Akademi was founded in 1979 to promote the understanding of South Asian dance in Britain, and in Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance, an event curated by writer and ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom, the organisation leads us into some of the art form’s more secretive byways.
Natalia Hildner opens the evening with a traditional mujra dance. Her performance, delicately lyrical in its interplay of gaze and gesture, reproduces those of the courtesans of the Mughal era, who danced to ghazals (love poems) for princes and nawabs. Mujra dancers were highly valued for their classical kathak dance skills but were considered unmarriable. Moralistic legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century further marginalised them, forcing many into prostitution.
The mujra style survived in the performances of Mumbai’s bar dancers. Their more overtly sexualised form of mujra, danced not to ghazals but to Hindi film songs, is demonstrated by dancer and choreographer Emiko Ishii. Her moves are much raunchier than those of the Mughal-era courtesans, but no less elaborate or choreographically sophisticated. In 2005, bar dancing was banned, as mujra dancing had been a century earlier.
Far from dying out, the style found new champions. Today, middle-class Indian housewives take mujra classes, and private and often steamy performances take place behind closed doors. The idiom has also been adopted by cross-dressed male performers, and it’s with their appearance that the Akademi evening takes a truly exotic turn.
Leela Ek Paheli is a drag performer who dances to bubblegum Hindi film hits, channelling Bollywood female megastars such as Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. It’s a high camp performance, capturing Sridevi’s goo-goo-eyed voluptuousness with particularly lethal precision, but it’s also technical dancing of a very high order. Asifa Lahore, Britain’s first out Muslim drag queen, is as dazzling as she is outrageous, tripping on to the stage in a burqa before delivering a smouldering song medley in a cocktail frock (“Make me cook, make me clean, Asian men are so mean…”).
But it’s Raheem Mir who’s the evening’s brightest star. Performing a classic mujra dance from the film Umrao Jaan, set in 19th-century Lucknow, Mir becomes both the film’s eponymous heroine and the actress (Rekha) who embodies her. With its sliding glances, subtly suggestive carriage of head and neck, and liquid arms and wrists, Mir’s performance is gesture-perfect. In its gender aspects, and as a marginalised dance form, it’s also doubly subversive. Much food for reflection here. A fascinating detour.
