Bollywood Dance at U.C.L.A.: A Team Built on Bonding and Battle

U.C.L.A.'s Bollywood dance team spends its season doing two things at once: bonding and battling. A new photographic essay follows the student ensemble through that double life, from the first audition to the competitive stage.

The team's members describe the practice in plain terms. "For a lot of South Asians, dance is the way we connect," one team member said. The sentence sits at the center of the project. It explains why the group exists and what the photographs document: not only choreography and costuming, but the relationships formed in rehearsal rooms and held together through the pressure of competition.

The photographer's sequence opens at the audition, the moment when the team's roster takes shape for the season. It then follows the dancers into competitions, the events that give the ensemble its competitive calendar and its reason to drill routines to precision.

Between those two poles — audition and competition — the photographs capture the texture of a student dance company: the repetitions of rehearsal, the physical demands of the form, and the communal life of a team whose members describe dance as their primary means of connection.

The quote from the team member carries the essay's argument. For the South Asian dancers photographed, Bollywood dance functions as more than performance. It is a social bond, a way of maintaining and transmitting culture among peers at a large American public university.

The competitive circuit gives that bond an external test. Battling, in the team's formulation, is the counterpart to bonding: the same group rehearses together, travels together, and then faces other teams in judged competition. The photographic essay holds both halves of that equation in view rather than choosing one.

The images move from the individual — a single dancer at an audition — to the collective, the full team in competition. That arc mirrors the team member's claim. Connection, in the ensemble's experience, is built before it is displayed; the bonding happens first, in rehearsal, and the battling follows, on stage.

U.C.L.A. is the setting, but the structure the photographs document — audition, rehearsal, competition, community — is one that South Asian collegiate dance teams across the United States recognize. The essay's value lies in its specificity: one team, one season, one campus, photographed from the inside.

The work closes on the competition stage, where the season's outcome is decided. What remains after the judging is the thing the team member named first. The dances end; the connection, as the ensemble tells it, does not.