Dancing Women

Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema

Usha Iyer (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

286 Seiten

2020
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-093873-4 (ISBN)

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A new look at Indian film dance, this book engages with the display and mobilization of the female dancing body to propose new models for theorizing film dance and music more generally. Author Usha Iyer offers a new understanding of how female dancer-actors impact narratives and the music composed for them.

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.

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

Introduction: A Corporeal History of Hindi Film Dance

1. Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body

Corporealizing Theoretical Frameworks of Film Dance and Music

2. Choreographing Architectures of Public Intimacy

A Spatio-Corporeal Approach to Hindi Film Dance

3. Corporealizing Colonial Modernities

Azurie and Sadhona Bose as Co-Choreographers of New Mobilities in the 1930s and 1940s

4. From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform

Folded Corporeal Histories of the Dancer-Actress in the 1950s and 1960s

5. Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?

Saroj Khan and Madhuri Dixit as Co-Choreographers of 1990s Bollywood Femininity

Epilogue: An Intermedial History of Hindi Film, Dance, and Music

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	19.10.2020
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	243 x 160 mm
Gewicht	558 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Tanzen / Tanzsport
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-093873-0 / 0190938730
ISBN-13	978-0-19-093873-4 / 9780190938734
Zustand	Neuware