The presentation will deal with the crucial role played by dance and dancers in Bollywood films and forms of regional Indian cinema(s). Special attention will be paid to the dancers, masters and musicians who belong to the hereditary communities of artists performing in temples, at courts and in the setting of the salon (known in South India under the generic terms devadāsī, rājadāsī and naṭṭuvaṉār) and acted, choreographed and sang for these movies, making them highly successful. The lecture will also focus on the speaker’s Bharat Natyam dance master, the late naṭṭuvaṉār V.S. Muthuswamy Pillai, who worked for the cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, trained quite a number of dancers and film actresses, and choreographed several items performed by them in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi movies. Interestingly, some members of the hereditary communities of performing artists found in the cinema a way to continue practicing their profession, which had been taken away from them by other communities after the application of the 1947 Devadasi Act. Stigmatized and criminalized by this law, for a short time they found some kind of patronage in the cinema, though this was not devoid of ambiguity.

Dr. Tiziana Leucci is a senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, and attached to its Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud. Her Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) dealt with the culture of South Indian courtesans. Dr. Leucci also studied ballet and contemporary dance at the National Academy of Dance in Rome and Indian dance (Bharat Natyam and Odissi) in India. She has authored a book and numerous chapters and articles on the anthropology and history of dance in South India and on the European perception and representation of Indian courtesans. Her further research interests are the history of the interaction between Indian and Western artists, and the anthropology of aesthetic theories and Indian choreographic practices, especially in terms of their transformations in the colonial period and on the modern stage. Since 2010, Dr. Leucci teaches Bharat Natyam at the Conservatoire “Gabriel Fauré”, Les Lilas – Est Ensemble (France).