I can’t imagine I’ll be seeing another film as passionate and uplifting as Call Me Dancer any time soon. I saw it at the USC film school, and director/producer Leslie Shampaine was on hand for a Q&A following the screening.
We meet Manish Chauhan on the streets of Mumbai, where he likes to demonstrate his prowess as a break dancer (a sport that was recently elevated to Olympic status). His parents—a taxi driver and a traditional stay-at-home mom—want their son to go to business school as the guarantee of a secure future, and for parental support after they retire. “Dancing is a hobby for rich kids,” says his father. As Shampaine clarified after the film, for a young person of Manish’s class, the élite world of classical Indian dance is far removed, irrelevant and inaccessible.
The 21-year-old wins a reality show dance prize and gains a certain local fame, but he is eager to elevate his talent into something higher and nobler than sport and acrobatics. Manish is so taken by the addictive discipline of dance that he hides the fact that he’s dropped out of school and is using his tuition money to pay for his dance classes. By enrolling in a ballet class he meets Yehuda Maor, a gruff 70-ish Israeli former ballet dancer and now teacher who, fired from his last employment in Israel where he was too demanding of his young girls, now finds himself, improbably, in Mumbai. Manish accepts Yehuda’s challenge and resolves to become a professional dancer. The teacher claims his student achieved in three years what others do in nine. But he comes from a very poor family, and with no financial support, how will he succeed?
Eventually, when prospects for further training abroad turn up, he secures patronage from a wealthy devotee of the arts in Mumbai, who states her view that if we wish the arts to thrive, the rich have to step up. If the child of a wealthy family wanted to pursue their passion in an unlucrative career, no harm is done as they will have a sturdy safety net to fall back on. So the film is, intentionally or not, a study of the arts under capitalism: How and if they thrive is sadly a function of how much the wealthy care to support it. (No comparison of the fate of the arts under socialism is introduced.) Inevitably, of course, we ask what talent and potential are ditched overboard in a society that doesn’t give young people all the chances and the access they need to develop themselves.
Call Me Dancer is the story of mentorship, passing down tradition and technique. Owing to their accidental meeting, Manish and Yehuda transform each other’s lives. Yehuda finds purpose in advancing his best students—also a younger one named Amir—even if it means losing them to further training and employment in the West. And Manish cherishes his dream of performing on the world stage; maybe success there will enable him to fulfill his filial responsibility and help support his parents in old age. The documentary places Manish comfortably within his traditional family, and happily, at least, he has the encouragement of his grandmother.
Jay Sean, a British-Indian singer-songwriter and executive producer of the film, contributed two original songs, with additional music by Bangladeshi American hip-hop artist Anik Khan, and a score by award-winning, British-Indian composer Nainita Desai and Nina Humphreys. Jay Sean was drawn to this project for his own personal reasons: his own parents wanted him to pursue a medical career instead of becoming a singer.
The film came about in an unusual way. After giving up her dance career in her early 30s, Leslie Shampaine went into film production. She had known Yehuda Maor from her professional dance days. Yehuda was so taken by Manish’s story and talent that he invited Shampaine to come to India to make a documentary film about him. She enjoyed complete access—vérité style—to individuals, classes, family. That film, shot over a span of five years in India, the United Kingdom, Israel (where he spends a year with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company), and the United States, and edited into a crisp 84 minutes over the course of the next year, is at long last what we see today.
We follow Manish to London, Israel and New York, and it takes him an eon (especially in a dancer’s short professional life) to secure a permanent position. A highlight is his brief sojourn with the now-defunct Bowen McCauley Dance Company that featured a much appreciated solo dance by him at the Kennedy Center. He had a brief flirtation with Bollywood, starring in one movie, Yeh Ballet—the filmmaker takes us on-set where his parents get to see their son perform for the first and only time—but to Manish, Bollywood is low pop culture, not the art he desires to create. He probably could have made a career for himself as a film star, but that was not his goal.
Shampaine steers a wide course around Manish’s personal life, apart from immediate family. Apparently, according to her, there isn’t one. A badly paid dancer’s life is too all-consuming for that, and besides, outside of marriage, in his culture, romantic relationships would be frowned upon.
Some filmgoers may be thinking of Slumdog Millionaire by way of comparison, the 2008 film that elevated Dev Patel to worldwide renown: Lowly Indian nobody of a kid makes good in spectacular success story. But despite some flickers of fame—photo shoots, magazine spreads—Manish finally got hired permanently by the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company in New York City. He’s still following his heart—and scraping by. The final words of the film are apt: “Please support artists. They help us see the world in a new way.”
The director describes her first film as “my love poem to dance.” Having circulated among the world’s film festivals and garnering nothing but rave reviews and awards, Call Me Dancer is now preparing for its North American theatrical release. Watch for it.
The trailer can be viewed here. Manish speaks of his future plans and dreams here.
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