The moment 18-year-old Manish Chauhan taught himself to do a back-flip – inspired by the moves of a Bollywood film star – he was all in. His street dance prowess soon won him a place on a popular TV dance competition: from there, his curiosity and drive led him to seek serious training opportunities. But, as he chafes at the opening of the documentary Call Me Dancer, “in India, people think that there is no future in dancing.” His mother calls it “a hobby for rich people, not for us.” His father is a taxi driver; his parents had scrimped and borrowed to send their son and daughter to college, to give them a chance at a more secure future.
This is not the first uplifting story of an exceptional young dancer who defied great odds. Vastly different circumstances propelled Li Cunxin (Mao’s Last Dancer), Sokvannara (Sy) Sar (Dancing Across Borders), Sergei Polunin (Dancer) and the fictional Billy Elliot into the rarefied world of ballet. But Chauhan was older when he discovered ballet and, despite his natural gifts and unrelenting work ethic, he was unlikely to make it to professional ranks.
Call Me Dancer is no fairy-tale but a character study in grit, which filmmakers Leslie Shampaine and Pip Gilmour have rendered with deftness, sensitivity and heart, their cameras having followed Chauhan for five years. Beautifully shot and edited, it is a window into the social and cultural settings which Chauhan must navigate – from his home life to the unfamiliar, intimidating surroundings of the Danceworx academy in Mumbai, the discipline of a contemporary dance company in Israel, and the hustle of New York.
The ballet world as depicted in film and television is rarely without the character of an imperious teacher, thundering at their students, perfectionist in their expectations. Danceworx’s 70-year-old Israeli American balletmaster Yehuda Maor is that larger-than-life figure, without the clichéd malevolence – a legendary teacher to several generations of dancers from leading companies around the world, now reinventing himself in India.
Call Me Dancer is also a window into Maor’s navigation of a new and unfamiliar culture, and his embrace of what Danceworx founder Ashley Lobo calls the “sea of talent” in India. Against the backdrop of thousands of years of a rich music and dance culture, Lobo saw the need for instruction in European and American dance forms to complement Indian classical, folk and Bollywood traditions. “Ballet for me is the most complete framework for global dance,” argues Lobo, that allows dancers to grasp other techniques and develop new styles. Lobo views Maor as a guru figure, though the traditional Indian concept was new to him.
“With Manish I could spot a good instrument, a unique instrument,” Maor says. Training with him, Chauhan advanced at breakneck speed. “But still people think I’m an acrobat,” he protests, unable to shed his b-boy image. Not Yehuda, who started working more intensively with him and another student, Amir Shah, engineering a friendly rivalry between the two. Seven years younger than Chauhan, Shah won a full-ride scholarship to the Royal Ballet School.
Even before the documentary wrapped, Chauhan landed a leading role in a Netflix movie titled Yeh Ballet, about two gifted young dancers, the plot loosely based on his and Amir’s stories, with acclaimed actor Julian Sands playing the role of the taskmaster teacher. After Yeh Ballet came more Bollywood TV and movie offers, Chauhan clearly a natural-born actor with smouldering good looks and an easy-going charm. But he turned Bollywood down to continue pursuing ballet – a pursuit stymied by a shoulder injury, and by the isolation wrought by Covid. A scriptwriter could not have supplied more suspense to this narrative arc.
I had a chance to chat with Chauhan after Call Me Dancer had scooped up numerous film festival awards, premiering in cinemas around the US and on ARTE in France and Germany. I asked him whether he thinks about how different his life might have been had he said yes to Bollywood. He says he thought of those “shiny” offers as, “a kind of test: of whether I would stay true to my passion or not… I invested in dancing not in acting. Both have a different kind of skill set. The Bollywood movie for Netflix went really well. But I’m not sure if I’m a good actor because I didn’t invest.”
If the right acting opportunity comes along, he maintains, “I’ll never say no to it because it will help me in my dancing, but I will always stick toward the dancing because that’s my love.” He expects he’ll make the leap one day, “If I’m not able to dance anymore. With dancing, one has only a set amount of time, but you can act at any age.”
What kept him going during the rough patch when he needed shoulder surgery, and then Covid hit? The surgeon told him it would take a year to recover, he says, “I thought, I am very strong, I can do it in three months! But really I was not… I thought the career was over.” But the cameras were still rolling on the documentary, and he was mindful of those who were hoping for a triumphant comeback.
“After two or three months I thought: that’s enough sulking, enough getting sad, it’s time to do something, make something happen. So I thought, if my arm is not working, then work on legs, maybe I start drawing with the other hand. I see so many movies, so many stories of people who start from nothing and become something. They have such big injuries and they come back. Why is it only on the big screen, why can’t it be in real life? I’m always optimistic.”
Now dancing with Peridance Contemporary Dance Company in New York, Chauhan values the versatility that comes with performing works by a wide field of choreographers, including Robert Battle and Ohad Naharin. “You become a better dancer,” he says.
In one of the more poignant moments captured in the documentary, Chauhan makes peace with the thought that he would never dance a ballet prince. What an irony that, in this past holiday season, he danced the Prince in Igal Perry’s Nutcracker.
Chauhan tells me that after the performance, he had a flashback to the time when he used to clean the studios at Danceworx and sleep in the basement instead of going home. “It was a marble floor, and cold, and I woke up one morning and my neck was frozen, and no one there at the time to help. I had to crawl to the microwave to heat up water in plastic bottle and put it on my neck, and I wondered ‘Do I really want to do this?’”
Not surprisingly, Chauhan has received a heap of messages from aspiring dancers since Call Me Dancer has aired – in particular, he says, from boys who see some aspect of their own struggles in his own story. “Ballet boys try to be tough,” he laughs, “but some boys started opening up after seeing the film, saying things like, ‘I also got told that my body is not meant for ballet, and my mom told me this is your last year. How do I tell her I really want to do it?’”
There’s a big poster of him up at Peridance right now. He says his fellow dancers sometimes tease him: “They’ll say ‘You’re a star now, are you going to come and sit with us?’ Yeah, it’s funny. I feel I have a responsibility, but it’s also fun and I enjoy it, why not?”
