Would love to be part of a dance movie like 'ABCD'!: Katrina Kaif

Katrina Kaif doesn’t get enough credit for being the fantastic dancer that she is. No one could have done the jhatkas and matkas better than what she did in Chikni Chameli and Sheila Ki Jawaani. While she knocked it out of the ballpark with those two songs, she held the viewers in a trance every second of the free-style dance-cum-striptease act in the Kamli song in Dhoom:3. And she has done it again now with the ballet-style Pashmina song in her next release. 

It’s natural to wonder if it comes all too easy to her because she is the gifted born-to-dance sort or if she slogs to get the steps right. Kat says, “Dance came to me as a beautiful discovery. I didn’t know the kind of joy it would give me. It was a slow and unexpected process of discovery. I don’t think it started out naturally. I think I had to put in a lot of work and I still do, but now I enjoy it more.” 

She adds, “Because of the lack of time and the logistics involved, we actually had only three days for Pashmina. And that is not my idea of performing in a song (laughs). I like to work on the song for 10 days and I like the whole team to be there. Instead, we had a small, minimal team because it was a Christmas holiday. We had literally three days to rehearse and shoot, once we had the choreography set. Pashmina has just the tip of contemporary dancing, the depths of the style is still unexplored. I don’t consider myself great or good at all, but I feel fortunate to connect to dance. It has an emotional connect with me.”

So what about a dance musical? “I would love to perform in one and be a part of a dance movie like Flashdance or closer home, something like ABCD!  Dance, for me, is a way of expressing my emotions which are left unexpressed. There are times when if I feel really low or just don’t know what to do, there are certain songs that I listen to, sometimes on loop for literally two hours, the same song because for that moment, it’s speaking the words of your heart. It’s almost like someone is expressing what you feel inside and putting it into words, the lyrics sometimes conveying what’s wrong. Music can do that for me. I felt that connection with Pashmina, too. There are certain movements that I do in the middle of the song and there’s something about the movement and words and music which is in a way I can feel it. It’s an emotion, not a movement, even though I would say I would want more time and choreography to do something like this. I would have happily rehearsed for a week (laughs), but there are few moments where you just feel that connect and gives you that joy in your heart, some kind of upliftment and a sense of relief when you are able to express yourself correctly.”