Five, six, seven, eight. Groove to the beats. Get your rhythm right. Practice the steps again. No, this ain’t a dance class in progress. It’s simply the choreographer training enthusiastic parents and relatives of the bride to stage a mega dance performance on her D-day. Choreographers, Bollywood performers and scriptwriters are now the faces of the entertainment business in weddings.
So if you have the moolah then a Bollywood performer will come on board - the fees depending on the popularity of the star or the starlet. While SRK is rumoured to charge a couple of crores for a function and Salman supposedly gets paid Rs 1 cr, lesser known stars such as Malaika Arora, Mahima Choudhary and Dia Mirza can charge anywhere between Rs 15 lakh to Rs 20 lakh each.
But if you don’t have the budget or the inclination to go overboard, try a wedding choreographer instead. Interestingly, there are variations that have come in within choreography as well. Explains freelance choreographer Vrinda Nichani, “People are experimenting with new ideas. They are also making it into a skit, enacting scenes and dancing. I teach them both acting and dancing as choreography is all about emotions. For the dialogues, they either hire a scriptwriter or write the dialogues themselves.”
Nichani charges a higher fee if the choreography includes acting as well. So its Rs 50,000 for 10 songs for a duration of about 20 minutes. But in case it involves acting as well, she charges Rs 70,000 for the same number of songs.
Professionals such as Nichani are now highly sought after for such lavish wedding functions. Ask Divay Dua, another Delhi-based choreographer who has his hands full this season. “I have already done five weddings in the past two months. We do a lot of act-based choreography in the sense that the songs involves a theme and a story.
A lot of people now prefer choreographed dances to Bollywood performers as they want to be directly involved in putting up a good show,” feels Dua who charges Rs 25,000-Rs 30,000 to stage eight songs in a function. The sangeet is just not complete without their presence. All inhibitions have been put to rest. For choreographers and scriptwriters, this means big bucks all the way.
