And he has seen much younger men — not even men really, just overgrown boys who’ve bulked up their muscles in the gym — come to him with three left feet, learn dancing from the master, and with perhaps as much skill in acting as he does, if not less, go on to becomesuperstars. Look at Hrithik, look at Shahid — both students of Shiamak. And what must be difficult to swallow is that both are considered by many to be better dancers than actors.
So what’s stopping Shiamak from donning the greasepaint and painting B-town red? “My Hindi,” he says, an unmistakeable note of agony in his voice. “I can’t speak Hindi well. I am taking lessons and improving it, but it’s going to take a long time. This is one reason why I can’t do Hindi films.” But c’mon, his Hindi can’t be worse than Katrina Kaif’s? If she can act in Bollywood, why can’t he? “Well, she can say one line and then cut; third line, and there’s again a cut. That won’t work for me.”
The irony is that Davar’s Hindi was one of the biggest selling points on TV, in the dance show JDJ, with lots of people tuning in as much for the comic relief it provided as for the dances. “I made a complete fool of myself,” he remembers. “People would stop me on the street and say, ‘Shiamak, we love you in JDJ, we love your Hindi; we had so much fun just laughing at the way you speak it; we’d wait for you to speak.’ Pretty soon my Hindi became a USP, and I got offers from TV shows where they wanted me to speak the same Hindi.”
Yeh to Shiamak ka copy hai!
While his Hindi is one source of angst, another is the legion of imitators who copy his moves and pass them off as his own. But he is training himself not to get upset over it. “Certain choreographers copy my style, my presentation ideas, my costumes, they copy everything, which is fine; but the sad part is, I can’t put those ideas in my next film, as before I can do that, they’ve already taken it away. I would perform something new at an award function, and they would take it and put it in a film; I would get a shock seeing all of my ideas in a film. But I’ve got used to that. I am happier now because the public understands that people are trying to copy Shiamak. They say, ‘Array, yeh to Shiamak ka copy hai!’”
Shiamak also feels strongly about the way dances are shot and edited in Bollywood today, and believes they undermine the very objective of choreography. “If you look at the dances of Helen, for example, the shots would be very long, so you got to properly see the dance. Today the dance no longer exists as much as it did before. They keep cutting and editing every five seconds. If people today really want to show choreography, they have to show the dance, show the movement. But mostly I find that whatever movement they do show is very repetitive, everything looks the same.”
At the moment, Shiamak has on his hands the film Aladin, for which he is the choreographer. He still continues to train the Miss India finalists every year, before they depart for the Miss Universe competitions, and he travels a lot, what with dance centres to supervise in Toronto, Vancouver, Dubai and Melbourne. For someone who, in his early days, had to suffer “humiliating” taunts of being “effeminate” because he dared to dance, that too in leotards, the grand-nephew of Fearless Nadia has come a long way. So what if he can’t speak Hindi — isn’t dance a far more universal language? And who speaks it better than Shiamak Davar?
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