How I Turned My Interracial Love Story Into A Bollywood Wedding Dance Performance
Ever since I was little, I was completely mesmerized by the dance scenes in Bollywood movies. The vibrant music, the storytelling through movement, and the way entire groups came together to celebrate love always stuck with me.I knew that if I ever got married, I wanted to bring that same energy to life at my own wedding.
After a lot of deep reflection, conceptualizing with my husband and planning, we turned that dream into a reality.
If you're thinking about creating a Bollywood-style dance performance for your wedding, here’s how I visualized and executed our love story on the dance floor.
Start With Your Vision
Before planning choreography or picking songs, it’s important to think about the overall vision for your wedding dance.
For our performance, there were three main things I had to consider:
Blending our cultures I wanted our performance to fuse my Indian culture with my husband’s Latin culture so that both sides of our story were represented.
Including our friends We wanted our friends to participate in the performance, but most of them were not dancers. That meant the choreography needed to feel fun and achievable for everyone.
Keeping it reception-friendlySince we weren’t having a Sangeet, our dance would take place during the reception. I needed to make sure the performance was entertaining without taking up too much time.
Once we thought through these elements, the next step was figuring out how to turn them into a story.
Outlining Your Story
One of the most fun parts of planning a wedding dance is deciding how you want to tell your story.
Ask yourself questions like:
Where does the story begin?
Do you start with childhood, or when you first met?
When do your friends and family join you on your journey?
We wanted our story to showcase our love for our cultures and friend circles, blending into one.
The story would begin with my husband in his hometown, Miami, celebrating his Latin roots. From there, the story transitioned my lifelong love for Bollywood. Eventually, our paths crossed through Hinge, and our love story began. From that point on, our two friend groups joined in, symbolizing the union of our two worlds.
Based on this outline, I started selecting songs that aligned with each part of our story.
Getting Your Dancers Involved
Convincing friends and family to dance at a wedding can sometimes feel like pulling teeth!
To make things easier, I created a Google Form where everyone could select which songs they wanted to participate in.
This helped in a few ways:
Friends could choose the songs they felt most comfortable performing.
I could easily see how many dancers were in each number.
It helped me determine the difficulty level of choreography for each group.
Knowing who was dancing in each section also helped me plan formations, transitions, and the overall flow of the performance.
You can view the Google form here.
Creating Your Wedding Dance Mix
If you have multiple songs in your performance, the best way to bring your wedding dance vision together is by creating a custom music mix.
You can do this by:
Working with a wedding choreographer
Asking your DJ to help create the mix
Having the final music mix ready before rehearsals is incredibly helpful. It allows everyone to understand the pace of the performance and the transitions between songs before stepping into practice.
It also makes choreographing the full routine much easier, rather than creating pieces separately and trying to connect them later.
Creating Your Choreography
If you're looking for inspiration, YouTube and social media are amazing resources.
You can:
Watch the original music videos
Look up dance covers
Find performance clips to spark ideas
If you're not a dancer, working with a wedding choreographer can make the process much smoother. A choreographer can help structure your story, create choreography that fits your group’s skill level, and guide everyone through the rehearsal process.
Organizing Practices and Communication
When you’re coordinating multiple dancers, communication is everything.
For our wedding dance planning, WhatsApp was the most helpful tool. The poll feature made it easy to find rehearsal dates that worked for everyone.
We used the group chat to share:
The music mix
Formation guides
Practice details
Videos and links
Keeping everything in one place helped everyone stay organized and made the entire process much easier to manage.
Bring Your Story To Life
In the end, our wedding dance became so much more than just a performance.
It was a celebration of our cultures, our friendships, and the journey that brought us together. Seeing our friends and family come together on the dance floor to tell our story was one of the most memorable moments of our wedding.
If you're dreaming of creating a Bollywood-style wedding dance, start with your story, involve the people you love, and most importantly, have fun with the process!
