Dancing Women

<em>Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema</em> an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender sexuality stardom and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses their publicly performed movements private training and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies the book considers the women's question via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie Sadhona Bose Vyjayanthimala Helen Waheeda Rehman Madhuri Dixit and Saroj Khan whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women including <em>devadasis</em> and <em>tawaifs</em> Eurasian actresses oriental dancers vamps choreographers and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration such as the choreomusicking body and dance musicalization aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the <em>Natya Sastra</em> and the <em>Abhinaya Darpana</em> and formal analyses of cine-choreographic techno-spectacles <em>Dancing</em> <em>Women</em> offers a variegated textured history of cinema dance and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.<br>