Art Against The Algorithm: The Creative Chaos Of 5 Homegrown Dancers

I started dancing when I was 10, and for a mostly shy kid who didn't so much as raise her hand in class, it was exactly what I needed to feel a sense of freedom from within. The discipline that followed for the next ten years was gruelling, and I still remember the scabs I had on the back of my heel from doing chakkar after chakkar (twists). But I remember going on stage for the first time, and I felt electric, like every single cell of my body was working in unison for the first time.

Dance is one of the most tactile art forms there is — painful, laborious, and physically exhausting, like any other sport (yes, dance is a sport, go argue with the wall). That tactility, the sheer physical cost of it, is also its most incredible quality. For this piece, we spoke to five homegrown dancers about their journeys: how they built their artistry in the first place, and how navigating social media and the rise of AI has since reshaped the way they see their own role as artists.

Where It Started

The crew known as Underground Hustlers (UGH) trace their roots to a "never-ending" list of international names like Bam Martin of Mos Wanted Crew, Chachi Gonzales, alongside homegrown teachers just as formative: the 13.13 crew, Ryan Martyr, Sambo Mukharjee and more. "These are a few teachers who inspired us, and they are the reason we started to pursue this art form seriously," they say. "It changed our perspective towards dance." What began as admiration for individual dancers gradually became something bigger than dancing itself.

For B-girl Simran Ranga, there was no single hero to chase. She wanted to be on TV, wanted to be "different" — and it was her teacher, B-Boy Deven, who put a name to that restlessness. "The first time I saw him doing breaking moves, something just clicked," she says. He trained her harder than the boys around her, at a time when there wasn't even a separate B-Girl category to compete in. Later, watching B-girls who were mothers, and breakers dancing at an elite level with a missing limb, reshaped what she thought the form was even about. "It's not about having a perfect body or perfect circumstances; it's about your mindset, passion, and how badly you want to keep going."

Simran Shivakumar's path started with music before it ever became technique — Bollywood and Kollywood songs that made her "want to move". Her gurus gave her the discipline underneath the joy. Twenty-two years into Bharatanatyam, she still calls it a search for her own voice.

Harshita Gautam's story starts almost the opposite way — six years of Kathak as an outlet for a kid with too much energy, until YouTube cracked her world open around 2011. Step Up, ABDC, crews like SoReal and I.Am.Me — "Oh my God, this is really possible," she remembers thinking. Kathak gave her rhythm but hip-hop gave her permission to have a personality inside the movement.

And for Harini Nilakanthan, a Bharatanatyam dancer who now splits her time between the U.S. and India, the early influences were unapologetically genre-agnostic — Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi on one side, Michael and Janet Jackson on the other, West African and Nigerian rhythms filling her house because her mother refused to let her be "boxed in". That refusal to pick a lane, she says, is still how she moves today.

Holding Your Ground Without Chasing The Trend

For the two Bharatanatyam dancers especially, the pressure isn't just to be seen — it's to be seen without diluting the very craft that took decades to build. "My relationship with classical dance has never changed at its core," Simran Shivakumar says. "So when I come across conversations about classical dance being less trendy or less accessible, I don't see that as a reason to dilute the art form." What social media changed, she notes, was never how she dances — that's still entirely her gurus' domain — but how she presents it. She borrows formation ideas and camera language from Western dance videos and folds them into performances that are still, unmistakably, Bharatanatyam.

She's candid about the cost of that discipline in a feed that rewards speed. A 30-second reel she shot in twenty minutes, no budget, hit 66 million views. A 3-minute piece that took two months of drilling and real production money got 100,000. "I don't think this means audiences value artistic labour less," she says. "I think they simply need to be shown it again" — which is why she's started posting behind-the-scenes and practice footage alongside the polished final cut, making the invisible work visible on purpose.

