Movement Redefined

Opening your instagram, seeing a woman happily dance to a song, the next moment you open the comments and see men calling her names and saying "ye online aake mujra karna bandh karo" (stop doing this Mujra online). This is common right?  Whenever I see comments like thesee on videos of fellow dancers, being a dancer myself I cannot help but pause. Because the word "Mujra" carries weight. It carries misunderstanding. Using it as an insult to describe someone dancing freely is not just lazy, it shows how much the society still misunderstands dance and still fail to respect the art form.  Mujra has a long and complex history, a homework which most people do not do, before commenting hatred on the content of dancers online. Originally, the word Mujra, was never a bad one. It was a respected art form. Back during the Mughal times, dancers, often courtesans called them Tawaif  performed Mujra as a blend of classical dance, predominantly Kathak on ghazals, thumris and poet...

 People enjoy the story of an overnight genius, the person who walks in, does one move and suddenly the whole crowd says "what a natural". It is a pretty story to share at parties and gatherings but it is also lazy and honestly, harmful to the art one is pursuing. This is because, when we talk about natural talent in dance like it is some magical birth right, we erase every element that actually makes a good dancer, from those long 8 to 10 hours of practice, new blood clot in different places of the body everyday to the intolerable body ache.  Lets be real here; some people have a head-start. Maybe they were toddlers who loved music, or they grew up in a home where the family believed in art and culture. That helps. But it is not the same thing as being born with perfect turns, flawless musicality, or an immunity to bad technique. The moves you see on stage are not a gift a dancer unwraps one fine morning,  they are the result of training that teaches the body to do what ...

 Body image issues in dance classes are far more common that people realise, and they often reveal themselves in the most subtle ways. One will clearly notice it the minute a plus size dancer performs beautifully and someone says "wow she dances so well despite her weight", as if talent is supposed to belong only to a certain body type. The surprise people express is not really a compliment, it comes from a deep, ingrained bias that dancers must look slim, toned and must have an aesthetic figure to be a good dancer. If this discrimination never existed from the beginning, dancers today would feel comfortable wearing whatever they want to class, without worrying about whether their body "looks like it belongs" on the floor.  Yesterday I came across this reel where Karan Johar was giving an interview. He was talking about a new song from his movie where a plus sized dancer got featured and he praised him for her confidence and dancing skills. I rushed to the comments ...

 I recently got featured in an AR Rahman music video and post shoot, I shared this news with a few friends and some family members. The most common reply to this was "you dance so well, you should have been the lead, why did you say yes to being a background dancer?" I wanted to explain them how an artist cannot be that deluded to have their first break with Bosco Caesar.  Giving them the benefit of doubt, I thought this reply must have been out of concern about my career but somewhere this felt out like an unnecessary pointing out of a kind of injustice, that the dance community does not believe in. Somewhere, between their tone and their assumption, one thing got cleared to me; people have no idea what background dancers are actually expected to do, pre shoot and on the days of shoot.  Background dancers do not need the sympathy they receive. We as dancers voluntarily sign up to be one. People do not understand that background dancers don’t need sympathy at all. In fact...

You can be the best dancer in the room and still struggle to teach a beginner.  I say so because in the dance world, we often assume that great performers automatically become great teachers, but the truth is very different. Dancing and teaching needing two separate skill sets, and excellence in one clearly does not guarantee excellence in another. A good dancer is someone who has mastered their style, their technique and the pace in which they learn something. They may pick up choreography quickly and perform with ease. But teaching requires the ability to slow down and break down a choreography to smaller bits to make it easy for the student. It requires remembering what it felt like to be a beginner, entering a class with a clean slate, no vocabulary, and no muscle memory. Just as no kid is taught Permutation and Combination in the beginning of their education before numbers, similarly, a beginner dancer needs to be taught basics, like counts before jumping into a choreographed...

Here is silent crisis in the dance community today,  the widening skill gap created by replacing technique training with choreography copying. Students are learning faster than ever, but improving slower than ever. And it’s because class culture has shifted from training to simply replicating . Most dancers now enter class expecting a nice “Instagram-ready” choreography. They want steps that look cool, pick up fast and feel instantly performable. Technique drills? Foundations? Style vocabulary? “Too boring.” “Too tough.” “Too slow.” But ironically, those are the things that actually make you a better dancer. You will hear dancers complain, “My dancing isn’t improving,” while they avoid the very spaces that require patience and intentional practice. They pick classes based on songs, aesthetics and camera setups, not teachers who can actually help them grow. And choreographers who teach real technique; systematic warm-ups, conditioning, style fundamentals often struggle to get regi...

