Hip-Hop's Bollywood Moment

Hip-hop’s growing presence in Bollywood has choreographers working with actors to fine-tune their technique and, of course, their swagger!

- Suhani Singh

Featuring a bunch of dancers who plied their trade on competitive reality TV shows, ABCD: Anybody Can Dance (2013) had next to no A-list stars, its most recognizable face being Prabhudeva. Yet choreographer Remo D’Souza’s second film as director, starring the terpsichorean talents of Salman Yusuff Khan, Dharmesh Yelande, Prince R. Gupta, Punit Pathak, and Tushar Kalia, managed to gross nearly Rs 40 crore at the domestic box office. It was the fillip that the producers needed to start a dance franchise, much like the popular Step-Up series in Hollywood. ABCD 2 (2015) was inspired by the true story of Suresh Mukund and Vernon Monteiro, two young choreographers from Mumbai’s suburbs of Vasai and Nalasopara, respectively, who collected money to take their group, Fictitious, to the World Hip-Hop Dance Championship in San Diego, US, in 2015. They won a bronze medal, the first Indian group to accomplish the feat. ABCD 2 crossed the Rs 100 crore mark. Its star, Varun Dhawan, who played Mukund, is poised to return on the big screen with his co-stars Shraddha Kapoor, Yelande, Pathak and Raghav Juyal in yet another dance flick helmed by D’Souza—Street Dancer 3D.

The dance in the third film is all for a cause—to help immigrants and refugees—a pertinent topic right now. The dance battles start off between two groups—Street Dancer from India (led by Dhawan) and Rule Breaker from Pakistan (led by Kapoor) until Prabhudheva intervenes and preaches making dance, not war. The ultimate dance offsets the two groups join hands to take on the British group, The Royals. In a D’Souza dance flick, the results are least surprising. The one thing common between all three films is hip-hop. If ABCD 2 introduced moviegoers to the jaw-dropping moves of Fictitious, lyrical hip-hop (‘Sun Saathiya