Harnini Nilakanthan put it more bluntly: she "detested every single trend" that came out of TikTok during the pandemic, and instead of chasing the sound, she kept doing what she'd always done — practicing, filming it, pushing musicality inside Bharatanatyam's own vocabulary. That authenticity built her following, and it also brought her death threats over a single dance video. She's unmoved on the larger question of purity politics: "When you think about what is pure, then you can face lots of harmful exclusion. It makes it seem like you need to do it in one codified manner or else you are ruining it." For her, cross-pollination — Chicago footwork, house, poly-rhythms she recognises inside her own tradition — is evolution, done with respect for where it came from.

Harshita Gautam locates a similar tension from the other side, inside hip-hop rather than classical form. Underground Hustlers put it in more communal terms, describing a scene they feel privileged to have witnessed in its most authentic form, before the term trend existed: dance posters that didn't carry the song's name, choreography reveals that weren't a thing yet, students who showed up because they liked a particular teacher's way of teaching. "It was a surprise to listen to the song for the first time and see the chores after you learned at least 16 counts of it. It was pure joy." Today, they say, trends are more prioritized over authenticity and originality, but rather than mourn that shift, they push for balance: understanding how the new generation thinks while still holding onto what made the form matter to them. As one lesson from class stuck with them: "Either you grew up with it or go with it."

What The Machine Hasn't Lived Through

Simran Ranga's answer is physical, almost literally scarred: shoulders scraped, knees bruised, weeks of bed rest just to learn a single move. "AI can create something instantly, but it can never experience what a dancer's body goes through," she explains. "What people see on stage, she says, is the shortcut version of a story that was never a shortcut. "You cannot shortcut humare khoon pasine ki mehant" (our blood and sweat)."

Simran Shivakumar reframes the question around who's actually creating the visual language of a performance in the first place. Take the dancers out of a music video, a concert, an award show, she argues, and see what's left. "The music is something you hear. We are often the reason you can see it." AI, in her view, can replicate movement and even generate something beautiful — but it hasn't stood backstage with nerves before a performance. "Those experiences are what give art its soul."

Harnini Nilakanthan is the most unsparing. She calls AI-generated art fundamentally different from human-made work. "Something like a machine taking my likeness and regurgitating it out after guzzling all the freshwater around it, doesn't have the same merit to me," she says. Her real objection is to what instant creation trains audiences to expect: a hyper-capitalist appetite for solutions to problems nobody had yet. "That amount of intense work that your brain is doing... that little sleep you feel, that constant overthinking — that is true to any artist, small or big."

Harshita Gautam and the UGH crew land somewhere similar but more procedural. "AI has helped everyone to keep up with [a rapidly changing world]," Underground Hustlers write. "The work which used to take days to finish is now done in a few mins. So it's not a bad thing for sure. But it should not become something to rely on." They frame it as a tool, not a threat, precisely because dance can't be abstracted away from the body doing it. "Dancing is totally physical and learned through years of training and experience." What matters to them is that the art is still made by people who fail and keep going. "This is something that will keep reminding us that there are still a few things that can't be done by AI as we humans do."

What they all keep circling back to, in their own vocabularies, is labour — the specific, unglamorous, repetitive labour of a body being rebuilt over years into an instrument. Social media didn't invent that gap between effort and reward; it just made it visible in real time, one view counted against another. AI, in their telling, doesn't threaten to replace that labour so much as clarify what it actually is: not the output, but the years it took a person to become capable of producing it.

It's the same math as those scabs on the back of my heel, or a B-girl's scraped shoulders, or a decade spent chasing sixteen counts before a song was even revealed. The pain is not incidental to the art, it is the art, compounding quietly until one night on stage it reads as electricity. That's the part no machine can shortcut — not because the output would look different, but because there'd be no body behind it that had to earn the moment.

As Harnini Nilakanthan put it before she signed off, "Push the boundaries so you can see where you can take yourself. We are limitless in the sense that we have so many possibilities we can make."

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