{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0267651130595293, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0018458698661744347, 'mean_word_length': 5.357771260997067, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Two dances and a conference

A symposium on ‘The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema’ was held at California’s Sonoma State University in April 2017. Organized by Rajinder Dudrah and Ajay Gehlawat, its presentations, which generated the articles featured in this special issue of SAPC, offered an array of new perspectives on this cinema’s musical and choreographic dimensions, with notable and especially welcome attention given to the latter. For despite general agreement among scholars of popular Hindi cinema that the presence of music and dance is one of its trademark features, scholarship on this formidable entertainment industry has often focused on its narratives as texts, and to a lesser extent on acting, camerawork, and mise-en-scène – largely ignoring the music and dance sequences that may constitute as much as a third of a film’s running time, or even dismissing them as insignificant add-ons or ‘spectacles’ of emotional excess (see, e.g. Prasad; Dissanayake and Sahai). And if song itself has been (to venture a pun) downplayed in most Indian cinema scholarship, the films’ choreographic component has usually been still more overlooked. This is perhaps natural given that most film and cultural studies scholars lack specialized training in musicology (or the emerging discipline of ‘choreomusicology’ highlighted in Usha Iyer’s contribution), and though two ethnomusicologists who presented at the symposium have produced important books on Hindi cinema (Beaster-Jones; Booth), scholars (like me) who lack such training are often painfully aware of their inability to effectively analyze in musical terms what is going on in song/dance sequences. In bringing together eminent ethnomusicologists with other scholars who write on Bombay cinema and with two whose work focuses on dance and its practitioners, the symposium demonstrated the potential richness of a more wholistic approach to (what one participant called) the ‘layered assemblage’ of Hindi films. It was thus, especially, appropriate that the academic presentations were bracketed by two dance performance events happily arranged to coincide with the symposium – a screening