Setting aside the traditional and more commonly known dance styles like Indian classical forms, Hip Hop and Contemporary, youngsters all over India are now experimenting with newer, lesser known dance styles that are, as a result, gaining popularity: Capoeira (Brazilian martial dance form), Thang ta (Manipuri martial form), Animation, Krump, Brazilian Zouk, Raqs Sharki... these are among several unusual forms of dance that are catching GenY’s fancy.
“I think nowadays people have a short attention span, and hence we are seeing an upsurge in what we call ‘modern dance styles’,” says Aanchal Gupta, founder and director at Arts in Motion Studios. “If you talk about ten years ago, the scene was something else. That was the time when dance was a discipline, taken seriously, and pursued with full dedication. Now, people have moved from pure dance to a more eclectic range of visual treats and I bump into many who are looking for newer, more exciting stuff that can challenge their body and mind, and utilise different muscles. They don’t want to be restricted to just one form and want to explore everything possible within their lifetime. Routine is monotonous for them. And why not The new era calls for new dance forms. We do, after all, live in a highly exposed world where every single thing — language, communication, mannerisms, worldview, etc. are constantly evolving. We no longer have dancers who have perfected or dedicated their lives to just one dance form, but dancers with multi-disciplinary credentials.
It’s been nearly half a century since American choreographer Yvonne Rainer announced the death of traditional dance values in her famously radical ‘No’ manifesto of 1965. And over the years, that very idea has questioned the ethos of dance with a wave of experiments, from minimalist works constructed out of ordinary pedestrian moves to multimedia dance theatre, deploying an eclectic sprawl of dance, gesture, text and props,” she adds.
In her studio, Aanchal offers modern styles like Bollybics, Broadway Jazz, Jazz Funk, Capoeira, and Aerial Silk. Talking about Aerial Silk in particular, she shares, “One of my programmes that is dedicated to aerial silk has many takers. It provides you with an eudemonic experience and has the salubrious air of yoga or anything that is healthy and clean. Though it may look difficult, it is easily done under the supervision of a trainer. It is a modern dance form that incorporates the use of hanging equipment or aerial apparatus. However, it is an incredibly demanding art form that requires a great degree of strength, power, flexibility, courage, and grace to master. Aerial dance shares a fundamental movement vocabulary with the circus arts, with high-flying acrobatic feats. Cirque du Soleil popularised the concept of aerial arts as a dance form and theatrical expression rather than a purely gymnastic form of movement. It has continued to evolve and is gaining national recognition as a fitness programme too.”
Another style that has been grabbing a lot of eyeballs among the young desi crowd in recent times is Krump, created 16 years ago by Ceasare laron Willis or ‘Tighteyex’. Television actor and dancer Shantanu Maheshwari, who recently attended a Krump workshop held in India by Tighteyex himself, shares that while it is heartening to see the rising interest in varied dance forms, there are always certain occupational hazards that need to be kept in mind. In context of Krump, he says, “As far as Krump is concerned, there are hardly any people in India who actually know the form well enough to be able to teach it. Tighteyex told us very specifically that you shouldn’t actually be taking any Krump classes unless the person who is teaching you has been in one of his workshops first. People tend to approach Krump with several misconceptions as well, sometimes — that it is an angry dance form that is meant to be done when you’re angry. And that is not the case at all. You tend to make angry faces while you do it because
it requires a lot of energy and a lot of strength. It’s like when you’re in the gym and going for a certain number of sets of something, but when you push yourself harder to go beyond that number, the level of your aggression goes up and it shows in the expressions you make. Dance in general is about storytelling too, and this applies to Krump as well. I knew some of this before I attended the Tighteyex workshop, but not in so much depth and I’m sure there are many like me who didn’t know either.”
Myra Fernandes, a Delhi University student who has taken to Raqs Sharki, or belly dancing as her form of choice, points out that a lot of this newfound interest in dance styles off the beaten track has also been around on the Internet for some time — something that isn’t necessarily a good thing when it comes to being able to discern the real thing from intelligent imitations. “Take belly dancing, for example. I watched so many videos online a month ago when I found myself getting interested in the form but now that I’ve actually joined classes in person, I’m having to unlearn a lot of what I thought I had learnt in advance! My love for belly dancing comes from the mystery that hovers around the intricate hip movements, and I now know that everything rests on technique and muscle memory if you taught yourself the wrong technique and gave yourself the wrong muscle memory in the hands of the wrong people, the road to learning something new just got harder for you than you can imagine,” she affirms.
Shantanu agrees and adds, “Here in India, a lot of the time the focus tends to be on the choreography more than the form. Also, those who really know how to teach a form charge a lot more than those who don’t know as much. And the normal tendency is to learn what one of them is teaching for a lower fee so that even if you don’t learn all the right things about a particular form, you’ll at least learn a few. Also, many people who’ve just started dancing six months to a year back begin taking workshops, and people attend them as well, which is something they really shouldn’t be doing.”
