Sinlung /
09 December 2010

The Man Who Invented Bollywood Dance

By Aarthi Gunnupuri

India is playing host to Bill Clinton and the sleepy town of Lucknow is a stop over.
On the menu is the finest Awadhi cuisine and the best dancer India can find to entertain a former U.S. President.

After the performance, Clinton says to the lead choreographer and dancer, “The world must see you!”

Shiamak Davar is a dancer-choreographer-entrepreneur-philanthropist. His schedule is packed through the year with staged live performances at power-packed places like the World Economic Forum at Davos, Indo-Tokyo Friendship Week in Japan, and this year's Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

In fact the Government of India summons Shiamak Davar from Mumbai pretty much every time they need to showcase the best of emerging India's contemporary culture.

And he's not up there in front of world leaders doing token Bollywood gyrations.

He's up there dancing a style he invented in Mumbai 30 years ago, when a fellow named Shahrukh Khan was a young, lovestruck upcoming actor courting a dancer in Davar's troupe who would later become the superstar's wife.

They invented a contemporary Indo-Jazz Bollywood genre made up of elements that combine classical Indian with Western jazz. And to give you an idea of scale, for the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006 Davar says, "We put up a nice 11-minute show, 400 dancers from my troupe performed alongside 300 Australian dancers trained by us. It was a magical experience."

1980s entertainers clique

Twenty-six years after he began teaching contemporary dance to seven students in a run down Grant Road school, today the Shiamak Davar Institute of Performing Arts (SDIPA) has centers around the world, including Canada, the Middle East and of course India. New centers are coming up in London and New York.

Right now instructors from the Debbie Allen Academy -- a school founded by one of the United States' most important dancers and choreographers -- are in Mumbai training top Indian dancers handpicked by Shiamak Davar in a one-year course at SDIPA.

To work with Allen's academy is to tap into dance history that reaches as far back the movie "Fame" in which Allen starred, the Academy Awards which she choreographed six years in a row and So You Think You Can Dance, a popular television dance competition on AXN, where she is a judge.

Malcom Gladwell, author of "Outliers," argues that an uber-successful person (the outlier) is often surrounded by a set of advantages that propel them to greater glory.

On his site, Gladwell says, "In order to understand the Outlier, I think you have to look around them -- at their culture and community and family and generation."

Born into SoBo old money, with the resources to hone his talent, Davar went off to study at premier performing institutes in London, including the Guildford School of Acting.

On his return, he began to teach dance in 1985, then founded the academy in 1992.

The first batch of seven students was an eclectic mix of the soon-to-be famous in India's entertainment industry. Singer Lucky Ali, model Rachel Rueben and actor Kitu Gidwani were good friends who enrolled to support their friend's endeavor.

"We used to all hang out together, Rachel, Jackie (Shroff), Sunil Shetty…" Davar remembers.
He says their addas in the 1980s were Pastry Palace at Napean Sea Road and the coolest club of their time -- Studio 29 on Marine Drive, inspired by London's Studio 54.

At the prestigious Cathedral School, Davar’s classmates were the present Mid-day MD Tariq Ansari, BBC anchor Nisha Pillai and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

"Fareed was a very quiet guy. I was the complete opposite -- always singing and dancing,” says Davar. Today, he counts among friends, industrialists, media moguls and the powerhouses of Bollywood, including the Bachchans, Shahrukh Khan and Aamir Khan.

Many of these connections may have inspired and driven the young Davar. But the one that seemed to have the biggest impact on his career was his relationship with Shahrukh Khan, through Khan’s wife Gauri.

"Gauri was in one of my classes, a hard-working student who later also joined my troupe," recalls Davar. "Shahrukh would hang around often, waiting for her to finish up. Soon, we got to know each other and he persuaded me to choreograph 'Dil Toh Pagal Hai', my first Bollywood film.”

Khan’s character, the male lead in the film, plays a dancer-choreographer. DTPH, as it came to be known popularly, was a rage. Everyone outside Mumbai knew Shiamak Davar after that.

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