Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to Tik Tok

Abstract

Rabindra Nritya, and Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian dance forms (109), thereby illustrating the cultural exchange that marked the 1930s in India. Bose was also simultaneously the dancer, set and costume designer, and primary actor and choreographer, thus exemplifying the multiple factors at work in the production of film dances. Next, a study of Madhuri Dixit’s dance movements in chapter 5 becomes key not only in revealing how the identities of the “coy heroine” and the “brazen vamp” (24) were consolidated in the 1990s, but also in foregrounding the expertise of the choreographer and the collaborative experiments between the dancer and choreographer that were crucial to emerging dance techniques in the 1990s. In conclusion, Iyer’s focus on the corporeal, gestural, and visceral repertoires of dance successfully studies film in relation to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, other performing cultures such as music and designing, and multiple material and aesthetic practices. In today’s India, where Hindu fundamentalism lies at the crux of the decolonized historical narrative, works like Iyer’s benefit readers across the disciplines of performance studies, dance studies, postcolonial criticism, and film studies. Dancing Women focuses on the interconnection of multiple aesthetic, material and corporeal histories in the production of India’s popular culture, Bollywood.