Dr Tiziana Leucci, Chargée de recherche CNRS (Research Scholar), Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CEIAS/CNRS), Paris

26 November 2015, 6pm-7.30pm,DU.103 Duchesne, Digby Stuart Campus, University of Roehampton, London

Free, all welcome, no need to book

My presentation will examine the role played by the dance in Bollywood films and in other forms of Indian regional cinema(s). Special emphasis will be given to those dancers, masters and musicians belonging to the hereditary communities of temple, court and salon performing artists (known in South India with the generic terms of devadāsī, rājadāsī and naṭṭuvanārs) who acted, choreographed and sang for those movies, making many of them highly successful. Some members of these hereditary performing artists found in the cinema a way to continue to practice their profession after it had been taken away from them by other communities through the application of the Devadasi Act, voted into law three months after the declaration of the Indian Independence in 1947. Stigmatised and criminalised by that law, for a short time they found in the cinema a form of patronage, though not devoid of ambiguity. I will also discuss my bharatanāṭyam dance master, the late naṭṭuvaṉār V.S. Muthuswamy Pillai, who worked in the cinema during the 1940s and 1950s. He trained a number of dancers and film actresses by choreographing the items they performed in Tamil and Hindi movies.

Dance historian and anthropologist at the French National Center for the Scientific Research (CNRS/CEIAS, Paris), Tiziana Leucci’s research focuses on Indian courtesans’ cultures. She teaches bharatanāṭyam at the Conservatoire ‘G. Fauré’, Les Lilas, and is co-editing a volume on Dance in Early South Indian cinema with Davesh Soneji (McGill University, Montreal) and Hari Krishnan (Wesleyan University). More: 

CDR website: