bhangra+Bollywood

This week we started looking into the idea of storytelling through bhangra dance. We learnt about how in Bollywood every piece of choreography tells a story generally the story is about love, forbidden love, betrayal, chasing someone/thing or family. We also found out that all bollywood/bhangra routines contain a comedy section and always have a happy ending.

In our groups of 6 we began to brainstorm ideas for our choreography. We quickly choose the theme of forbidden love and started to create a story that would fit the theme. We came up with the idea about two people falling in love but being from different religious backgrounds. We choose this because we learnt that Muslims see it as wrong to marry out of the religion.

We then thought one way to show this difference would be to use a more contemporary bhangra and a more street bhangra. We split our group into half and started creating some motifs. After 4 lessons we have successfully created a story and planned out how to tell it though our dance and we are about half way through choreographing the steps. For our music we choose the song J’ai Ho and are considering mixing it with a more traditional Bollywood song later on. So far our dance looks great but we have stuck to simple moves and not been adventurous with the choreography so our aim for next week is to add more technically challenging moves.

On our last lesson of the week we all watched the latest Bollywood release ‘dabangg’. We were watching is specially to analyse the dance sections and to understand how Bollywood uses dance to enhance its movies and story lines. In this film the dance was used to add comedy and to show a relationship developing between two characters. We all saw that you very rarely see one person dancing alone and there are always large groups of dancers performing in unison.

This week was really interesting and I’m looking forward to continuing with this next week.