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.

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.