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Chapter 2 develops a body-space-movement framework that studies the spaces of dance, the movement vocabularies used, and the resulting construction of star bodies. This framework uncovers the production processes behind the fetishized space of the Hindi film cabaret, an “architecture of public intimacy,” whose spatial and choreographic operations arouse intense sensorial stimulation. Through a focus on cabaret numbers featuring the dancing star Helen, this chapter discusses the cine-choreographic practices that produce a collision of infrastructures, bodies, and spaces. The body-space-movement framework is also employed to analyze film dance in relation to Indian “classical” and “folk” dance forms. Borrowing from Indian performance treatises like the Natya Shastra and Abhinaya Darpana, this chapter deconstructs the dancing female body into three broad zones—the face, the torso, and the limbs—each of which is capable of a variety of addresses depending on the social connotations of those gestural articulations at certain historical moments.

Chapter 4 focuses on two Bharatanatyam-trained stars in the 1950s and 1960s, Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, analyzing changes in film dance alongside the canonization of specific classical and folk dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. By studying how dance training influences acting repertoires, this chapter calls attention to movement, gesture, and bodily comportment to enhance our understanding of virtuosity and technique, proposing a movement-based analysis of film acting grounded in kinesthetic performance and spectatorship. Rehman and Vyjayanthimala’s most ambitious production numbers speak to their own performative desires as trained dancers. Films featuring these A-list actresses as dancing protagonists evince a generic tendency, described here as the “melodrama of dance reform,” which combines the dance spectacular with the “social problem” film, producing in the process cinematic figurations riven with anxieties and aspirations around female sexuality, bodily movement, and economic independence.

This essay recounts and analyzes the Post Natyam Collective’s process of creating the contemporary abhinaya work, “rapture/rupture.” Working in a feedback loop between theory and practice, it researched ways to denaturalize Indian classical kathak’s script of idealized femininity to facilitate fluid, diverse possibilities for performing gender and cultural belonging in South Asian aesthetic contexts. “Rapture/rupture” produces a dancing subject whose ethnic mismatch, hybrid movement vocabulary, gender nonconformity, and same-sex love across cultural difference exceed the boundaries of a kathak discourse that calls for purist notions of culture, race, nation, religion, and femininity. In theoretically analyzing how gender, cultural belonging, and desire are conceptualized through abhinaya, postmodern dance, US identity politics, and poststructuralist critiques of identity, it argues that embracing lack—being “not enough”—is a mode of exceeding dominant boundaries that enables a multilayered, intersectional dance-making practice that queers gender, queers cultural belonging, and embodies queer female desire.