When choreographer Joya Kazi was tasked with bringing collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance to the display screen in Netflix’s Better of the Greatest, she discovered herself drawing from real-life expertise. “It’s cutthroat, it’s dramatic, there’s relationships, there’s rivalry,” she says with amusing over Zoom, reflecting on her time with the Hindi Movie Dance membership she began on the College of California, Davis. Born in Mumbai and raised within the San Francisco Bay Space earlier than transferring to Los Angeles in 2012, Kazi’s roots in a number of kinds of Indian classical dance—and her display screen resumé spanning initiatives from Hollywood to India—made her uniquely certified for the formidable new dance film.
The approaching-of-age comedy, directed by Lena Khan, premiered on September 18 and indicators a real landmark second for South Asian illustration in international popular culture. It follows childhood finest associates Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) as they dive into the high-stakes world of aggressive Bollywood-fusion dance on the College of California, Los Angeles. For Kazi, the chance to work on Better of the Greatest alongside choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman Chbeeb felt like worlds colliding. “By no means in 1,000,000 years did I feel that one thing about our area of interest world would ever be for the plenty,” she says.
Bringing Bollywood-Fusion to Netflix
As each a choreographer and a cultural advisor on the movie, Kazi—who additionally makes a short cameo as a contest decide—drew from a breadth of kinds inside classical, people, and conventional Indian dance, channeling intricacies from kuthu, garba, bhangra, and others. She felt particularly captivated with capturing the nuances of South Asian–American tradition, together with fusions with different dance types she grew up with.
Forged member and Los Angeles–based mostly dancer Neha Anushka, who makes her film debut enjoying rival crew captain Selena, appeared to her Sri Lankan and South Indian heritage to immerse herself in Indian classical dance for the primary time. “I used to be attempting to attach with the kinds, and the simplest method to try this was to return to my South Asian roots,” she says. Although she has danced since age 7 in genres starting from jazz, up to date, and hip hop, Anushka found new challenges within the meticulous particulars of conventional Indian dance. “At evening in my lodge room after studying choreography, I’d apply the hand gestures,” she says.
With quite a few fierce dance numbers driving the plot, rehearsals for Better of the Greatest had been unsurprisingly rigorous. The method started with two months of preparation in Los Angeles for Ramakrishnan and Kedia, with Kazi recalling the celebrities coaching “like true skilled dancers” for six courses a day, six days every week. When manufacturing moved to New Jersey for filming, the choreography crew labored with a skeleton crew to carry their concepts to life. “You’ve a director’s imaginative and prescient that you just completely want to satisfy, after which it’s a must to be sure your actors look phenomenal within the motion that you just give them,” Kazi says.
It definitely helped having high-caliber dance expertise bolstering the forged. Indian dancer and actor Tanishq Joshi, who performs UCLA crew member Vishal, has spent years fusing Bollywood music with hip-hop kinds. He additionally choreographed a hip-hop/street-style part for the South Asian dance crew, Broad Avenue Baadshahz, at his alma mater Drexel College in Pennsylvania, so he was nicely poised to tackle the film’s largest numbers. “In rehearsals [for Best of the Best], I keep in mind everybody was struggling, as a result of they had been laborious items!” he remembers. “Think about Step Up and Convey It On ranges of dancing, however in a South Asian house.”
A Watershed Second for South Asian Dance Illustration
Among the most memorable dance sequences in Better of the Greatest embody an formidable competitors quantity impressed by an Indian wedding ceremony; an explosive student-union showcase; and one fierce dance battle at a frat occasion. For Anushka, her center-stage second got here within the form of a Mount Everest–themed competitors piece. “That was among the finest experiences of my life,” she says. “You get to see so many alternative kinds within the span of two minutes.” The entire expertise was particularly surreal for Anushka for the reason that story unfolds at UCLA, the place she’s presently double majoring in statistics and knowledge science, in addition to communications.
The film’s dance climax arrives with a high-concept competitors showcase themed round colonial India’s legacy of stolen jewels. That scene introduced distinctive logistical challenges when the crew swapped prop rehearsal yarn for highly effective heat-emitting lasers throughout filming, which seem in a museum-heist sequence. “We needed to be very cautious, and the dancers had been actually avoiding these lasers!” remembers Kazi.
It isn’t misplaced on the dancers what a milestone it’s to be part of Better of the Greatest. Joshi has been manifesting platforms of this dimension for a while, and offers full credit score to the crew of South Asian creatives, together with co-writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, for making the dream lastly “come true.” Anushka agrees that issues have come a great distance since her conference days, when she not often noticed different dancers who appeared like her within the hip-hop house. “Attending to encourage the following technology is certainly what I’m most enthusiastic about,” she says of the movie function. As for Kazi, she says she felt like she was “holding again tears daily on set.” In that method, issues have come full circle since she first entered the trade as a teen with hopes of bridging her two worlds: “It was such magic and a blessing to really feel just like the issues I dreamt of 25 years in the past are occurring now.”
