Last week, London's new Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson made a pitch in support of the upcoming London Mela, a major festival celebrating British Asian arts and culture that some have called the "Asian Glastonbury." Speaking at the press launch for the festival, which will be held in early August, Johnson urged Londoners to "get on down" to the festival and "strut [their] funky stuff." He acknowledged that he had merely a "passing" acquaintance with bhangra and reminisced about his effort to learn some moves at a cousin's wedding in Delhi:
I was told you had to do "lightbulb lightbulb, motorbike motorbike." I practiced a great deal, and I had my kurta pajama, and my chappals, and my everything else, and I thought I looked absolutely tremendous. And everybody else turned up in a suit. [link]
Many Americans who tuned into Fox's hit reality show So You Think You Can Dance earlier this week got their first introduction to Bollywood when contestants Katee Shean and Joshua Allen danced to Dhoom Tana from the hit film Om Shanti Om.
Neither dancer had heard of Bollywood prior to meeting choreographer Nakul Dev Mahajan, who gave the couple their first lesson in mudras."The story is guy likes girl, girl plays hard to get, but eventually gives in," said Mahajan as he described the dance to the couple.
Check it out:
The performance apparently prompted loads of people to do a Google search of "so you think you can dance bollywood" - the search term was the 77th most popular, according to techdreams.
The routine also received rave reviews from the show's three judges. Judge and Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe seemed particularly pleased. "I've been trying to get [Bollywood] on this show for three years," he said.
Check out this great video of Suleman Mirza, a Michael Jackson impersonator who auditioned for the TV show Britain's Got Talent. Simon Cowell of American Idol is one of the judges. The real treat isn't Mirza's impersonation-- although that's plenty good--it's what comes afterward, in the form of a big, burly Sikh guy wielding a broom. And the crowd goes wild...
EnGendered 2008, a multi-disciplinary arts festival exploring the complex gender and sexual identities in South Asia was held recently at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. The three-day event presented by the Nayikas Dance Theater Company, was, in the words of founder Myna Mukherjee, “was a conversation between New Delhi and New York”. Through visual arts, performing arts, film and writing, EnGendered encouraged an open dialogue on gender identities and gender roles, the still taboo subject of sex, sexual choice and the intersections of all these with religion and ritual.
The visual arts exhibition Pardah, featuring artists from
India, Pakistan, Germany and the US, opened the festival. The works
exhibited included paintings, prints, photographs, digital art,
installations and the works of the traditional art form Mithila
painting.
The opening night titled Linga Sarita (Rivers of Gender)
explored the possibilities of interpreting and constructing gender
through neo-classical forms of dance, followed by a keynote plenary.
The backdrop for the evening was the cityscape of Manhattan seen
through the enormous glass wall of the Allen Room, and definitely a
world apart from the usual dark curtains or panels printed with
advertiser information, and at certain times of the year, a temple
shikhara (dome).
It was 4 p.m. on Sunday, and my family and I had just piled into a yellow cab outside Manhattan's Bryant Park. The 4-year-old twins and their parents were exhausted from a day of watching Indian entertainment, handrcarafts and more at the park. The cabbie who picked us up was a Bangladeshi and was full of questions about the event and the programming. He'd heard about what was going on and wanted to know more. We handed him a brochure and told him about all the India-related stuff going on in the city through Wednesday. The kids loved watching the folk dances, the Bollywood dancing (choreographed by the legendary Saroj Khan, who's the biggest dance choreographer in Mumbai) and seeing the huge, fake Taj Mahal. See the full lineup of events, Sept. 23-Sept 26. Photos below by Shaju John, freelance photojournalist - ask him for reprints, hi-resolution versions: shajujohn2005 at gmail.com.
The Sunday New York Times "Arts & Leisure" has a big inside spread about the rapper M.I.A., whose real name is Maya Arulpragasam. Her new album, "Kala" (named for her mother), comes out this week, following up on her 2005 debut, "Arular" (that album won over critics, but the paper says it only sold 129,000 copies). "An Itinerant Refugee in a Hip-Hop World," by Ben Sisario, starts out with the singer in her Brooklyn apartment.
MAYA ARULPRAGASAM’S Brooklyn apartment was a neglected mess when she
finally returned to it last month after six months abroad. But it took
only a day to straighten it up and turn it into her version of a
pied-à-terre, a makeshift multimedia headquarters. An audio mixing
board, film canisters and shiny gold and black dancing outfits stood on
one side of the apartment, and half of an uneaten papaya waited on a
table in the back.
Ms. Arulpragasam — better
known as the rapper M.I.A. — was in town for only about a week before
going on tour, and when asked when she would return to the apartment, a
spacious studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Caribbean and African
immigrant neighborhood, she shrugged. “I spent time finding that
couch,” she said, pointing to one of the few items of furniture, “and I
haven’t even sat in it.”
The piece goes on to explore her life and her politics.
