Tribute to Bollywood premieres at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park

Scene from Bollywood Boulevard: A Journey through Hindi Cinema
with Proma Khosla (left), Manav Gulati (center) and Pranav Patel (right)
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Bollywood came into my life after an injury left me unable to do much more than prop up my wrenched body in a somewhat less painful way and watch Netflix. I started mainlining as much Shah Rukh Khan as I could find, first intrigued by a news story about the Indian superstar's repeated detentions by immigration authorities at U.S. airports. (“Yes, it always happens. Whenever I start feeling arrogant about myself, I always take a trip to America,” he joked.) And I stuck with Bollywood not only for its charming, multi-talented "King Khan" but also out of helpless fascination with a form of entertainment that gave everything you could possibly ask for...and gave some more...and then some.

A storyline long enough--often up to three hours with an announced intermission!--and twisty enough you get lost in it and forget your troubles. Everything from slapstick and farce to tragedy, rollercoaster romance to action/adventure. Insight into social realities of family, friendship, class and religious conflicts, traditional values vs. modern desires, women's empowerment--check out the great Chak De! in which Khan coaches a women's national field-hockey team--and more. And big, fanciful music and dance production numbers to rival Hollywood, Broadway, MTV and YouTube combined. Most if not all of this often in a single film! I learned early to not fight the thing, just kick back and let Bollywood work its magic. I am grateful to Netflix and Bollywood for my healing.

To a lesser degree, I'm grateful to Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors for last night's celebration of Bollywood history, tradition and personalities--Bollywood Boulevard: A Journey Through Hindi Cinema--a world premiere presentation at Damrosch Park Bandshell. It was a lovely night with, thankfully, just a half-hearted sprinkling of New York summer rain. Produced by Heena Patel and Rushi Vakil and choreographed by Rohit Gijare, the 90-minute show briskly surveyed Bollywood music hits, dance styles and iconic performers through several decades of development. It was exuberantly performed, colorful and entertaining-- wonderfully nostalgic too, I'm sure, for audience members of the Indian diaspora.

For non-Indian and relative newbie fans like myself, though, too much breezed by (for example, the names of individual songs and films briefly posted in the upper left corner of the video screen, referring to--I could not tell--either the previous song or the one just starting). The tribute to identified "game-changers" like A. R. Rahman, Bappi Lahiri and the trio of Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy sent me right to Google this morning to find out more about these gentlemen whose images appeared behind the stage as their songs, varying in style, were played and sung. Aside from feeling a bit swept away by all of this stimuli and its pace--not an uncommon thing with Bollywood--I enjoyed the dancers, musicians and vocalists and surrendered to the condition of just not having enough information at hand. I think LCOOD is often like that, and we all have fun with it anyway.

On Tuesday, regrettably, I had missed India’s Identities through Bollywood Cinema: How Bollywood Sees Us, the festival's panel tracing Bollywood's role in "uniting people from different religious, ethnic, linguistic, economic, and class backgrounds," its "multitude of voices." But I will try to make up for it on my own, in coming weeks, with a dedicated new round of Netflix research.

Dancers:

Aliyaa Islam, Aria Dandawate, Avinash Gabbeta, Barkha Patel, Bindi Patel, Geatali Tampy, Heena Patel, Manav Gulati, Minal Mehta, Payal Kadakia, Poonam Desai, Pranav Patel, Proma Khosla, Rhea Ghosh, Rohit Gijare, Rohit Thakre, Sean Kulsum

Musicians:

Achal Murthy (bass), Varun Das (drumkit), Niranjan Nayar (guitar), Rohan Prabhudesai (keyboard), Sanjoy Karmakar (percussion), Harini (Rini) Raghavan (violin)

Vocalists:

Harini (Rini) Raghavan, Harshitha Krishnan, Krishna Sridharan, Neel Nadkarni

Bollywood Boulevard: A Journey Through Hindi Cinema has concluded, but you will find a world of interesting, free events at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, now through August 13 (OMG, Bonnie Raitt!!!), by clicking here.

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Brazil's passinho dancers in US debut at LC Out of Doors

A Batalha do Passinho dancers
Below: Batalha host Zuzuka Poderosa
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

When New York's summer weather cooperates, as it certainly did last evening, Lincoln Center Out of Doors can be a great way to soak up and savor the positive energy of arts from nearly everywhere in our world. Last night's show brought an organized group of performers of passinho, the Rio de Janeiro party dance, in their US debut together with Rennie Harris Puremovement, the celebrated Philly troupe that revolutionized a sophisticated blending of hip-hop moves with more conventional dance theater techniques and aesthetics.

Three luminaries of New York's urban and contemporary dance scene
served as the passinho battle's judges.
Left to right: Rokafella, Akim Funk Buddha and Doug Elkins
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A Batalha do Passinho dancers (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The showcase was created in 2011 by co-artistic director Julio Ludemir
after this Rio favela dance trend went viral on YouTube.

Opening the two-hour show, the Brazilians burst on the stage with a rawness and sense of adventure and fun that would be hard to top. Rapidfire twisting of their feet made their bent legs look like massive, lethal grinders. The daunting contortions of flexing and bone breaking, the smooth illusions of moonwalking, b-boying acrobatics, Cossack folkdance and even voguing all flow through passinho, offered in a spirit of good-natured competitiveness. The batalha (battle) format of the Brazilian presentation, facilitated by the merry host, Zuzuka Poderosa, gave the Lincoln Center audience an active investment in the proceedings as we watched closely to make distinctions between the competitors' styles and specialties.

Marcelly Miss Passista,
champion of the Lincoln Center batalha
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Brazilian dancers trained our eyes for a kind of reckless derring-do that seem combed out of the silky, glamorously sexy Puremovement with Harris's oddly safe, placid approach to arranging dancers across a stage--line them up, slide the frontal lines side to side. It's funny to come away feeling that I would have preferred to see Puremovement "where they belong now"--in formal, and well-managed, indoor staging. Put a frame around them.

The interesting encounter and dialogue of troupes that could have been did not pan out. Maybe next time both crews could be tossed together in a residency to experiment and cook up something surprising.

New York knows and loves Rennie Harris's endless seductions, the way his dancers' bodies bounce like rubber against air as if it were a hard surface; the way they float inside and around the edges of music's rhythms, each body addressing multiple, discrete segments of time in individual ways even when everyone's working the same moves. Puremovement demonstrates the basic silliness of trying to make dance where everyone looks exactly like everyone else, where visual homogeneity is privileged. Everything offered up is going to be a little different, according to who gives it, and that's a fine, instructive thing.

*****

There's much more to come from the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival, running through through August 10--all programs absolutely free. Click here for a schedule of events including tomorrow's 1pm Family Day dance class with dancers from A Batalha do Passinho!

Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Damrosch Park Bandshell, Lincoln Center
West 62nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, Manhattan
(map/directions)