This Is How We Dance Now! Performance in the Age of Bollywood and Reality Shows by Pallabi Chakravorty is a dizzying read in its wide swath of competitive dance on television and a world beyond the frame of the screen. It is the first ethnography of dance reality shows in post-liberalized India, and an in-depth study of sites often considered unworthy of scholarly and artistic attention. Much of the scholarship on Indian dance in last few decades has focused on one of the eight Indian classical dance forms with some recent work on contemporary dance. And, while Indian cinema has been a rich source of scholarly works, studies at the intersection of Indian dance and television are exceedingly rarefied. Chakravorty seeks to address this shortfall in her newest book.

According to Chakravorty, the established dance categories in India of “classical,” “folk,” “tribal,” and “filmy” are dissolving (2). As these forms cross-pollinate onscreen, and Bollywood aesthetics dominate much of Indian popular culture, the dance reality show has emerged in recent years as a rich locus of study. The author's fieldwork focusing on dancers and choreographers in Mumbai and Kolkata provides a wide range of perspectives, shedding light on these artists’ desires both on- and off-screen. Using “remix” as a theoretical lens and even as a methodology, Chakravorty attends to issues of desire, subjectivity, embodiment, modernity, and social mobility (9). Established codes of affect originally tethered to bhakti and sufi mythopoetic love have been “remixed” as consumerist desire expressed through sexualized bodies on-screen (103). Remix is many things: it is dance practice, an aesthetic, and even an emotional aspiration tied to domestic and marginal spaces “that creates a cosmopolitan hybrid identity” (138). Bringing together dancing bodies and screen bodies in a single study is an ambitious goal, and Chakravorty is ultimately successful in her analysis of these structural and cultural shifts within the context of a neoliberal India.

In the first half of the book, Chakravorty sets up important premises for her layered argument and begins with interdisciplinary insight into how desire, emotion, and subjectivity have been theorized in the context of screen dance. From Tagore to Hegel, Freud to Judith Butler, and Marx to Zizek, Chakravorty expertly crosses philosophical traditions, as well as geographical and disciplinary divides, and examines Indian dance reality shows and the ways their performers negotiate the gaze, fetishism, media embodiment, and sensory excess (9). Navigating “Eastern” and “Western” schools of thought, the author provides a critical backdrop for how lived experience interfaces in the technology-driven visual and sensory culture of India, especially in the context of Bombay cinema (now referred to as “Bollywood”). Challenging Euro-American framings of subjectivity and the body, Chakravorty aligns with some recent South Asian scholarship that seeks to use indigenous terms (in Sanskrit and Urdu) as theoretical tools rather than adopting ill-fitting English translations. She also marks how Indian film dance has been Indianized with a focus on tala (rhythm) and laya (tempo) as opposed to choreographic “space,” which has markedly been a more Western preoccupation. The images depicting these dances, dancers, and dance spaces are well-researched and add an essential dimension to the book. The author also historicizes how erotic desire has been articulated in early Bombay cinema and has congealed around Bollywood cinema, along with a corresponding rise of media technology since the 1990s. The vamp/virgin binary has been replaced by its more modern counterpart since the mid-1990s, and now the onscreen female dancing body is awash in consumerism, luxury, cosmopolitanism, and consumption.

In the second half of the book, with the deft hand and keen eye of an anthropologist, Chakravorty returns to the dancing body and the often liminal spaces beyond the screen, reflecting a phenomenological turn in Dance Studies and social theory that arose in the mid-1990s (a response, the author notes, to postmodern indeterminacy). Chakravorty refers to her own embodiment of classical Kathak training in her study of the dancing body onscreen as it is “transformed into a sign, a certain kind of packaging of cosmopolitan hybrid inspired by the images represented in song and dance sequences of Bollywood films” (109). She suggests this onscreen body is distinct from earlier Indian dancing bodies constructed within the guru-shishya parampara (the traditional student–teacher relationship) and the aesthetics of bhava rasa (emotions performed into affect) (109). Chakravorty writes,

Instead, bodies mediated through India's popular screens are interested in upward mobility; regional and national dance reality shows such as Dance India Dance and Dance Dhum Machale are, for many, a way to become “someone.” Dancers and choreographers are eclectic and navigate between various styles of dance, such as hip hop, Latin, ballroom, African, Kathak, jazz, folk, and Bollywood. The intense choreography of bodies and cameras helps the reader understand just how intricate and labor-intensive the production of the dancing body onscreen body needs to be. By attending to the processual, the author gives us a better understanding of how a simple shot of wrists adorned with bangles may take days of choreography, blocking, shooting, and editing. The first-person narratives of dancers and choreographers provide the reader with a wide array of subject positions that illustrate a diversity of class positions, religions, and genders, as well as a corresponding depth of aspirational choices. The flexibility and unpredictability of their lives is daunting to behold and challenging even to the author who must constantly navigate the movement in and around the myriad dance spaces of her study.

In the final chapter, Chakravorty pulls back from ethnographic detail and reminds us of the polarizing debates around liberalization in India, connecting these shows to wider issues around women's bodies in the context of branding, consumerism, and the transgressive spaces that challenge middle class morality. By connecting current critiques of “tastelessness” to age-old ones around auchitya and women's bodies within classical Indian dance and Indian cinema, Chakravorty's work gives us new insight into dance that goes beyond tired binaries of “traditional” and “modern.” Her work on gender roles and the “item boy” is especially welcome as it contributes to an ongoing conversation around fluid gender roles in Indian dance. Item girls and item boys used to be the performers of sexual excess in song and dance sequences. As Chakravorty discusses, recent Bollywood cinema merges the role of the item boy or girl into the role of the main protagonist, allowing for a cosmopolitan identity that is both global and Indian (95–96). Finally, Chakravorty reminds us of the irony of the market: “The same commercialism, opportunism and manipulation of dance reality shows and Bollywood dance that were undoubtedly tied to the seductive world of Bollywood culture, consumerism, media, and youth, had aided in a kind of gender and class liberation in India” (190). However, she questions whether liberation tied to Bollywood hegemony is, in fact, liberation, rendering the lens of “remix” even more enticing as a possibility of “improvisation and subversion” (190).

Chakravorty is a widely published and respected scholar of Indian dance, and her latest book is a welcome addition to dance studies. Her ethnography is useful to dance and performance studies and beyond, and builds on the work of South Asian scholars such as Rupal Oza (The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender and the Paradoxes of Globalization, Reference Oza2006) and Tejaswani Ganti (Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, 2004), as she locates Bollywood within the context of emergent cultural practices in neoliberal India. Due in large part to her experience as a scholar-practitioner, Chakravorty's well-crafted book makes for a compelling read. The sweaty dance spaces full of deep desires for fame and upward mobility are palpably generative sites for readers interested in dance, media, anthropology, visual culture, sociology, women and gender studies, and South Asia studies.