Bollywood Schottisches

Several years ago, someone in the Bay Area dance community (maybe Deb Henigson) had the brilliant insight that the rhythms of bhangra, a folk music and dance from India, and schottische, a Bohemian dance popular in Victorian ballrooms, were the same. So here's some schottische music from India. It's worth noting that all three songs are, in true Bollywood fashion, over 5 minutes long. They're also fast, so I'd advise both shortening and slowing them down for dancing.

• Sadhna Sargam et al - Maahi Ve
  I was introduced to bhangra at Decadance's Spring Show 2005, where they performed a bhangra-schottische fusion to "Maahi ve." That piece is still one of my favourite Deca numbers, and you can see it at around 1:20 in this video. After checking out the music video for "Maahi Ve" on YouTube and finding out that it was from the film Kal Ho Naa Ho, I actually watched the whole movie to see this colourful, extravagant production in context.
• Shankar Mahadevan - Pretty Woman
  Turns out out most Bollywood films are long (we're talking over 3 hours) and chock full of singing and dancing. Here's another song from the Kal Ho Naa Ho soundtrack, and I definitely recommend watching the clip(below) if you want a taste of how over-the-top these song-and-dance numbers can be. Graham did a nice edit of "Pretty Woman" which we played at Friday Night Waltz in June.
  
• Shankar Mahadevan, Shaan, Mahalaxmi Iyer - Rock N Roll Soniye
  This is the "Bollywood schottische" that Richard Powers plays most often. I think "soniye" means something like "pretty girl" or "my love" -- it's a term of endearment.

Bronco Schottisches

Bob and I are teaching the Bronco Schottische at Faster Polka tomorrow night (Roble Studio, Stanford University, 9PM). If you don't know what that is, it's kind of like redowa for schottisching. As in, you get to go faster and it's fun. I learned it from Ryan and Monica at Waltz Weekend 6 years ago, but haven't encountered it much since then. Which is why we're sharing the fun tonight.

So, to make sure you all have something to practice with, here are a few schottisches that I like for the Bronco. They're all about 150 bpm, which seems to be a good tempo for it. You don't want to go too much faster, since Bronco is trickier than regular schottische, but you don't want it too slow either because then you lose the energy.

Rockapella - Zombie Jamboree

The iTunes link is to a live version; I don't know how that is for dancing. I have the version from this CD. You can also watch a performance on YouTube.

Joe Diffie - Third Rock from the Sun

I've also heard this one called a west coast swing, but I like the bounce it has for a schottische. You can hear the full track on last.fm.

Geoff Byrd - Elusive Butterfly

Disclaimer: I haven't actually danced to this one yet, but that will be rectified on Friday. It sounds like it should be fun, though. (Thanks to Rowyn for the recommendation.)

Nothing downloadable I could find, but there's a sample, a video, and a CD.