Most demonstrations of Indian dance in Western outlets, whether an ice dance program or a routine on So You Think You Can Dance, is termed Bollywood, drawing its inspiration from the somewhat hybridized style of movement presented in the lavish dance sequences from that world of film. The best beginner's guide to Bollywood dance, complete with image and video, may come from BBC. Also worth consulting is this excellent brief history of Bollywood dance, from its earlier days rooted in classical Indian styles to later influences from Western popular dance. Movement is thoroughly explored here, but perhaps the central point worth noting is the foundation of Indian dance upon gesture. While this specific characteristic can mark out the style and make it perhaps rather subject to mimicry, the import of each gesture is great and thus Western dancers -- and ice dance teams -- have more often than not taken an effort to learn from teachers of the style.
The most famous take on Bollywood on ice, of course, belongs to Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who were well-placed to make a big splash with their interpretation. The team and coach/choreographer Marina Zoueva worked with a former professional dancer in an effort to understand and faithfully reproduce the dance's arm and body movements to the ice, while also paying mind to relative authenticity in costuming:
The program's callbacks to its source material are many. Davis's pose at 3:36 is quite explicitly a reference to the image of the Nataraj. Gesture and shape are utilized throughout the dance, including in element work, and take note as well of the head and neck movements at 0:56-0:58, 1:28, and 1:53, and the body positions at 1:13-1:15 and 3:02-3:05, which harken to traditional bharatanatyam's demi-plie in first position, as discussed in the above article.
But as a comparative note, it is worth taking a look at the original dance sequences from which the music for Davis and White's program was drawn: Kajra Re, Silsila Ye Chaahat Ka, and the purest of the dance numbers, Dola Re Dola:
Strongly-choreographed as their effort is, though, Davis and White were not the only or even first team to explore the possibilities of Bollywood and traditional Indian dance movement on the ice. In a twist of fate, in the same season in which Davis and White's original dance appeared, the novice team of Madeline Heritage and Nathaniel Fast also competed a Bollywood program using one of the same music cuts:
The team's opening pose, primarily Heritage's position, is its own take of sorts on the Nataraj, which they immediately follow with several quick side-by-side steps and a twizzle and glide into the demi-plie position. Despite the requirements of the free dance, nods to Bollywood are continued in their subsequent footwork, including the knee bends at 1:19 and 1:20 and dynamic arm positions from 1:31-1:34, and carried through the entrance and interstitial steps in their twizzles at 1:40 and the arms in the second spin position at 3:07, leading into a return to some side-by-side dance work. Heritage's lift positions, too, also reflect snapshots taken from Indian dance. Although imperfectly executed, the team's free dance can rival Davis and White's OD as the most consistently carried-through attempt at reproducing Bollywood movement on ice.
Of course, despite the nods made by both teams in some steps and positioning, the lower body components of the original Bollywood examples -- the hip motion and isolations, the light and swift-moving footwork, the weight-shifting -- are, like genres previously explored along the lines of hip hop and modern, not easily translatable to ice. But what most marks out Bollywood dance -- and most challenges its interpretation in a competitive ice dance program -- is its scope and scale. The Bollywood dance sequence is not created to be much less than spectacle, a feat rather difficult to replicate by two parties in a brightly-lit but sparsely-accoutred ice rink.
But presenting its own challenges is classical Indian dance, of which bharatanatyam might be the most well-known example, as well as that style which informs Aldridge and Eaton's approach. While bharatanatyam is too comprised in large part of gesture, it is equally reliant on footwork. The building block of the bharatanatyman is, in fact, the adavu, a combination of hand, leg, and overall body movements. While some attempt might, again, be made to nod to these postures when choreographically permissible, it is again down more to the mudras, or hand gestures, to suggest traditional Indian movement in a program. An exceptionally thorough index of gestures, including photos, is linked through this page, while this video also offers a detailed rundown.
Maureen Ibanez and Neil Brown's 2007-08 original dance, set to the Bollywood number "Bole Chudiyan," is dominated more often than not by a fairly standard approach to the elements, but a number of choreographic touches do work to establish almost something more in line with a classical Indian approach than the flashier, bouncier Bollywood of the other dances:
Take, as one example, their opening sequence from 0:35-0:46 and compare with this invocatory bharatanatyman performance from Savitha Sastry:
Another, somewhat less faithful go at classical dance, also set to a Bollywood cut, was delivered in the same season by Zoe Blanc and Pierre-Loup Bouquet, adorned in rather less traditional costuming than the other examples offered here. While their opening sequence, too, points to the source genre with the gesture work, the overall movement and choreography is more ice-based than otherwise. The team works in their Indian movement primarily through occasional returns to gesture, such as the transition from the in-hold sequence moving into the no-touch step sequence at 1:55, creating a kind of patchwork of Indian-inspired dance and standard elements. But the gestures, though not especially well-articulated, can be traced to the mudras, such as Blanc's hamsasya while in lift at 2:49 and again in end pose.
While an attempt to reproduce similar gestures and body movements is clear in these more traditionally-inspired programs, one additional component is both quite evident in her performance and quite clearly absent in general from its on-ice counterparts: the use of eye movement, another layer of meaning in classical dance that may be of fairly minor consequence to a judging panel more concerned with larger and more skating-bound detail as well as simply difficult to carry through while executing elements and constant on-ice motion -- though a little nod is offered, as noted by commentators Tom Hammond and Tracy Wilson, in the opening moments of Davis and White's original dance.
One last, rather loose take on the concept of the Indian dance or Bollywood program may come from Lynn Kriengkrairut and Logan Giulietti-Schmitt, who in 2009-10 skated their free dance to selections from the Slumdog Millionaire score. The team focused their movement efforts almost exclusively in the lyrical vein -- yet they still opt to include a few gestural moments at midpoint:
In wrapping this look at Bollywood and bharatanatyam, it's important to note a certain irony of bringing either genre to a coupled-dance discipline: for as much a cornerstone as dance is of the Bollywood film, dance sequences between only a hero and heroine are infrequent or less dance-intensive than group sequences; classical dance, meanwhile, is traditionally a solo art. So ice dance by its nature, then, might be challenged by more than physics to most faithfully replicate its source matter -- but the most faithful efforts can also reveal the surprising possibilities for its on-ice recreation.
