In Netflix’s “Best of the Best,” Collegiate Bollywood-Fusion Takes the Spotlight
When choreographer Joya Kazi was tasked with bringing collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance to the screen in Netflix’s Best of the Best, she found herself drawing from real-life experience. “It is cutthroat, it is dramatic, there’s relationships, there’s rivalry,” she says with a laugh over Zoom, reflecting on her time with the Hindi Film Dance club she started at the University of California, Davis. Born in Mumbai and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Los Angeles in 2012, Kazi’s roots in multiple styles of Indian classical dance—and her screen resumé spanning projects from Hollywood to India—made her uniquely qualified for the ambitious new dance movie.
The coming-of-age comedy, directed by Lena Khan, premiered on September 18 and signals a true landmark moment for South Asian representation in global pop culture. It follows childhood best friends Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) as they dive into the high-stakes world of competitive Bollywood-fusion dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. For Kazi, the opportunity to work on Best of the Best alongside choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman Chbeeb felt like worlds colliding. “Never in a million years did I think that something about our niche world would ever be for the masses,” she says.
Bringing Bollywood-Fusion to Netflix
As both a choreographer and a cultural consultant on the film, Kazi—who also makes a brief cameo as a competition judge—drew from a breadth of styles within classical, folk, and traditional Indian dance, channeling intricacies from kuthu, garba, bhangra, and others. She felt especially passionate about capturing the nuances of South Asian–American culture, including fusions with other dance forms she grew up with.
Cast member and Los Angeles–based dancer Neha Anushka, who makes her movie debut playing rival team captain Selena, looked to her Sri Lankan and South Indian heritage to immerse herself in Indian classical dance for the first time. “I was trying to connect with the styles, and the easiest way to do that was to go back to my South Asian roots,” she says. Though she has danced since age 7 in genres ranging from jazz, contemporary, and hip hop, Anushka discovered new challenges in the meticulous details of traditional Indian dance. “At night in my hotel room after learning choreography, I would practice the hand gestures,” she says.
With numerous fierce dance numbers driving the plot, rehearsals for Best of the Best were unsurprisingly rigorous. The process began with two months of preparation in Los Angeles for Ramakrishnan and Kedia, with Kazi recalling the stars training “like true professional dancers” for six classes a day, six days a week. When production moved to New Jersey for filming, the choreography team worked with a skeleton crew to bring their ideas to life. “You have a director’s vision that you absolutely need to fulfill, and then you have to make sure your actors look phenomenal in the movement that you give them,” Kazi says.
It certainly helped having high-caliber dance talent bolstering the cast. Indian dancer and actor Tanishq Joshi, who plays UCLA team member Vishal, has spent years fusing Bollywood music with hip-hop styles. He also choreographed a hip-hop/street-style section for the South Asian dance team, Broad Street Baadshahz, at his alma mater Drexel University in Pennsylvania, so he was well poised to take on the movie’s biggest numbers. “In rehearsals [for Best of the Best], I remember everyone was struggling, because they were hard pieces!” he recalls. “Imagine Step Up and Bring It On levels of dancing, but in a South Asian space.”
A Watershed Moment for South Asian Dance Representation
Some of the most memorable dance sequences in Best of the Best include an ambitious competition number inspired by an Indian wedding; an explosive student-union showcase; and one fierce dance battle at a frat party. For Anushka, her center-stage moment came in the shape of a Mount Everest–themed competition piece. “That was one of the best experiences of my life,” she says. “You get to see so many different styles in the span of two minutes.” The whole experience was especially surreal for Anushka since the story unfolds at UCLA, where she’s currently double majoring in statistics and data science, as well as communications.
The movie’s dance climax arrives with a high-concept competition showcase themed around colonial India’s legacy of stolen jewels. That scene brought unique logistical challenges when the team swapped prop rehearsal yarn for powerful heat-emitting lasers during filming, which appear in a museum-heist sequence. “We had to be very careful, and the dancers were truly avoiding those lasers!” recalls Kazi.
It isn’t lost on the dancers what a milestone it is to be a part of Best of the Best. Joshi has been manifesting platforms of this size for some time, and gives full credit to the crew of South Asian creatives, including co-writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, for making the dream finally “come true.” Anushka agrees that things have come a long way since her convention days, when she rarely saw other dancers who looked like her in the hip-hop space. “Getting to inspire the next generation is definitely what I’m most excited about,” she says of the film role. As for Kazi, she says she felt like she was “holding back tears every day on set.” In that way, things have come full circle since she first entered the industry as a teenager with hopes of bridging her two worlds: “It was such magic and a blessing to feel like the things I dreamt of 25 years ago are happening now.”