“I’m just trying to build some sort of bridge,” she said of her work,
picking at a slice of Oreo cookie cake. “I’m trying to create a third
place, somewhere in between the developed world and the developing
world.” <snip>
Even in conversation M.I.A. leapfrogs the planet. Over a couple of hours she discussed an uncle who works for Amnesty International in Sri Lanka; described shooting a gun into the Baltimore sky on New
Year’s Eve with Blaqstarr, one of the producers on “Kala”; wondered
whether Nelson Mandela
deserves her respect as a good family man; and recounted a trip to
Liberia to help reintroduce former child soldiers into society. “I went
there just as a human being,” she said. “I wanted to see what a country
looks like after a war because I come from a place that has never seen
the end of it.”
These have not traditionally been blockbuster
topics in pop music, and along with M.I.A.’s unorthodox recording
choices, the bad track record of British rappers in the American market
and her intense if ambiguous political messages, they raise the
question of how much impact she can have on the mainstream.
Saturday's Wall Street Journal "Pursuits" section has an article on "Music's New Mating Ritual" by John Jurgensen (free for now, behind pay wall soon). It looks at genres that are getting fused these days, resulting in crypically named hybrids. Here's the opening paras:
Indie Hindi, socaton, skurban. You may feel like you need a dictionary the next time you go shopping for music.
The music world is getting thick with hybrids, or
cryptically named blends of established styles. Indie Hindi, for
example, is traditional Indian vocals tinged with edgy American-style
rock. Socaton is dance music that has elements of rap, calypso and
reggae. The number of genres is up more than 40% over the past four
years, by one measure -- Gracenote, which maintains the
music-classification system used by major sites like Yahoo and iTunes,
now recognizes more than 1,800 genres. It recently added "hyphy," a
jittery form of hip-hop from the San Francisco area.
It goes on to talk about Anoushka Shankar (that's Ravi Shankar's daughter and Norah Jones's half-sister) and her collaboration with superstar DJ Karsh Kale.
A new album from this sitar player and DJ Karsh Kale has Indian and electronic influences, a blend called "desi dance."
The album, "Breathing Underwater," drops Aug. 28. The article also talks about another desi genre.
Meanwhile, Falguni Shah, a classically trained Indian vocalist who
records under the name Falu, uses the term "indie Hindi" to describe
her New York band's sound. (Her producer coined the term.) [WSJ.com is offering its visitors a sample of Falu's "Dum Maro Dum."]
[Adding a China category to SAJAforum to occasionally track items about the country that, along with the U.S., has the most influence on South Asia as a whole.]
After Bollywood films, classical Indian dance has
caught the imagination of the Chinese, with a young woman actively
promoting Bharatnatyam among her compatriots, especially the tiny-tots.
For 33-year-old Jin Shan Shan, a Jawaharlal Nehru
University alumnus, it has always been a passion to become an exponent
of Bharatnatyam. She has established a school for Bharatnatyam here. [PTI photo of Jin and her daughter, Jessie.]
You may not know it, but there's a variation of the Sanjaya situation going on right now on U.S. TV. For all you South Asians who cringed as Sanjaya Malakar made it through the various rounds of "American Idol" on Fox (some of us, including my 4-year-old twins, liked seeing Sanjaya do his thing), it's cringing time again.
This time, it's not a singer of Indian descent, it's a dancer of Pakistani origin. Kashif Memon, who works at a sandwich shop and nurtures dreams of being a Bollywood star, is making waves on NBC's summer show, "America's Got Talent."
He had made it through two rounds already and last night performed in the semi-finals (he was in the top 10). We won't know if he made it into the top 5 via the results of the at-home voting till next Tuesday, July 24 (8 pm on East and West Coasts and 7 pm Central). But judging from the in-studio reaction, he struck a nerve. According to the show's site, here's what the judges had to say:
Kashif was hoping his performance could bring him closer to following
his dreams of being a Bollywood star. The audience danced to his
performance. Piers thought he had no talent to be on the show, Sharon
thinks that he was amazing, and David thought he had charisma.
[David, by the way, is David Hasselhoff, who is famous for "Knight Rider," "Baywatch" and jokes about his own poor-quality singing's popularity in Germany.]
What Memon lacks in talent (he makes Sanjaya look like Tony Bennett), he makes up for in sincereity. But when mainstream Americans watch him, are they laughing with him or at him?
Bring in a South Asian contestant who lacks talent and confidence. Keep
him/her on the show until the competition is close to the end. Then
dump him/her unceremoniously.
Last week, London's new Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson made a pitch in support of the upcoming London Mela, a major festival celebrating British Asian arts and culture that some have called the "Asian Glastonbury." Speaking at the press launch for the festival, which will be held in early August, Johnson urged Londoners to "get on down" to the festival and "strut [their] funky stuff." He acknowledged that he had merely a "passing" acquaintance with bhangra and reminisced about his effort to learn some moves at a cousin's wedding in Delhi:
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