Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema by Usha Iyer (review)

Abstract

In Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, Usha Iyer deconstructs the spectacle of the dancing body in Hindi cinema to reveal the industrial and material realities it conceals. Iyer’s project deviates from previous studies of Hindi cinematic songanddance, which have primarily focused on the ideological dimensions of these sequences. Instead, Iyer is more interested in the industry practices that, in her words, “[alert] us to questions of virtuosity, labor, and pleasure undergirding the production and reception of popular Hindi film dance.”1 Locating her study between the 1930s and 1990s, Iyer deploys the danceractress as an “analytical category” to explore the “construction of gender, stardom and spectacle” in dance sequences.2 Iyer decodes the star texts of various danceractresses, including those of Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, and Madhuri Dixit, to explicate the “social norms for female performance” that informed the reception of their dancing bodies and the ways in which these actresses sought to “challenge or subvert these through their movement vocabulary.”3 Iyer’s comprehensive and meticulous study is