Bollywood Dance Numbers Are Endurance Events, and Nobody Films Them Like One

A four-minute song can take eleven days to shoot, in costumes weighing ten kilos. The people doing it are athletes, and the industry has never had a vocabulary for that.

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Here is what people outside the tradition consistently miss about a Hindi film song: it is not a break in the film, and it is not easy. A four-minute number is routinely shot across a week or more, in costumes weighing several kilos, under lights, with full-out performance required on every take because the camera moves and the cut has to match.

The people doing that are athletes. The industry has never quite said so.

The classical foundation nobody credits

A large share of Hindi film choreography sits on Kathak, Bharatanatyam and folk forms — and the actors who read as the best dancers on screen are almost always the ones with years of classical training behind them. That training is why a hand looks right. It is not charisma; it is a decade of practice in a discipline that has its own examinations.

Canon #18 Umrao Jaan उमराव जान Muzaffar Ali · 1981 · Drama, Musical

Rekha's mujra sequences work because the form is being performed correctly rather than approximated. The same is true of the set-pieces two decades later — put two trained dancers in one frame and the shot does not need editing to be exciting.

Canon #88 Devdas देवदास Sanjay Leela Bhansali · 2002 · Romance, Drama

The physical cost is real and mostly undocumented

Injury during song shoots is common and rarely discussed publicly. Knees go. Backs go. A performer in a lehenga weighing eight to twelve kilos, doing twenty takes of a jump-and-spin on a hard studio floor, is doing something no sports medicine department would sign off on without a recovery plan.

Compare that to how the sports films in this canon treat physical work — as technique, with the preparation shown.

Canon #80 Mukkabaaz मुक्केबाज़ Anurag Kashyap · 2017 · Sports, Drama Canon #56 Chak De! India चक दे! इंडिया Shimit Amin · 2007 · Sports, Drama

Both films photograph bodies doing difficult things and take the difficulty seriously. Song picturisation almost never gets the same respect, despite being harder on the performer than most of what happens in the sports films.

The stamina number

The genuinely athletic Hindi film sequence is the long-take group number, where forty people have to hit the same mark repeatedly and the camera does not cut away to hide anyone. 'Chaiyya Chaiyya', shot on the roof of a moving train, is the famous example, but the same demand runs through every large ensemble set-piece.

Canon #63 Dil Se.. दिल से.. Mani Ratnam · 1998 · Romance, Thriller

If you want to train the way this actually requires

Film choreography demands three things simultaneously — mobility, single-leg strength and aerobic capacity — and almost nothing in a standard gym programme trains all three. That is why dancers who cross-train for film work tend to come out of classical practice rather than out of a weights room.

The thing to watch for

Next time a song comes on, ignore the star and watch the background dancers in the wide shot. If they are all landing together on the same frame, somebody rehearsed that group for weeks and the film is telling you it cared. If they are slightly out, you have just learned something about the budget.

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Filed under Dance · Choreography · Training · Craft. Written for The Bollywood 100.