Bollywood Nights

With a dozen frenetic routines to get through, the show is hugely demanding for the dancers.

If flocks of butterflies went around holding digital cameras, this is what they'd look like. A group of young Indians alight from their bus and throng the gardens and ornate, marble-floored temple of Krishna in Melbourne.

The guys wear jeans, but in honour of the visit, some of the girls have donned embroidered salwar kameez tunics and trousers, and they throw pink bags over their shoulders, or green scarves which flutter in the breeze.

They chatter in Hindi, taking photographs of each other, and help themselves to the sweet, cloudy Holy Water at the temple entrance, drinking handfuls and throwing it over their heads.
A white man in a saffron Hare Krishna robe, with a shaved head and dotted face-paint, looks slightly alarmed by the gentle invasion.

Later, upstairs, when the group has crowded into the narrow gift shop, a thin solemn woman in a sombre brown robe behind the counter asks, "Who are you all?"

"We're performing in the Merchants of Bollywood," one young man replies. "I'm an actor, the rest are dancers. Do you know this show?"

"I don't like Bollywood much," the woman replies.

You get the feeling she thinks such movies are much too frivolous. All those wet, clinging saris and exotic locations, like Switzerland or Queenstown. Not very pious, surely.

All the dancers in her shop are Bollywood film professionals, but the actor, Pramod Pathak, doesn't seem bothered by the woman's hint of disapproval and neither does the dance captain, Mahesh Makwana, known to the group as "Bubba".

They go into the dining room to give the surprise gifts they've just bought to the Aussie bus driver and the tag-along New Zealand journalist. There's a bright pink scarf for Andrew, an orange one for me. "Please," says Bubba, concerned we may not feel at ease in his place of worship, "make yourself welcome - just do whatever you feel."

I've known them for maybe 24 minutes. Already one of the dancers, Kanchan, using her friend Radhika as a translator, has offered to thread my eyebrows for me.

The girls take my hand and pull me along to pose for yet more photos. In a corner, the Hare Krishna man is reciting in front of a dancer's video camera: "We're open from 4.30am till 5am, 7am till 11am ... "

These are the Merchants of Bollywood performers off duty - friendly, curious, unembarrassed by such trifles as hardly knowing the people they're spending the afternoon with, contentedly swaying in their bus seats to Indian pop cassettes while the wooden lace-trimmed, boxy Melbourne villas pass by outside.

On duty onstage in five hours time they'll be smiling whirling dervishes, gyrating to the same pop music, moving faster than a tap dancer with the shakes.

In quick succession, the women will toss on red saris, harem pants, cheerleader outfits, combat pants, full skirts embroidered with mirrors - everything glittered and shimmering.

The guys will be shaking their booties, wearing more sequins and suggestive outfits than hoodie-wearing male dancers in Western hip-hop videos would ever dream of - leopard print pants teamed with rash shirts or even no shirts, all the better to show off their pecs and tatts.

A handful of actors perform slapstick routines while the dancers do quick-whip changes and flirt in the wings, the whole thing held loosely together by a thin Bollywood-style plot.

As a spectacle, the show's an impressively high energy, entertaining blur; as an aerobics workout, it's hard to beat.

There are about two dozen routines in every two and a half hour show, up to seven shows a week, in eight Australasian towns over three months. Wellington and Auckland are the last stops on the tour.

It's Bollywood 101, written and directed by Toby Gough, the Scottish director of the Whale Rider musical and several Cuban dance shows.

It's aimed at non-Bollywood audiences who loved the dances in Bride and Prejudice and are ready to push their cultural comfort zone out one step further, as well as Indian audiences who want to relive the songs of hit movies of recent years.

There was a large contingent of Australian-Indians enjoying the show the night I went. On other nights, says Andrew the bus driver, the audiences were whiter: "I've seen more Indians at a Drifters' concert".

The show is a challenge for the local technical crews. All the props are real, which means they're hard-to-replace heavy metal instead of polystyrene mock-ups, and many of the 350 costumes are hand-embroidered silk. They look glorious, and would hold up for several takes on a movie set, but Kim, the Melbourne costume manager, has had to bring his sewing machine down from the costume room three storeys up and park it just beside the prompt corner so that he can sew up split pants mid-performance.

One of the dancer/actors, Deepak "Six-pack" Rawat, rips his vest every night by the power of his abs alone.

The life in Mumbai sounds glamorous - getting paid to dance - but so many dancers are squeezed into the musical films that they're looked upon as little better than extras.

Dancers pass an exam to be in an association, but usually have little formal training - it's relatively easy to find work.

"The dancers are treated like meat on film sets," says New Zealand actor Rajeev Varma, who hung out on the set of Devdas in Mumbai and was line producer in New Zealand for three others.

Not that young actresses have it much better than the dancers: "It's pretty filthy, there's a lot of casting couch action."

Some of the dancers do the work because they are "obsessed with dancing," says Merchants of Bollywood dancer and actress understudy Saira "Cookie" Shaikh, elegant backstage in her dressing-gown.

For others, it's pocket-money while they train as beauticians. But for many, this is how they earn a living and can help their families.

People of "good families" wouldn't dance for a living. It's not unusual for crews to shoot until they drop, working 6am until midnight for days on end.

Bubba says that although it's good money, parents "have ugly feelings" about their children working so hard and about the ethics of the Bollywood industry. But in Australasia it is different. After the Melbourne matinee it takes all of six minutes for several of the guys to be in their street clothes and out signing autographs and posing in dark glasses for photos with adoring fans.

The fluorescent magic of Bollywood has enlarged its territory yet again, creating momentary stars in its wake.