Sooni Taraporevala dives into her new show 'Waack Girls' and stepping away from dance-themed film stereotypes

The show’s creator and director Sooni Taraporevala with Mekhola Bose and Rytasha Rathore, who lead the show’s ensemble cast. Pic/Kirit Surve Parade

The seeds of acclaimed screenwriter, photographer, and filmmaker Sooni Taraporevala's new Prime Video series Waack Girls were sown in her last directorial venture, 2020's Yeh Ballet, where we first saw Mekhola Bose, the dancer at the centre of the new show. The form of this high-octane street style of dance, originally created in the gay clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s as an expression of rebellion and individualism, is put to spectacular use throughout the nine episodes of the series. At the same time, it becomes a medium to tell the stories of six young women, each looking to break away from individual struggles and societal and familial pressures to conform and find joy and fulfilment through dance.

Despite its use of dance as a central narrative device, Taraporevala who co-wrote the show with daughter Iyanah Bativala and Ronny Sen, was keen to avoid the usual tropes of dance-themed stories. "At least in India, dance films have a specific structure, with two rival teams, and a dance competition at the end. Both in Yeh Ballet and Waack Girls, I studiously kept away from the competition at the end. I think both of them are quite original in the way that they play out," she tells mid-day.

In the show, waacking, originally created in the gay clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s as an expression of rebellion, becomes a medium to tell the stories of women looking to break away from societal and familial pressures

For Bose, a waacking artiste who has been dancing professionally for more than a decade, it was Japanese dancer Mizuki Flamingo's popular waacking videos on YouTube that first got her interested in the style: "I was looking for a master style in my crew because I could do everything but not as well as the others. I wanted to stand out and I saw this style and thought that this is something I could take to. And I fell in love with disco music. Those things together started the dance off for me. Later, I realised that it's actually an emotional dance and I'm an emotional person. That's probably why it worked for me."

But the series, she says, taught her about the specific demands of dancing for the camera. "It takes multiple takes from multiple angles, which you don't consider when you're doing a live performance. [There], it's one shot, one go," says Bose. At the same time, one needs to stay connected to the specific emotions of one's character at that given moment. "I could be myself and be anything on stage that I'd like to project, but here, I have to be Ishani [Bose's character] and stick to her nuances. I think that's something I learned on this project."

A disco ball sequence that opens the series - striking in the way it plays with light, movement and Bose's swift dancing silhouette - was one of the toughest sequences to shoot, she says. "The lighting was making all our heads spin. The camera technicians, Sooni, me - we were all swooning and it was really hard to be centred and be able to execute a dance in heels in that kind of lighting."

Bose grew up in Kolkata, the city Taraporevala chose to base her series in. The director's own history with Kolkata, coupled with its cultural context played a role in the decision. "I love Kolkata because I have experienced it with The Namesake. When I did Little Zizou, Bikram Ghosh was my music composer, so I worked a lot with him there. What I really loved about that experience was that it felt like Kolkata artistes are very pure in a way that commercial Mumbai is not," shares the director. "I love that they have streets named after Shakespeare, and that culture is so important there. I love that there's still old buildings that have not been torn down, and I was very excited to have the main location as this wonderful old Satyajit Ray kind of setting and put very modern waack girls in it."

"I love that it was a lead role," chuckles Rytasha Rathore when we ask her what she liked about her character Lopa Mehta, a spirited dance manager determined to make the show's waacking artistes famous. "Let me be real. It's not every day that I get a call from Tess Joseph [casting director] asking me to audition for one of the leads." But it was also Lopa's "unapologetic, unabashed, go-getter spirit" that she says inspired her. "Sooni told me that Lopa was like a feisty, scrappy terrier… A lot of it I have managed to imbibe in my real life thanks to Lopa Mehta, because she's a bad b''''. She's awesome."

The actor - who has worked across a host of mediums and formats from theatre, television, OTT and ads to 2021's Comedy Premium League - has no preferences and is enjoying the variety of work she is being offered. "I love stage because we get so much rehearsal and you really get to go deep into the work. But in terms of the moments of living [as the character] between ‘action' and ‘cut', only acting for camera can give you that because it picks up even the smallest things. Whereas for stage, it's always a wide frame. I can't choose between stage and camera. I love them both too much for two different reasons, and I'm grateful that I get to work across mediums and tell stories in any format."