Choreographing fantastic spectacles: song and dance sequences in Bollywood cinema

In this article, I will exemplify the role of song and dance sequences in Bollywood. I will analyse films of a prominent Bollywood production house, ‘Yash Raj Films,’ primarily because Bollywood produces more than 250 films every year, therefore making the body of work too big to analyse. Yash Raj Films, is India’s biggest, and one of the oldest production house. Study of YRF films provides an opportunity to examine the films from 1970s until present, to examine the trends, and changes over the years. In the first section of the article, the focus will be on, how YRF films have represented song and dance sequences in its films? In the second section of the article, I will analyse the representation of song and dance sequences in YRF Films, in accordance with Rick Altman’s musical sub-genre analysis i.e. Fairy Tale musical, Show musical, and Folk musical, but my attempt to do so is in no way to categorise Bollywood song and dance sequences in accordance with the musical sub-genre. I will use the musical sub-genre approach of Altman’s to discuss the elements that inspires the Bollywood song and dance sequence construction in terms of spectacle, show, fantastic, and folk.