Let’s do the dance

1 Which specific dance move first caught global attention after being used in a celebration by Cam Newton, an American football player for the Carolina Panthers, during a game against the Tennessee Titans in 2015? It was later used by many celebrities including Paul Pogba, basketball star Lebron James and even Hillary Clinton on the Ellen Degeneres show?

2 Which set of vigorous Italian folk dances get their name from the fact that performers resemble the victims of the bite of a venomous spider?

3 Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber claimed that he came up with his musical, Bombay Dreams, after viewing this smash hit Bollywood dance sequence from a 1998 film. The song, based on Sufi mystic Bulleh Shah’s lyrics, was shot at a Unesco Heritage Site. Name the song or the film.

4 The premise of which super hit film was based on a New York article by Nik Cohn, which he later acknowledged to be a fabrication?

5 Mythology. What name did Arjuna adapt during his one year as a dance teacher to princess Uttara in King Virata’s Matsya kingdom?

6 Which dance originated in the 1880s along the River Plate river, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay, and has three distinct forms, Argentine, Uruguayan and Ballroom?

7 In Arabic, it is known as raqs sharqi, the Eastern dance, or raqs beledi, the folk dance. Its more common name is a direct translation of the French ‘Danse du ventre’.Which is this dance form, where the focus is far more on torso as opposed to limb movements?

8 Which musical drama of the 1970s, also the name of a dance performance, was based on the Berlin stories of novelist Christopher Isherwood and won eight Oscars, including a Best Actress for Liza Minelli in 1972?

9 Cab Calloway called it the ‘Buzz’ when he first performed it in the ’30s. But the person who really made this move big first performed it in public on a television special on 25 years of Motown music in 1983, and then used it in an iconic video. The person, and the move.

10 For what specific dance are the Turkish Mevlevi Order founded by the followers of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī famous, something usually performed during a sama ceremony?

Answers

1. The dab, originally from the Atlanta hip hop scene, in which you drop your head into the bent crook of one slanted arm, while raising the opposite arm.

2. The tarantella, which, apparently, resembles the actions of people bitten by a tarantula spider

3. ‘Chhaiyya Chhaiyya’, from the film Dil Se, which was shot on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway train

4. Saturday Night Fever, which launched John Travolta’s film career

5. Brihannala. He was cursed by Urvashi that he had to spend one year as a eunuch

6. Tango; the Adidas Ball designed for the 1978 FIFA World Cup was also called the tango

7. Belly dance

8. Cabaret. Interestingly, Isherwood’s other acclaimed work was his biography of Sri Ramakrishna Parmahansa

9. Michael Jackson and the Moonwalk, which was also the name of his biography

10. Whirling; they are the famous whirling dervishes

Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup

Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW