From Nani's 'Aaya Sher' to Ram Charan's ‘Rai Rai Raa Raa’: Decoding The Male Hero’s Dance Choreography in Indian Film Songs

There is an animal abandon in the dance choreography of Telugu mass cinema—male actors jumping, squatting, bouncing with a reckless frequency, sliding across the floor, using every muscle of the leg to prop every seizure of movement. In Paradise’s ‘Aaya Sher’, for example, Nani moves forward by squatting on one leg, bouncing on it, flapping his other leg like a wind-wiper to lug him forward, gathering dust with his motion, while lighting a cigarette, hands in the air, triumphant. In ‘Rai Rai Raa Raa’ from Peddi, Ram Charan stamps the floor with such ferocious frequency he spends just as much time on the ground as he does hovering above it.

This boisterous male energy and lithe slugs of celebratory movement weren't always present in Telugu cinema. “In the 1950s and 1960s, it was usually the heroine who would be seen dancing,” film scholar SV Srinivas tells THR India. “Akkineni Nageswara Rao in Dasara Bullodu (1971) might be the first example of a hero dancing in Telugu cinema, though this must be verified.”

According to Srinivas, while the hero’s dance emerged as a notable feature of Telugu cinema in the 1970s, it was in the 1980s and 1990s that the ‘group song’ mounted on a massive scale became popular—where "a hero’s popularity and greatness is embellished by others around him. The focus, here, is on the hero’s body, rather than the heroines.” The number of bodies in the crowd increased, in tandem with the scale and spectacle of the film, whose budgets kept ballooning. “If you have so many bodies on screen you cannot have them do slow movements,” Srinivas notes.

The actor’s physique, too, changed, increasingly squeezed, shaped, and polished in the gym. While yesteryear star-actors like Chiranjeevi, too, were known for dancing —break-dancing in Pasivadi Pranam (1987), for example — the new choreography required a different kind of body and focused labour, impossible when you are doing multiple films a year, being pulled from one set to the other, the way actors were in the 1990s and prior.

“These songs require hours of practice to pull off a dance number on screen. A native bodily intelligence is not enough. You can have ‘Naatu Naatu’ precisely because these are accomplished bodies performing these dances. We don’t see Prabhas doing these songs, for example,” Srinivas notes.

The pan-Indian success of films like RRR (2022) and Pushpa (2021, 2024) punctuated this trend, where the male body became a perfectly tuned instrument, as though part of the percussive highs of the music. This is the kind of choreography that is both endearing and edifying for the fandom—unembarrassed by the absurd, unintimidated by the acrobatic. Tamil cinema, however, took a diversion.

In the 2000s, you had new stars—Vijay, for example—who were willing to bend their bodies, and new choreographers—Prabhu Deva and Lawrence Raghavendra—who were willing to put these bodies to test. Prabhu Deva was also an actor-choreographer, through the 1990s, who buoyed films to commercial success merely by his brand of slick acrobatics. Gentleman in 1993 was a pivot.

But now, choreographer Sathish Krishnan notes, “In Tamil cinema, there is the story’s narration along with the song. Before, the movies would have one introduction, and maybe two foreign-set songs. That would also be the time for the audience to go out for a smoke. In a 2.5 hour film, there used to be 20 minutes for just songs. Now even those 20 minutes are used for a story you need to follow.” As a choreographer these days, he also “directs” songs, a new demand made on choreographers.

Telugu cinema, though, has retained the centrality of the song and dance. “Songs are still important as a breather. They don’t make you understand the storyline, they are there only to entertain the fans,” Sathish notes.

Have the demands made by Tamil fans on their superstar shifted, then?

In Tamil cinema, the actor Vijay is an exception. “His fans want to watch him dance, so there are not too many montage songs in his films,” Sathish notes.

But the winds are changing. Beast (2022), for example, had only one song—‘Arabic Koothu’, where all the energy, abandon, and madness was densely packed into one explosion of absurd choreography. Directors like Mani Ratnam and Shankar, known for their music, too, have largely given up on choreographed dance sequences. Shankar’s 2.0 (2018), for example, only had an end-credits song, and Ratnam’s Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (2018) used music only as a montage—the first Ratnam film without lip sync songs. When Shankar made Game Changer (2025), though, his Telugu film with Ram Charan, he went back to the formula—the film was promoted on the basis of how exotic and expensive the song sequences were to shoot.

“Tamil actors don’t dance these days, with the exception of Dhanush and Sivakarthikeyan. The young bloods who are coming show their promise in their action choreography, but they don’t understand that only dancing for a song will take you into everybody’s house. Songs always have a better reach. Take ‘Rowdy Baby’. The kids love it,” Sathish notes.