 Camera has become the biggest enemy of dancers today.  I have seen students in workshops just waiting for the moment where the choreographer says to go and grab their phone for smaller group showcases. From re applying lipstick to changing earrings to putting on lenses, I have seen people go an extra mile, not for a showcase, but, to dance in front of the camera.  This opinion does not have anything to do with how I prepare myself before a showcase. Even I go fix my hair, put a bandana in the left hip pocket of my jeans and rewatch myself on the mirror multiple times. But, when I go for a showcase, I make sure I have fun dancing, interact with the other 15 people in the class watching me and just have a good time, overall. Enjoying the experience is a must.  Actually I get it when students get a scolding when they immediately go back to their phone to check how they look in the video. A basic dancer etiquette one should abide by, if they want to call themselves a da...

A strange shift has happened in the dance world; the fortune of classes held now depends on Instagram algorithms. Recently, I was supposed to go to a class and was very excited to learn the routine. The routine was a little difficult but I was ready to challenge myself in the class. That afternoon, I suddenly got a message from the studio saying, "the class has been cancelled unfortunately, we will proceed with your refund".  I did not care about the refund, all I could think about the next few hours of getting that message was, how I missed out on learning the techniques. Those classes are not only my weekend getaway from the tedious professional life I have, but are also the blocks to building my career in dance as well. And, I am quite serious about that too.  I said okay with no further questions asked, but in my mind, I knew what exactly caused the class to get cancelled. The choreographer must not have got enough registrations for that class and studios is Mumbai usuall...

 Rolling Loud landing in India for the first time feels like the green signal of representation that Indian hip-hop culture always needed. When a festival this big arrives, it does not just sell music, it sells movement, identity and culture as a whole experience. A huge part of this marketing push has been through creators, especially dancers and choreographers who already shape how music virality online. First, the festival is clearly treating social media as its frontline. Rolling Loud India’s Instagram is filled with reels, teasers, countdown edits and announcement videos that are meant to be stitched, remixed and reposted; the exact ecosystem dancers thrive in. The official pages become the anchor, while creators push that content into their own circles, making the festival feel community-driven instead of top-down. Then there’s this experiential layer. Coverage of Rolling Loud India highlights lifestyle partners and dedicated spaces built around movement, street culture and...

 A few days ago, I was watching an interview of Alexander Noel where he said that his audience would point out that many of them would be scared of attending his classes because his routines looked very technical and difficult to perform.  On that, he said, when he is preparing a piece for the Ultimate Dance Week or for a professional two day intensive dance camp, the students who participate are professional dancers themselves and are there in the camp to up skill themselves. But when he is preparing a piece for his regular classes in studios or when he is doing a world tour, he keeps his choreographies a bit simpler, goes easy on the techniques. This is because there are many beginners and non dancers who attend his classes too. In order to make those students feel that even they belong there in the class, he keeps his pieces doable for everyone. According to him, no student should feel left out from the dance community.  This interview made me think about how independe...

  Dance is often seen as a world built on movement, discipline and artistic expression; but anyone who has spent a good time being a part of the dance community knows there is something much bigger at play. Dance cannot flourish because of the technique alone. It also flourishes because of the people you know, the partnerships and the communities dancers create around themselves.  One of my strongest beliefs is that dance never exists in isolation. A performance isn't just an eventful evening on stage filled with colourful lights, it is the result of collaborations with studios, costumer organizations, student groups, small business, sound engineers and the wider local community. All these network contribute to a single moment of art. Yes, on the stage, the dancers are the one who shine, but it is also the hard work put in by these networks to make those dancers shine on stage.  But, beyond helping just a programme night survive, these networks that are built also contrib...

