Drawn to the lavish dance numbers in films from India, or just bored with their gym workouts, people are flocking to Bollywood-style dance classes that mix traditional Indian folk dances with hip-hop moves. And the US exercise industry is taking notice. Long enjoyed by young people of Indian descent, and common in big cities on the coasts, Bollywood-style classes are popping up in regions of the country where Indian cinema is new and there aren't as many people of Indian descent. Fans of Bollywood — an informal term for Hindi-language films, often romantic musicals — want formal instruction in the style marked by foot-stomping dance numbers that put folk moves and hip swings to pop beats. Students swing their hips, raise one hand to their mouths as if calling out to a lover, and then lift one leg and hop forward in a line. After the number, instructor Renu Kansal reminds the dancers to wave their arms side to side smoothly, so they don't look “too drill-team-ish.” As if they were in a Bollywood movie, the dancers are trying to tell a story of romance. “I taught this in New York, and when we moved out here and I started Bollywood dancing classes, I was skeptical,” Kansal said in an interview. “I was like, oh gosh, I don't know if this'll work here. But I had to double my class offerings in under a month. It was a huge surprise to me.” Kansal isn't the only Indian dance instructor caught by surprise. Used to teaching folk dances to the children of Indian immigrants, instructors now field calls from people with no connection to south Asia. “All of these days it was small-scale, but now it's big-scale,” says Bhagya Nagesh, an Indian dance instructor in Naperville, Ill., who will open a studio called Bollywood Rhythms in the Chicago suburb next month. The fitness industry has noticed its popularity, calling it part of a trend toward ethnic-style dances where participants get a workout while learning about new cultures. The American Council on Exercise says ethnic dancing, such as salsa dancing, belly dancing and now Bollywood dancing, is a major growth area for gyms and dance studios. The classes attract people who don't usually exercise, along with gym members bored by running on treadmills. “Americans like exotic, but they like dancing to songs they know,” says Schadia Hazlett, an owner of three studios of Atlanta Belly Dance, which has several hundred to 1,000 students at times. “It attracts a totally different clientele than salsa or samba.” Fans of Bollywood hope the trend isn't going away. The moves can appear schmaltzy to Western audiences, and at times the movie plots seem designed only to tie together dance numbers. “Some it is kind of hokey and silly. But if you go back and watch American movies from the 1930s and ‘40s, the big musicals, they were the same way,” Striegel says. “So it's like going back to the old school.”