The superstars still acting—Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth—are also a lot older, the former 75, the latter 71. Their bodies cannot afford to expend the same energy. “I feel like Rajinikanth’s songs, in the past few decades, are sped up by 1.25x,” Srinivas notes.

Even as the number of songs reduced, the energy within the song seems to have expanded. One argument is that the choreography in the 2010s changed because the music changed. Like AR Rahman introducing new sounds and rhythms into cinema in the 1990s, new-age composers of the 2010s unleashed new percussive highs, a shift in tempo.

“It is a progression of sorts,” Srinivas notes. “Bappi Lahiri's music was fast-paced for its time. Rahman’s ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ was, perhaps, one of the fastest-paced songs of the 1990s. With each generation, music is getting faster, with new influences like EDM and hip-phop being Indianised into a hybrid form.”

Shrasti Verma, a choreographer who assisted on blockbuster songs in Jailer, Game Changer, and Pushpa, tells THR India, “With songs from composers like Anirudh, Thaman, and DSP, we have to give more energy to the choreography. The high tempo requires a lot of dancing.”

The choreography that wraps the body around beats, has, naturally, increased its vocabulary of movement. “Earlier, there was jazz and salsa, but now, we have Latin, hip-hop, tap dance, waacking,” choreographer Baba Baskar says. “Choreography now is a lot faster. The instruments used are also different, there are computerized instruments now making unheard sounds. Aana thol addikikara madhari onnum illai (But there is nothing like hitting the hide of a percussive instrument)." The prominent use of the drum, Srininvas notes, is a predominant feature of these songs.

Like in the aughts, Tamil film choreographers are also migrating North, bringing with them their idiom. When Prabhu Deva choreographed Katrina Kaif for ‘Suraiyya’ in Thugs of Hindostan (2018) or Madhuri Dixit in Pukar’s (2000) ‘Kay Sera Sera’ it was distinctly different, in taste and conception, from any such song Kaif or Dixit had performed. ‘Mein Aisa Kyon Hoon’ in Lakshya (2004) and ‘Chinta Ta Chitha Chitha’ in Rowdy Rathore (2012), too, were unlike anything Hindi cinema was secreting, the former leaning into Michael Jackson and the latter into koothu, both of which Prabhu Deva internalised into a messy, but joyful fusion, the seams seen. The #MeToo-accused choreographer Jani Master, who often choreographed for Salman Khan, was engaged in O Romeo (2025) for ‘Aashiqon Ki Colony’ and ‘Paan Ki Dukaan’.

The way Tamil-Telugu film choreographer Shobi Paulraj shaped Shah Rukh Khan’s body in Jawan’s ‘Zinda Banda’ and the way Hindi cinema choreographers Bosco-Caeser framed the same body in Pathaan’s ‘Jhoome Jo Pathaan’ is an instructive contrast—the former, a tinny, percussive Anirudh composition, in an Atlee film, and the latter, a Vishal and Sheykhar composition in a Sidharth Anand film, that allowed for close-ups and frozen, glamorous tableaux. The bodies in the crowd are doing different kinds of work—the former is to prop the heroism of the hero; the latter, to serve as a dynamic backdrop. What distinguishes the choreography of Hindi from Tamil songs? Are we looking at a possible confluence of styles?

Baskar simply responds, “Style and swag is with them. Power and mass is with us.” He notes that Tamil cinema does not have situations like Hindi cinema, and besides, “the rhythm of the music is entirely different.” Describing Hindi film heroes as “stylish, slim, and trim,” he notes, “Even if they walk, it is like a dance.” This notion of grace associated with Hindi cinema heroes is echoed by Sandy.

Choreographer Brinda Master, too, acknowledges this stark difference, “Tamil cinema is inspired by folk traditions; it is very raw. Hindi cinema choreography, on the other hand, is more graceful, simple movements will be fine—easier for the audience to catch. In Tamil and Telugu, though, you need a lot of energy.”

Ultimately, though, songs are spaces of fabulation, where the movement of bodies is dictated by and dictates unique cultural fantasies. The loss of these songs, as it is being seen in Tamil cinema, is, thus, a loss of fantasy. As Telugu cinema expands its idiom, and Tamil cinema’s shrinks, shipping part of it to Hindi cinema, it is the question of fantasy that dangles.

“Films today want you to be in a conscious state. After watching ‘Arima Arima’, I was sitting on my bike smoking, wondering what the hell did I watch?” Sathish notes.

What, then, happens to rapture?