Bollywood: a cross-disciplinary study (MUST20007)

Indian commercial cinema, affectionately if ignorantly called 'Bollywood' by the West, typically produces extraordinary spectacles of colour, music and dance, whether telling stories of comedy or drama. This subject explores Bollywood film and dance through a blended learning model, with contact hours comprising viewing of films and online lectures with embodied learning through practical rehearsal and performance of Bollywood style dance pieces. Lectures will analyse the ‘rasas’ (or rules) that guide the storytelling in film, and their basis on nine key emotional states. Students will combine this critical understanding with their experience of learning Bollywood dance to undertake a practical creative task. Film screenings will be provided in a cinema and students are strongly advised to attend these to experience them as a community, as is traditional, though they may choose to view them in their own time. The subject objectives are two-fold: to learn about the world’s largest film industry, ‘Bollywood’, through an in-depth study of some of its outstanding examples and to explore and understand the efficacy and inter-relatedness of different ways of learning (critical/analytical, creative practice, embodied knowledge and critical self-reflection).