Dancing on air

KOCHI: One of the best and most effective ways to shake off stress after a bad day is to just blast your favourite music and dance your heart out. With Covid-19 filling our lives with a general sense of gloom, it would do us all some good to tap our legs and swirl our bodies once in a while. When a group of 16 friends realised this, they wanted to do something fruitful with the extra time on their hands. To spread cheer, the young women tapped into their shared passion, starting a dance collective called Daily Dance Point.

The collective, which was launched in August with a YouTube channel and an Instagram handle, creates short videos of freestyle choreography to popular tracks featuring its members. With two among them appearing in a recent video released by Karikku, the collective has managed to generate quite a stir within the indie dance community in Kerala in a short span of time.

Daily Dance Point comprises Safia Khaleel, S Anupama, Archa S Jayanth, Nirmala Chandran, Mahima Saira Anoop, Farheena Babu, Rajalekshmi A, Afrin Fathima, Rithu Krishnan, Sajna Shereef, Gowri S, Aishwarya M S, Riya Mariyam Thomas, Amala Salin, Yasmin Shafi and Anjali Suresh, who are all from Kollam and have known each other since kindergarten.

 "All of us have been friends our whole lives. We have kept in touch even after passing out from school. We are spread in different parts of the world right now, but we consider each other family. Although only one of us has undergone training, dance has been a part of our lives since we were young. So during the lockdown, there was a loop dance challenge going around on social media. We recorded each of us dancing from wherever we were and compiled it in one video. It received over 20,000 views and was also telecasted on a TV channel. Soon after, our other friends suggested that we should come out with more such content together. That eventually led us to start a dedicated dance group," says Nirmala.

All about dedication
With around 16 videos under their belt on YouTube, the group's most well received series of videos titled 'Dedication series' involves selecting an established music composer or singer and choreographing his or her tracks. While seven of the members are recurrent dancers featured in the videos, the rest stay behind the camera taking care of cinematography, editing, social media and branding.

"Each of us has a separate talent and we divide the work according to our strong suits. So far, we have managed to do everything by ourselves even though we weren't aware of a lot of technical aspects when we began. We have also not sought any sponsorship. Hence, this is truly a labour of love by a bunch of girls," says Safia.

 The young women, all in their early 20s, are determined to promote dance as an artform that goes beyond being a mere performative medium. For them, it marks celebration, grief, anger and self expression in a palpable and physical manner perhaps no other artistic pursuit can.

"Our immediate goal is to upload regular and interesting content. Going forward, we would like to learn different dance styles and incorporate them in our videos, perhaps come up with fusion choreography. A video featuring all 16 of us is on the cards and we are hoping to find a studio space to shoot our content. Dance has given us so much joy and we hope to spread it to girls youngerthan us," says Anupama.