Growing up, I have never had a room of my own. Adding to that, I was the first child, that too, a girl. Having a personal room was a far fetched dream back in 2003.  After shifting two different houses, when I turned 16, I finally got a room of my own. My dad never really had the intention of giving me a personal room before turning 20, but a guest room of the house was unoccupied, so I called dibs. He had to agree because I had already started preparing for boards and my dad would do anything to make sure his sleep wasn't disturbed. So, a win was a win.  There is something strangely honest about dancing in a small room. Four walls, a low ceiling, barely enough space to stretch your arms without hitting a cupboard, yet somehow these tight four walls teaches you more about movement than any huge studio ever could. I used to think limited space was a setback. Now I feel it forces a kind of raw creativity you only discover when the world shrinks around you. When you dance at hom...

Being a dancer for almost 15 years now, I have learnt that the stage an artist gets to perform at, is more than just a platform, it is more of a mirror that reflects the complicated power dynamics of our society. We often speak of dance being a universal language of expression but here is the truth; the system that governs who gets to perform, where and what, is deeply shaped by invisible forces like caste, gender, economic differences and access. It is high time that we pull back the curtain and see the reality.  Dance is an art form that demands time, space and gradual training over the years. For many forms, especially classical forms, training includes years of expensive classes, costumes and consistent rentals to studios for practice. These factors immediately brings in a class barrier. Putting it simply, if an artist's family cannot afford those years of investment and the high cost of living in a big city where most dance training institutions are situated, their path to pro...

 It is all fun and games to learn a choreographed piece and then perform it out. That is how the workshop culture has been expanding in India since 2021. Take the major metro cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore; all of a sudden choreographers started taking workshops on choreographed pieces and every class was housefull, completely sold out.  Instagram played a major role in uplifting these creators. Now, those creators are taking classes all over the world.  But what about those dancers who do not want to stick to learning pieces choreographed by others? What if they want to create something of their own and perform it out.  With workshop culture increasing, dancers are slowly forgetting to give importance to having a personal style. They are learning what is being taught. Spoonfeeding. And, art cannot survive with copy and paste.  And that’s where the conversation around having a personal style comes in, not in a moral, “you must do this” way, but in a very re...

  I have heard many people casually say "oh dance is just to have fun, it’s not that serious", but the reality says something else. When I was exposed to Kathak for the first time, I realised you just don’t learn physical movements but you also learn theory.   Kathak is as much about understanding as it is about performing. Every gesture, every hand movement and every glance has its own meaning. Take mudras for example, we call it the language of hands. Mudras are not just graceful hand movements, every mudra has a meaning which is derived from a living or non-living object existing in the world. From fish to a shell, to a dholak and Shivling, every word has a mudra for it. It does not end there, there are Asamyukta Hasta Mudras, which are performed by one hand only and Samyukta Hasta Mudras, performed by both hands. Both these categories can carry an entire story when performed.   But simply memorizing which mudra comes after what is not enough. To be precise, it is not ...

    Dance is a dying art. When an artform is misused in a way to extract likes, shares, comments and exclusive subscriber only content, it loses its authenticity. I see how people over Instagram call dancers horrible names, when all they have done is, dance.   Some people, both girls and guys take advantage of the whole situation. In the greed of going viral, they start revealing their body parts in the name of dance. Movements have become about aesthetics, not artistry. But at the end of the day, we are still part of a very patriarchal society, and when lines are crossed, it’s the women who face the social media hate, not the system constantly rewarding such behaviour.   The saddest part is how this constant chase for gaining quick fame overshadows real, raw talent. The dancers who have spent years training, learning musicality, technique, rhythm and discipline, end up getting sidelined by trends that come today and vanish tomorrow. When sensationalism gets attentio...

  Imagine this, a Sunday afternoon, your relatives have come to your house for lunch, followed by a family gathering where the youngest ones of the families are expected to be their free entertainers. Relatable much? As an artist, it is always a pleasure to be on stage, with all the limelight, performing. With every performance, the confidence the stage provides, makes an artist more grateful to the skill they have. But, the feeling isn’t the same always. “Beta, show us something na, or you feel shy to dance infront of us but not infront of the camera?” coming constantly from relatives feels like a taunt more than a eager urge to see our performance. What many people don’t realize is that performing is an emotional exchange, not a switch we can flick on and off whenever someone feels like being entertained. In my opinion, art demands energy, intention and a certain state of mind. When I am on stage, I am mentally prepared and aligned to my craft. But when someone out of nowhere as...