UT Bollywood fusion dance team qualifies for national competition

The University of Texas at Austin’s competitive Bollywood dance team, UT Saaya, will compete in the annual Legends dance competition in Dallas, Texas, on April 20.

Legends is the national final competition in the Desi Dance Network circuit and is the largest Bollywood dance competition in the United States. Every major university in the U.S. has a Bollywood fusion dance team — which mixes hip-hop and contemporary dance with traditional Indian dance styles like bhangra, raas, kathak and bharatnatyam — but only the top 10 teams in the country convene each April to compete in the Legends National Championship.

UT Saaya was the first co-ed Bollywood fusion dance team to be created on the forty acres in 2011. However, they only received their first invitation to compete in the Legends competition in 2022, where they placed fifth. Saaya returned to the national finals in 2023, where they placed second overall. 

This year, the Longhorn dance team traveled to Illinois, Maryland and Minneapolis to compete in various competitions within the Desi Dance Network circuit to qualify for Legends. They placed within the top three teams in each of these competitions, according to UT Saaya captain Aryan Paul. These wins allowed them to gain a very high ranking score within the Desi Dance Network circuit, 1085 out of 1250, making them currently ranked the second-best team in the nation.

“We want to win it, so it's gonna take a lot of hard work,” UT Saaya captain Pranav Konduri said. “We have been putting in so many hours sweating our ass off.” 

In a Feb. 8, 2024 article by Deadline, National Geographic announced that they will be delving into the world of competitive Bollywood dance in a new docuseries produced by Smriti Mundhra, the creator of “Indian Matchmaking” on Netflix. 

“I don’t think most people know that (the Desi Dance Network) is a thing,” Adi Pillai, a freshman physics major and UT Saaya dancer, said. “If this new series comes out, it’ll show what a lot of South Asian kids experience on campus and shed a lot of light on it, which is really good for our community.”

This new series is slated to be six parts following two key squads competing in the Desi Dance Network circuit and their journey to Legends to compete for the national title. The release date for the series has not yet been announced.

“We were definitely approached (for the docuseries) last year and the year before,” UT Saaya captain Navita Dhillon said. “They’ve filmed our practices a time or two.”

UT Saaya ultimately denied the offer to be featured as a main subject in the new series which will instead follow the co-ed dance team Laksh from the University of Texas at Dallas and the all-female team Buckeye Fusion from Ohio State University, Dhillon said.

This article and video was originally submitted as an assignment for journalism portfolio taught by nuri vallbona at the university of texas at austin.

High kicks and higher stake

Cheerleaders are a staple of American culture. Any high school slice-of-life movie will tell you that the girls in the cheer squad are on top of the suburban ruling class. The stakes, glamour, fame, and scandal get even higher when you go pro. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are world-class performers who have solidified themselves as the pinnacle of cheer excellence. Their iconic uniform is symbolic of American sex appeal, and they have integrated themselves into every part of pop culture, from TV shows to brand deals; they've done it all. But, regardless of how prominent the squad is in our culture, how much do we really know about the reigning queens of the football field? 

A journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin, Sonali Menon, will dice into everything cheer: the history of the team, their scandals, the infamous "Making the Team" reality TV show, and the greater implications of what it means to be a woman in the public eye.

I am a bit of a podcast junkie. It doesn't matter if I'm cleaning, working, or blankly staring at the ceiling; I will always have some audio medium flooding my ears in the background. The series that got me into podcasts was "The Orange Tree," which details the tragic death of a UT student named Jennifer Cave. Robert Quigley, my professor for my first-ever reporting course in college, produced it and introduced it to me. I binged it immediately, and I was hooked. "The Orange Tree" was made through UT's audio production house, The Drag, and became one of the top true crime podcasts on Spotify and Apple Music with a 4.8 rating on iTunes. So, I was thrilled when I was given the opportunity to produce an episode for The Drag Audio House, the published of “The Orange Tree” under podcast producer Katey Outka.

For my podcast episode, I delved into a world I'd been fascinated with for ages — NFL cheerleading. More specifically, the glamorous realm of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I had always known about the cheerleaders — when you are a Dallas native, it's a little impossible to avoid their navy and white star motifs — but I became obsessed with them in middle school after watching their reality show "Making the Team." I was thrilled to be able to interview current Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Victoria Kalina for this project to gain insider knowledge about the team. I hope you have as much fun listening to this episode as I had making it!

In Good Hands

In the spring semester of my sophomore year, I enrolled in seasoned documentary producer, podcaster, journalist, and professor Katherine Winkler Dawson's class, Reporting Images. In this class, we were assigned a final project of creating a 3-4 minute documentary video about a single subject of our choosing. 

Before this, I had never dipped my toes seriously in the non-writing mediums of journalism. My video production experience had been limited to iMovie before this class. Still, I am very thankful I was given the opportunity to work on this project because it taught me valuable skills in how to source interesting feature subjects, record A- and B-roll footage, how to storyboard and write scripts after parsing through all your footage, and how to piece everything together seamlessly along with natural sounds and music in Adobe Premiere Pro to create an engaging video. 

In my video project, I followed the story of Paige Hawkins, a UT student who runs a successful nail business from her West Campus apartment. I learned about her through Instagram and was inspired by her work ethic and ability to balance her rigorous studies as a health studies major with her time dedicated to maintaining a clientele base and honing her artistic skills. 

Child’s Path

Sonali Menon · Child's Path Audio Project

In the spring semester of my freshman year, I took a class called Digital Storytelling, taught by Professor Robert Quigley. In this class, we were assigned a final project: creating a 3-minute audio project covering a single feature subject of our choosing or a news coverage event.

Working on this project gave me my first experience in audio production, and I learned many valuable skills, from sourcing to developing an ear for exciting soundbites and editing in Adobe Audition and Audacity.

For this project, I focused on an Applied Analysis Behavior (ABA) center in Frisco, TX, called Child's Path. I really wanted to highlight an ABA center because my sister has Autism, and ABA centers and therapists have been immensely helpful to her and our family in helping her communicate and navigate through life a bit easier with their professional assistance. Not many people know their work, so I wanted to shed more attention on all they do for individuals with developmental disabilities and offer my thanks for all they contribute through exposure.