By: Shandra Back
Pitch Black. The only available sense to the audience is sound. A mix of Punjabi and classic Bhangra music blares from the speakers as the air of anticipation rises. In the blink of an eye, the lights blast on and Fauj Bhangra, a Boston-based Bhangra team, becomes a sea of bright colors and radiant smiles. Weaving and jumping with boundless energy, the dancers show no sign of exhaustion except for the perspiration on their brows.
After training for over 100 hours, the curtain opens and closes within mere minutes. Yet, while the excitement is over within the blink of an eye, a big source of the joy of Bhangra for Patel is all the moments leading up to this climax. Through a mutual love of dancing Bhangra, Patel was able to find his community and and an unbiological family in a new city far from home.
[It] is one of the best feelings I've ever experienced,” said Patel. “Dancing on stage…It’s like you're not just dancing by yourself. You're with people that you've been training with for so long.”
From a young age, Patel was exposed to Bhangra through events at the Indian American Community of South Florida (IRCC), where he grew up. Every year, in early November, the IRCC would host a Diwali show. At this event, Patel watched high school and college-aged kids compete in Bhangra competitions. One year, as he was watching the competitions, it clicked. “I want[ed] to get up on stage and go into that…So I started dancing,” said Patel.
Bhangra originated from the Punjab region of India and Pakistan as a folk dance to welcome a season of good harvest. According to Patel, many of the dance moves of modern Bhangra were inspired by farming practices. The dance spread throughout other regions of the world and evolved from social dance to choreographed performances and competitions, said Patel. The music and dance have evolved and continue to celebrate their origin.
Patel began learning to dance Bhangra in middle school and continued it into his high school years. According to him, most dancers begin dancing Bhangra in college, but Patel felt lucky to have had the opportunity the pursue this dream from a younger age. Through his various Bhangra teams leading up to college, Patel began to love the art form and community aspect of the team. He feels that he made some of the closest bonds of his childhood with other members of his dance teams. “It goes beyond just being accountable for each other at practice and at the performance and at competitions,” he said. “That's one thing that I'm really grateful for having been able to form through something as simple as just coming together and dancing.”
Deven Mistry has known Patel since preschool and danced with him on Bhangra teams before college. Mistry grew up alongside Patel inspired by his dedication to the team and his leadership as a captain in high school. “He is determined and knows how to dedicate his mind to something,” said Mistry. “Rishi doesn't stop working toward it until he deems it to be perfect.” While they are not on the same team anymore, Mistry has found his own Bhangra community at the University of Florida and calls Patel for captaining advice.
Since Bhangra contributed to his childhood identity and sense of belonging, Patel moved out of the house knowing that he wanted to pursue dance in college. “I knew I was gonna keep dancing. That was not a question,” said Patel. “The question was, where am I gonna dance?” As a current freshman at Boston University, a big pull to the city of Boston was to join the dance team Fauj Bhangra which Patel had been following for many years prior. As an established team for over a decade, Fauj Bhangra prides itself on social media as being “Boston's Premier Bhangra Army.”
Bhangra is grueling which makes the career of the dancers short. This is why, Patel explained, many of the well-respected teams of the past have discontinued. “You only have a certain number of years that you can keep pushing yourself that hard,” he said. Fauj Bhangra is unique because the captain of this team has remained the same for the past decade.
Being a member of Fauj means more than a name, a title, or a reputation. For Patel, Fauj has become his family away from home. The transition into college hit him harder than expected. Patel became overwhelmed with schoolwork and felt homesick. Yet, in finding his place among the team, Patel joined more than another extracurricular; he found a familiar anchor in a foreign place.
For Patel, a large draw of Bhangra is in the energy that each member brings to the team. Fauj works hard, practicing, on average, three times a week. The work is both gratifying and unifying. With a dance such as Bhangra, where the performance depends on the team rather than the individual, team chemistry is essential. Patel loves dancing in an environment where his team members hype each other up.
It has always been Patel’s dream to take home first place in a competition. On April 16, he accomplished this dream. After the hard transition to BU, any consideration he had of transferring to a different college disappeared after the Down South Bhangra Competition in Alabama. “That weekend really gave me a sense that I'm around the people that I need to be around and it was really an eye-opening thing,” said Patel. While he felt close to his teammates in the months leading up to the competition, Patel felt that traveling to compete solidified his bonds with the team and gave him the community he had been dreaming was waiting for him in Boston.
For Patel, the excitement of competition doesn’t end when the curtain closes. Sometimes it’s in the moments after that make a lasting impact. When watching Bhangra, the audience sees smiling faces and boundless energy from the performers. Although after the curtain closes, the dancers collapse from the exertion of pure energy and adrenaline. After competing in Pittsburg at one of the biggest Bhangra competitions in North America, Patel’s previous team was making their way back to the dressing room when his parents sent him a video recording of the performance. Instead of watching the screen with everyone else, Patel observed the faces and actions of his teammates at that moment.
“All I could see was everybody hyping each other up,” he said. “It was not like oh, you messed up this move. It was just like, you fucking killed that. That was amazing. That was the first moment where I saw everybody on our team so happy to just be watching each other dance.”
Credits:
Photos courtesy of Fauj Bhangra dance members