some as young as five, willingly learn Bollywood-style hip swivels. "It gives them something to show off at a party," says one mother with a laugh. "And it's exercise."

The quintessential Bollywood dance number has to have a tree for the lovers to run around as they lip synch love songs with at least 50 backup dancers performing moonwalk-meets-classical-kathak stunts in acrobatic, bosom-heaving unison. A fountain (or five) is also good for the obligatory wet-sari sequence, and four changes of costumes -- one for each stanza, including a chiffon sari with a backless blouse for a scene set in freezing Himalayan snow -- is de rigueur.

In some ways, Bollywood has hardly changed in 50 years. The winning formula is still three and a half hours of family misunderstandings, mustachioed villains, star-crossed romance, dishum dishum action, comic sidekicks, car chases and a cabaret number. Songs can still make or break a movie: many films sell as much on the reputation of choreographers such as Farah Khan and composers like A. R. Rahman as that of their actual stars.

But in other ways, it's no longer the Bollywood of my youth.

Bollywood was a risqué world with money but little class where the vamps flashed thigh and cleavage and the heroes kept their shirts unbuttoned. Bollywood produced more films than Hollywood, and millions of Indians queued up on opening weekend to buy tickets on the black market, but many looked down their noses at the genre's kitschy excess.

These days, Bollywood is entering the American mainstream, thanks to movies such as Mira Nair's art-house hit "Monsoon Wedding" and the Bollywood-inspired pageantry of "Moulin Rouge." Also very fabulous is "The guru", and while were at it, "Bend it like Beckham", although the latter is not really a Bollywood style film at all. Indian beauty queen Aishwarya Rai recently appeared on "60 Minutes," and rapper Dr. Dre was slapped with a lawsuit for mixing a snatch of an old Hindi song into his single "Addictive."

"India is a very PC, very cool place to be in right now," says Renda Dabit, whose event-production company, Hennagarden, helped put together a Bollywood theme party for the Academy of Friends Oscar gala in San Francisco last year. "After 9/11, the Moroccan theme parties [and] Arabian Oasis nights were not so popular anymore. But Bollywood is hot."

Much of the Bollywood surge comes from greater availability. Even 10 years ago, Bollywood's only audience in America consisted of homesick immigrants willing to suffer through streaky pirated videos. Now, Bollywood films screen regularly at multiplexes . The latest Bollywood DVDs are available on Netflix and merit their own section at Blockbusters.

"It's got north Indian kathak, south Indian classical, hip-hop, disco, folk, jazz, all combined with a lot of style," says Montre Bhiwandiwala, who teaches Bollywood dancing at the India Community Center and at Naach, a Sunnyvale school focused exclusively on Hindi film dancing. Bollywood music, which is also called filmi music, has always been remarkably eclectic, borrowing freely from classical Indian ragas, Sufi love songs, Bengal's baul folk music, disco and rap but giving everything a uniquely Indian twist. The Berkeley dance team, says coordinator Anita Bhat, gets it inspiration as much from a Tamil movie as from the latest Usher video. For team member Sheetal Kapadia, the Hindi Film Dance competition is not about copying a Bollywood film; it's really about the team telling its own Bollywood-style love story through six song segments in exactly eight minutes. This year's number, fresh from winning the gold at a national competition in Detroit, is "something we can all relate to," says Kapadia. It's the romantic tale of the most popular boy on campus, who like any Bollywood hero worth his masala is also a dancing whiz and tries to impress the new girl on the block. And though it might be compressed into eight minutes, rather than spread out over three hours, the Bollywood magic can still work in real life as well. "My roommate and his girlfriend met at the second Hindi Film Dance competition," says Indus Council President Tejas Nerechania.

Bollywood films, with their often top-heavy patriarchal family values and traditional gender roles, in which women routinely make sacrifices for their husbands, might seem a bit of a throwback for a modern Indian-American generation. "But we can make up our own stories that break that stereotype," says Bhat. "And it's great for girls to know they don't have to be nearly naked to be regarded as beautiful."

But even the traditional family values have their appeal, says USF Professor Vamsee Juluri. "Bollywood is heartfelt; it's about a representation of families and relationships you don't often get in Hollywood." Tinseltown certainly has little room for three and half glycerine-soaked hours in which a mother's noble love helps errant sons reconcile with stubborn fathers to the tune of a thousand violins. "In Hollywood, we save the world for God or from megalomaniacs," says Juluri. "In Bollywood, we are saving the world for Mom."

Sources:
www.sfgate. com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/02/04/bollydance.DTL www.bollywoodgrooves. com
www.bollywooddance.co. uk