Interview Documentation

I started transcribing the interview I had from the beginning and then wished I had started somewhere in the middle. I was unsure of which excerpts to use because I didn't want to keep skipping around the interview to find the more "interesting" parts or cut the responses, but they were all pretty lengthy. I didn't even begin to cover what we got into in the interview. It lasted pretty long, a good 30 or 40 minutes and I learned a lot and got some different answers to my questions than I was expecting. The interviewee has indicated that they would like to be referred to under an alias, and will hereby be referred to as Pocahontas (this was decided at the interview, due to a love for Disney characters and an unrelated "inside joke," if you will).

INTERVIEW EXCERPT:

Me: Starting at the beginning, how many different types of dances do you guys do?

Pocahontas: Umm…I’m not quite sure whether there is a definite answer to that, it changes from year to year. But dances I have seen Badmaash do…let’s see…ok Bhangra Garba Raas Hip Hop Step Bharathanatyam Kathak Lyrical…umm…a little bit of Samba I think

Me: Really?

P: Yeah well we’ve got just a lot of people who have a lot of different talents in the group so that’s 9…there might be more, or variations between them, like mixes of them

Me: Do you generally do them all in an average concert or a mix?

I think our big show, which happens once a year we try and get as many different dance styles as possible. It doesn’t always happen, but we try.

….

Me: How do you pick the songs that you use for the pieces?

P: That’s up to the choreographer’s discretion. But I think a lot of that also has to do with our music people who are right now mostly Shri (sp.?) and Rahul umm I know that Rima and I knew that we wanted to use the background to Love Game and then we went to Shri to be like do you know any Hindi or Bollywood or just any old Indian song that could work with this and he was like “yes I know the perfect song” so like they both have ridiculous data bases either on their computer or in their head and they help out along with song selection and even more with song mixing

Me: Ok. Umm. Does the choreographer have free reign? Like does the group have to approve the dance or do people have the authority to approve or reject them?

P: It’s pretty much if you go to the Co-D’s at some point at the beginning of the semester and you’re like “Yo I want to choreograph this dance” they’ll be like “Sure, go for it,” which is really cool and a lot of times choreographers will kind of weed themselves out if they aren’t feeling it or if they don’t think that they have the time or something but we don’t reject dances from the show or we like don’t audition dances for the show

Me: Do the stories of the dances relate to the words of the songs?

P: It depends. So, for something like Bhangra or Raas I don’t think there’s much storytelling or anything related to the songs but for Bollywood I think they usually try to use songs whose lyrics kind of go along with the story so like the premise of a Bollywood piece the reason that it’s so long and so many different songs is because it’s supposed to like parody a Bollywood movie and like whatever love triangle happens because there’s always a love triangle. So like I know Sima was listening to songs to like fit this kind of blueprint of a story. And in Bharathanatyam I know if you choose to, when you use songs with words you can actually fit your movements to the words because it’s a form of storytelling, it’s like a pantomime. But a lot of times for Badmaash we don’t do that because that style of Bharathanatyam it’s called when you’re telling the story is a) Religious for the most part and b) just really hard to teach if you’re not trained. So for Bharathanatyam I’ve found Badmaash usually sticks to plain old movements that kind of show off the rhythmic and technical aspects without the storytelling in it.

…

Me: What does the music chair do?

P: Music Chair. Right now I think is Shri (sp.?) And last year was Rahul. Their job I think is basically to help out musically wherever possible so if a choreographer goes to them and is like I need music for this piece. Help me. They’ll help. And they do a lot with mixing songs if more htan one song is used in a piece and in terms of the competition piece which I think is probably the biggest group piece the co-directors choreograph it and the music chair does all the music for it, picks the songs according to the choreographers desires and then like makes a really epic, epic mix.