The song-dance sequence as cinema’s story within story
Ideally, choreography should facilitate a seamless transfer from dialogue to a song-dance sequence, while contributing to the totality of the storytelling, said Mr. Hariharan.
: From durbar nautch to wedding sangeet and night club swing, the best of song-dance imagery in mainstream Indian cinema has served both to render mass entertainment and advance the story arc, according to filmmaker-writer K. Hariharan.
Ideally, choreography should facilitate a seamless transfer from dialogue to a song-dance sequence, while contributing to the totality of the storytelling, said Mr. Hariharan, in his masterclass on ‘Choreography for Melodrama in Indian Cinema’ at the Manifest Dance-Film Festival that was recently hosted by dance-film collective AuroApaar at the Alliance Francaise.
It is important that the mise en scène follows the law of continuity and fills the gap that the dialogue is unable to fully bridge, sustain the character arc and eventually add to, and enrich the story, he said.
He would demonstrate clips of a few set pieces from Indian choreography—the layering of detail in Guru Dutt produced Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam starring Waheeda Rehman, the grace of tawaifs (courtesan) in Pakeezah, the Busby Berkeley-Fred Astaire influences in Kamal Haasan’s dance sequence in Raja Kaiya Vecha from Apoorva Sahothargal or Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) where the track Dholida juxtaposes Alia Bhat’s panache with the crude gyrations of a fellow inmate of the brothel, signifying a sisterhood of the oppressed.
As a highly industrialised and technology-dependent art, cinema the world over, relied on emotional stories borrowed from other art forms. Melodrama—a portmanteau of melody and drama—was a valid form, which allows for the deliberate heightening of a moment to serve the totality of cinema, and blended well with the Indian cinematic tradition, Mr. Hariharan said.
He felt that it was important to understand the context of the Indian filmmakers-producers’ struggle through the constraints of three centuries of colonisation. If the first public screening by the Lumiere Brothers in Paris in 1895 brought traffic to a halt at a time when trains were operational and the first aircraft were taking off to the skies, there was no electricity at the time of their first screening at the Watson Hotel in erstwhile Bombay a year on.
The surveillance-censorship of printing presses also meant that there was virtually no access to literature. In fact, in years to come, the stereotype of the nefarious white man would become a symbol of protest, a post-colonial political statement, against the long subjugation, he said.
According to him, silent cinema since Raja Harischandra came out in 1913 and up to 1930, was far from a quiet affair; projectors raised quite a racket while entertainers behind the stage played music to offset the whir and also indulge the audience during the intermittent breaks to cool the overheating machine.
Mr. Hariharan pointed out that the belief that cinema’s primary purpose was to entertain and satiate audience expectations would be reflected in the political correctness, an assiduous avoidance of politics or sensitive subjects. This compulsion to cater to the lower rungs on the aesthetics scale gave precedence to simplicity of tunes over the complex nuances of the classical.
Choreography, which repurposed high and low elements borrowed from Indian and Western dance cultures, succeeded also because they were good for memory mimic, when people walked out of hall humming a tune.
No dearth of local talent
In contrast to the technological and other challenges around filmmaking, choreographers never faced a dearth of local talent as public song and dance performance has, from time immemorial, been ingrained in popular consciousness, he said.
“Importantly, this cultural tradition that evolved around temple iconography essentially de-vulgarised, dignified and elevated dance to a state where the sacred and the profane coexist”.
According to him, if Saroj Khan reinvented Bollywood choreography, Madhuri Dixit gave the sizzling song-dance a new legitimacy in a post-colonial consciousness that awakened from the 1990s liberalisation wave.
This reckoning with a colonial past is best illustrated in Lagaan (2001) where the foreigner is freed from the villain stereotype and instead is cast as the benevolent sort, said Mr. Hariharan.
Read Comments
- Copy link
- Telegram
READ LATER
Remove
SEE ALL
PRINT