Sooni Taraporevala’s ‘Waack Girls’ is an underdog tale with a difference

Usually, when you tell a film or show director that their work reminded you of something else, you run the risk of offending them. Not so with Sooni Taraporevala and the two leads of her debut web series, Waack Girls, out today on Amazon Prime Video. The nine-part show, which revolves around the life of six young women in Kolkata who form a dance troupe, reminded me of Chak De! India—both feature a scrappy, ragtag bunch of women, each with their own compulsions and things to prove, who don’t initially get along and have to learn how to be a team. When I say this to Taraporevala, though, she beams. “Really?! That’s so great to hear,” she says, while her actors Mekhola Bose and Rytasha Rathore thank me for the comparison with the 2007 sports film. 

But the thing about Chak De!, and about most classic underdog stories, especially on screen, is that they invariably feature a thrilling climactic scene in which the protagonist, against all odds, emerges as the victor, reducing the audience to a puddle of happy tears. And this is where Waack Girls is different.

Dance as an expression of oppression

First, what the hell is waacking? Also called punking, it’s a dance form that originated in the queer clubs of Los Angeles in the disco era of the 1970s and ’80s as an expression of the LGBTQ+ community’s oppression. Bose, a waacker from Kolkata, has been practising the form for more than 11 years, and, although shy to accept it, she’s widely considered one of its pioneers in India. And now, with a major, first-of-its-kind web series on it, she will certainly be credited for bringing it into the mainstream. In fact, says Taraporevala, while the show is purely fictional, it is inspired by Bose. “I was casting for Yeh Ballet [her 2020 film, based on the true story of two underprivileged boys who become ballet dancers], and went to watch a dance battle at Famous Studio in Mumbai, close to where I live. As I walked in, I saw Mekhola dancing. I didn’t know what she was doing, I had no idea there was something called waacking, but I just loved her. I filmed her, met her the next day at another event, asked her if she’d ever acted before, and eventually cast her in the film. So that’s how my waacking journey began.”

In both these works, dance is the leitmotif. It’s easy to believe that has something to do with the fact that Taraporevala herself trained in ballet as a child, but she laughs at the thought. “I wouldn’t say trained. I attended classes. For many years. But, well, let’s just say there’s a picture of us performing on stage and I’m the only one with the wrong arm up!” Still, dance is a world she knows, even if she has no talent for it. “I love watching good dancers. And I’m a photographer; I love visuals. I love the fact that you can film dance in a very interesting way and convey something without words.”

Another similarity between her 2020 movie and this show is that they juxtapose a dance form with both a class and a gender that seem at odds with that form. In Yeh Ballet, two boys from a slum learn a dance form that’s typically seen as feminine and upper-class, while in Waack Girls, English-speaking middle-class and wealthy girls practise an ‘aggressive’ kind of dance that was a response to marginalisation. But Taraporevala insists that these dichotomies aren’t about pushing any kind of message. “Yeh Ballet is based on a true story; the two boys actually came from those backgrounds. And one thing that fascinated me, besides their economic class, was that I had never seen male dancers when I was growing up. The other thing was that one of the boys was Muslim, one Hindu, and the ballet teacher, Jewish. And that’s real life, I didn’t make it up.”

For her, unexpected contrasts just make for interesting stories. For example, the palatial haveli that Ishani [Bose’s character in Waack Girls] lives in. All sweeping staircases, high ceilings, and dusty antiques, it’s the kind of house you could imagine as the setting of a classic Bengali period film. “But instead of having a Satyajit Ray kind of scene in there, I wanted to use that space to show young girls waacking. That sort of juxtaposition interests me.” Taraporevala did want characters from different backgrounds and social strata in the show, but not to be ‘correct’ in any way—just to tell a good story.

On imperfect feminism and solidarity as the big win

Through the show’s nine episodes, we do get to see a variety in the girls’ upbringing and motivations. There’s troupe leader Ishani, an orphan who lives with her ailing grandfather (Barun Chanda) and has to handle not just her own inner demons, but also two uncles who want to evict them and take over their sprawling mansion. Her friend LP (Anasua Chowdhury) makes copies of designer clothes by day and dances at a club by night, and is months behind on rent. They’re joined by Anumita (Ruby Sah), who’s forced to be a gymnast and is bullied by both her father and her coach; Michke (Priyam Saha), under constant pressure from her pushy mother to lose weight; and Tess (Chrisann Pereira), who has to babysit her gambling addict of a mother (Lillete Dubey). And the glue that binds them all together is their enthusiastic manager, Lopa (Rathore), a feisty lesbian who frequently clashes with her conservative, wealthy parents. She’s not whipping her arms around on stage, she’s not winning edgy, underground dance battles, she’s not even always successful at getting the girls the kind of gigs they need. And she fucks up, a lot. Yet she somehow, eventually, manages to win over her sceptical, jaded dancers.

This, too, reminds me of Chak De!, where the coach takes about half the movie to earn his team’s trust. In fact, we circle back to that film while discussing a scene in Waack Girls, in which the dancers, who have so far mainly bickered with each other and not developed any real bond, finally find common ground when they get into an all-out physical fight with a bunch of obnoxious men. They leave the place a mess, but they leave as a team. If you recall, SRK’s movie had a very similar scene. In both, the women bond over a common enemy, namely patriarchy. But Rathore is clear that female solidarity goes way beyond this. “What binds women is far more sacred and divine than patriarchy. I would never give [men] that much attention or importance.” Bose, though quieter, agrees: “I think it’s just that these girls won’t tolerate unnecessary disrespect, no matter where it comes from.”

It’s an interesting ‘unlearning’ curve for the characters, because they also have their own prejudices and their moments of completely disrespecting each other. You see it every time LP fat-shames Michke or Ishani gives Tess a hard time because jealousies about a guy come into the picture. So are they friends? Are they allies? “They’re humans,” says Taraporevala. “We all have friends whom we’ve fought with and then become friends with again. We have friends who say inappropriate things, who are not woke, like how LP doesn’t have the right vocabulary. But it was never meant to be a show about perfect girls who do everything right all the time.”

That idea of imperfection is important, especially in an age when we are constantly shamed for not having the perfect politics, especially the perfect feminism. But that’s something we need to explore and understand about female solidarity, that there is no one perfect feminism. It is layered and complex, yet when push comes to shove, female solidarity is the one thing that women can rely on to save themselves. Rathore understood this a long time ago. “I’m a big, big fan of sisterhood. My closest friends till date are my girls from school. So it’s a beautiful gift that Sooni gave us all that we got to be a part of Waack Girls and make friends for life, and work with so many women across all the departments [most of the HoDs on the series were women].”

For Bose, interestingly, it was working on the show that actually taught her the importance of female solidarity. “I’ve never had a girls’ group. I’ve been the only girl in an all-boys group my whole life. So I learnt this through the series. I think I needed this, too.”

And at the end of nine episodes, when I think about what the show really is about, it’s this. It’s not about a major victory, there’s no trophy, no sudden solution to all the characters’ problems. The biggest win for these girls is understanding that they have each other.