Dancing the diasporic dream? embodied desires and the changing audience for Bollywood film dance

Abstract

Focusing on the migration of Bollywood dance out of the film screen, this article investigates the relationship of the dance form to film viewers and to amateur dancers who attend Bollywood classes. It questions the notion of desire in the act of watching Bollywood film and seeks to discover whether this is translated into participation in dance classes and performance at social events. Is dancing the ‘Bollywood dream’ part of the imagined fantasies of viewers and dancers? How are those dreams enacted? Does it create a fantasy, nostalgic space for those in the Indian diaspora and a web of dreams for the non-Asian participants? Tracing the changing status of Bollywood as a dance genre, the article maps the dance’s increasing codification through newly created exams and syllabi, as well as its marketing through fitness and health. Interviews with Bollywood teachers and their dance students assist in drawing out the nuances of meaning in this contested arena where global cultural processes are at play.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.