Designing the song and dance sequences: Exploring Bollywood's cinematic creativity

Indian love of dance is deeply cultural. Dance is embedded in India's folk music traditions and religion and the use of song and dance in Bollywood films is a natural extension of those recognised cultural forms and these factors have helped contribute to Bollywood's global successes. In 2012 Bollywood's global ticket sales exceeded that of Hollywood with 3.6 billion Bollywood tickets sold compared to Hollywood's 2.6 billion (Sardana 5). Bollywood/Hindi films stand apart from Hollywood films, as it generally utilises elements from multiple genres, which has been dubbed as the masala (spicy) genre of films (Ganti 2004; Kaur 2005; Dudrah 2006). Song and dance sequences feature as an integral part of the mainstream Bollywood films. Interviews with contemporary Bollywood directors and dance directors reveal unique creative practices that Bollywood filmmakers use during the collaborative production of films. These highly collaborative processes especially in terms of designing song and dance sequences are unique to Bollywood filmmaking and confirm the creative contributions of the dance directors, which is not a fully recognised position in western or Hollywood film awards (Simonton 2004a and 2004b).