Related Stories CHEZ PARISTHROUGH A LENS, VIRTUALLYLiving in MallvilleSoul spaTEE TRAVELLERS

Someone, somewhere is dancing. Right now. Perhaps flinging their limbs awkwardly in a garish pink costume or pirouetting with grace in a dance class. But, they are following the beat—with happiness. Like Damini Dutta, a teacher at Pon Vidyashram in Chennai, who sits glued to the television when Saroj Khan’s Nachle Ve comes on air. At the end of the show, she steals into her room, stands before a mirror and lets the thumkas flow. For others like Anju Ahluwalia, 30-year-old homemaker and mother of a six-year-old in Noida, dance is a passion to be shared. In January, Ahluwalia turned a small room in her house into a dance school and called it—fittingly—the Aaja Nachle school. In just a month, she has had 30 students, mostly housewives.

The movie might have bombed but across the country, the young and the old, software professionals and singletons in search of love, have taken Aaja Nachle’s message to heart and swayed on to the dance floor. The Salsa India school, which started out with just 10 students in Delhi in 2001, now has 2,000 students spread over eight studios in the NCR, five each in Kolkata and Mumbai and one in Pune. In small towns and big, the number of dance schools has seen a quantum leap. Choreographer Saroj Khan says she has been flooded with mails since her programme began, asking her to teach a particular number or let them audition or apprentice with her.

It’s not only the hip youngster who wants to show off his moves on the dance floor. At Versatile Dance Class at Bhanwarkua Square in Indore, the afternoons are busy. Jagjit Singh, owner of the school, reserves that time for housewives and women keen to pick up Bollywood numbers for wedding functions and sangeets. Singh says, over the last few months, afternoon classes have made more money than the regular ones.

Dance class no longer means pushing reluctant girls in pigtails to kathak or Bharatnatyam gurus. The new beat of the times is salsa, followed by jazz, ballet, meringue, bachata, cha cha and hip-hop. In Gujarat, the land of the dandiya, it’s the salsa which is drawing the crowds. Hardik Pandya, administrative head of the Shiamak Davar Institute for Performing Arts, Ahmedabad, says, “It’s been 10 months since we came to Ahmedabad and the response has been great. More than 2,000 persons have taken classes with us. Salsa remains the most sought-after.” Many corporate firms in the city have direct tie-ups with dance schools and often arrange for sessions for their employees.

Even in a traditional city like Chennai, western dance—and surprise, surprise—Bollywood dancing is picking up. “People look for salsa and jazz. But yes, Bollywood dance too is growing in popularity,” says Jeffrey Vardon, who runs the Hot Shoe Dance Company in Chennai. Vardon told us of instances when mothers-in-law tag along with their daughters-in-law to supervise what is being taught and then get drawn into the activity themselves. There are dance clubs in Chennai that host salsa, hip-hop and retro nights. “It is not just the kids and the youngsters who are coming to our school. We have grandmothers learning along with their grandchildren and parents with their daughters or sons. Dance is becoming a social fun thing,’’ says 30-year-old John Brito, who opened Chennai’s first dance school.

It’s not a coincidence that so many of the eager learners are women. “For most people, particularly women, it’s a way of escaping their regular roles at home. Besides, as an ethnic form, the acceptance of dance is greater, so it’s not like they are breaking a taboo,” says Isha Singh, psychologist, Max Healthcare, Delhi.

In Kolkata, even the bhadralok has stopped looking down at the swing-your-hips routine. A popular school in the city, Vive La Salsa, opened at the end of 2005 and has five centres at upscale addresses. “We don’t advertise but every month, when a new class starts, we find our hands full,” says Aditya Upadhya, owner and chief instructor of the centre. The students are between 20 and “late 40s,” many of them exposed to the dance through Bollywood, television shows and trips abroad. “Even five to six years ago, Bengalis would form only about 2-3 per cent of the student base at such dance schools. Today, they make up 30 per cent of our students,” says Arindam Mukherjee, manager of Dance World in Kolkata.

Why dance? Why, when you are an Indian with stiff limbs and an ample figure, expose yourself to sniggers by twitching those hips? There as many reasons as there are people. The rhythm is irresistible. Someone’s put on Dard-e-Disco. And the most common motive—keep up with the Gulatis. Alka Aggarwal, 40-year-old mother of an 18-year-old daughter, is learning how to groove to Sajna ri vaari at Ahluwalia’s school. Alka has never danced before. But now she wants to shake her leg with the perfection of a Bollywood diva. “At my brother’s wedding a year ago, I could not muster the courage to dance. I didn’t know how to dance.” For her niece’s wedding on February 14 though, Aggarwal is determined to put up a great show.

And when television swamps you with images of celebrities, thin or fat, jiggling in paroxysms of delight, even those with twin left feet aspire for that impossibly agile move. “Thanks to reality television shows such as Jhalak Dikhla Ja and Nach Baliye where actors can jive effortlessly under a choreographer’s guidance, people have now begun to feel, ‘If they can, why can’t I? All I need is a bit of professional help.’ With this help, they try to overcome their hesitation to dance at parties,” says Ritu Soni Kapoor, director of Delhi-based Zenith dance institute. Zenith trains students in Bollywood or free-style dancing, which is still the most popular genre, and has 13 centres across the capital.
The glamour, surely, is bewitching. Says Harchas Kaur, a 31-year-old fashion merchandiser in Delhi, “When I performed as part of a troupe at Siri Fort auditorium, I felt like a star.”

Ads By Google