What is Bollywood?

Bollywood is the nickname given to the Indian film industry - it's a play on the word Hollywood.
The B comes from Bombay (also known as Mumbai), a big city in India.
Bollywood is massive. It makes up to 800 films a year - twice as many as Hollywood and about 14 million Indian people go to the cinema everyday
Films are made so fast that sometimes actors on set shoot scenes for four different films at a time - using the same actors and the same backgrounds. And sometimes the scripts are even hand-written!

Why is Bollywood so big now?
2002 was the year it all kicked off for Bollywood in Britain.
A season of Indian films was shown on TV when India and England played in a big cricket tournament.
A department store devoted a summer to Indian fashion, and shops everywhere were full of colourful clothes, bindis, bangles, saris and henna.
Bombay Dreams, a new West End musical, was a sell out. Special cinemas also showed Bollywood classic films and had exhibitions featuring Bollywood film posters.
Bollywood films have managed to cross over and now it's not just Indian families watching them - they're being shown in big cinemas across the UK.

What's the future for Bollywood?
The future looks even brighter for Bollywood. Big US film companies such as Warner Bros and Twentieth Century Fox are setting up offices in India.
Where Indian film makers have found it difficult to compete with Hollywood's special effects, this is seen as the next big area for Bollywood to develop.


Bollywood Dance
But Indian film dance is not just some wild wiggling around - the choreography is done according to the text and mood of a song and often the words are interpreted with hand movements. However, the main aim of these dances is to entertain. A film can become a success even with an average film script if it contains several good dance scenes - and the songs make their way to the music charts as well.
MEISSOUN has been a fan of Hindi films for some years. And as a dancer she naturally was interested in the dances. She studied hundereds of dance scenes to learn and understand the style and has been performing Bollywood dance since 2000 with her group "Masala Girls" and solo.
Most of the times MEISSOUN copies the choreographies as exactly as possible from the films in order to offer an "authentic" Bollywood feeling. From time to time however she also does her own productions and puts a lot of effort into the suitable interpretation of music, mood and text. She also wears a special costume for each song.
MEISSOUN published a longer article about Indian film dance in the magazine TanzOriental.

What else would you think is important to know about Indian film dance?
Indian film dance uses many different styles of dance styles ranging from Western to Eastern, Arabic to African, right throughout to hip hop and street dance. If a song/dance becomes popular, the film becomes a hit. Audiences will flock to see the film 10 times just to see the one dance which has become so famous.