Dance and Deception in Othello: Desdemona’s “Turn” in Omkara and Huapango

This chapter serves as a companion to the previous chapter but focuses on dance and sets the analysis in the context of the Renaissance debate about dance that mirrors and extends the controversies about music (and theatre). I argue that the word “turn” plays a crucial role in the play, not only in embodying Iago’s effort to “turn” Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch,” but in evoking a dance term and linking it with excess sensuality, as in Othello’s comment that Desdemona “can turn, and turn, and yet go on,/ And turn again.” Referencing early modern dance manuals as well as texts involved in the dance debate, I outline how Iago choreographs Desdemona’s actions in ways that lead to Othello’s misperceptions. I also suggest that the dance which precedes the night watch in Cyprus serves as a darkly ironic nuptial masque. From here I examine two modern film adaptations that centralize dance: Huapango, which is set in Mexico during a huapango dance festival, and Omkara, in which Bollywood dance numbers by the Bianca figure (Billo) play a crucial role. Ultimately, I contrast Huapango with Omkara by focusing on Billo, a nightclub entertainer whose outlandishly sensual dance numbers seem to place her in opposition to Dolly (Desdemona) but who, I argue, comes to embody a healthy form of romance whose spirit is expressed most visibly in exuberantly eroticized dance. In this respect, I conclude that the film realizes in its culturally distinct way Sir John Davies’s early-modern vision of dance as “love’s exercise.”