Farah Khan Is Off Her Freaking Rocker

I love Shakira. And call me stubborn, or stupid if you will, but I don't like finding out unpleasant things about people whose work I admire. So when I heard that her recent "Bollywood-themed" performance at the MTV Video Music Awards included Bharatanatyam, I grimaced, expecting the worst. And I was right.

Her tribhanga at the beginning comes off as though she's a limp puppet.
Her poker-faced walk forward, hands supposedly in Bharatnatyam mode and legs doing some weird kicking thing (a "frappe", says my friend), during the flute sequence at the beginning made me want to yell "elbows up, elbows up!"
Her nethichuthi looks positively ridiculous alongside that slitted sarong that's supposed to be a lengha of sorts, loose hair, and an absence of something as basic as eyeliner.
Her back-up dancers are downright scandalously awful. And sadly, most of them look like they're actually Indian.

And this complete disaster -- which successfully makes Shakira look stupid to anyone who really knows their Bharatnatyam, and makes Bharatnatyam look stupid to anyone who doesn't -- comes courtesy of Farah Khan, aka Bollywood choreographer extraordinaire.

Can I accept it as Bollywood? Sure, but only because Bollywood by its nature is kitsch and mismatch. As Bharatnatyam? Fuck no.

What Farah Khan has done is to simply take the easiest route -- easy, easy exotica. A couple of mudras here and some really bad atami there -- at one point, the dancers in orange rush forward while trying to maintain atami, and end up looking like ducks -- and voila!: fusion at its most cloyingly worst.

In doing so, she does a disservice to both the dance and the dancer, not to mention all those sad girls in orange. "Hips Don't Lie" is a great song -- go on, laugh at me -- by itself, with a great video. How Khan took something like that and turned it into something like this (yes, I was going to give you the link eventually, I just wanted you to read what I had to say first) is beyond me. What she should have done is to have kept it really Bollywood -- fun, light, funky -- instead of making a total mess of it with all that pretentious pseudo-exoticism. Should Shakira herself have known better? Probably not. After all, if an Indian choreographer insisted she was teaching her an Indian dance, what reason would she have not to believe it? Should Farah Khan have known better? Hell yes.

Khan's problem here seems not only to have been careless unprofessionalism, but also over-ambitiousness and a disregard for the fact that when invited to represent, one has the responsibility to represent. Not distort. Extremely annoying as well is the fact that real Bollywood numbers, by and large, are so much better than this performance, as is Shakira's own bellydancing as seen in the original video for this song and in others. In trying to negotiate some hip, global convergence between Bollywood and Bharatnatyam and belly-dancing, Khan fails all three artforms.

I can't help but make a comparison to the Bharatanatyam dancer in the street with Michael Jackson in his "Black or White" video. She, at least, came across authentic.

I still love Shakira. Farah Khan, meanwhile...