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Music makes you lose control
Mumbai finds its dancing feet with the Mumbai Mirror Dance Camp
Joeanna Rebello
A little more than a month ago, Mumbai Mirror promised to help Mumbai find its dancing feet. Last evening, we saw proof that the city not only found its feet over the last few weeks, it also kicked up one hell of a storm. Inside St. Andrew's Auditorium, 15 amateurs dance groups - from five hubs across the city - twirled and twisted, leapt and dived, to the rhythms of salsa, hip hop and Bollywood music. This was the culminating performance of the Mumbai Mirror Dance Camp with Terence Lewis. It took 15 groups, 12 preparatory classes, and an hour-and-a-half to keep a packed house on the edge of their seats.
As each group stepped out of the dark to a tune, extended families in the audience began to holler and root for daughters, sons, wives and husbands on stage. It took dancers of all kinds - fat, scrawny, short, tall - to make up each troupe, and every dancer danced with absolute abandon, surely acquiring a personality far removed from their ordinary.
They were all in character, in their street-style rags, or their slim salsa skirts and rosettes, or their Bollywood-inspired ensembles. There were tinsel flags, hair extensions, body suits, sequinned shirts - there was everything a professional dance group would have assembled for a show. Each act lasted no longer than two-and-a-half minutes, but it was enough for the dancers to make an impression, especially on chief guests Kim Jagtiani, Shiney Ahuja and Jimmy Felix and Sangeet Haldipur, the boys from Asma.
Just before the closing, if only to give the uninitiated a sample of a style called contemporary dance (his hallmark), Terence announced, "This one's for Sarojji," and his troupe rode the boards in a cracking display of plasticity and imagination. "I am so proud of what they've achieved," Terence says of the Camp. "I believe everybody can dance, and this camp was only a lesson in discovering one's innate motion." The sequences, choreographed by Terence, together with his instructors, swore to the democracy of dance, as a constant flux swirled everybody around, so all got their brief moment in the sun. Terence also gave the groups a mandate - remember, this was a competition - no one was to spend over Rs. 300 on costumes. He pointed them in the direction of markets they could buy their gauze and lycra, their beads and buckles, and the groups got aunts and grannies and cornershop tailors to sew flashy ensembles.
We'll wager anything that there will be popular demand for the Camp to reopen next summer…
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
