Punjabi-style fitness is dancing near you.

After a too-long fire drill that left them standing outside in the drizzle, a ragtag crew of teens dressed in sweat socks and yoga pants filed back into Eric Hamber Secondary School’s dance studio. Their young faces represented cultures from across the globe, and they perked up to see bhangra instructor Raakhi Sinha ready to lead them through a routine. Bollywood music pumped, and they were off. Hands in the air, feet stomping, heads held high, the teens sweated it out.

“So pretty! You’re princesses,” shouted Sinha, as a circle of girls posed and swayed to the beat.

It was like Disney’s High School Musical had suddenly gotten a multicultural reality check, found some genuine energy, and developed a cheeky sense of humour.

This class is just a small sample of Sinha’s week, which includes teaching bhangra to dozens of students from five to 85 years old, from Surrey to Vancouver. Her company, South Asian Arts, is at the forefront of the populist bhangra revolution in the Lower Mainland. (She co-owns it with dhol-drum instructor Gurpreet Sian.) South Asian Arts (www.southasianarts.ca) instructors teach bhangra-aerobics classes at the company’s studio in Surrey, and at Killarney, Sunset, Coal Harbour, and the Roundhouse community centres in Vancouver.

“Bhangra is a 100-percent effective way of getting you in shape and entertained,” Sinha told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview following the class, explaining the dance’s explosion onto the local scene in the past five years. “I have a whole comedic shtick that makes the hour fly by.”

Bhangra evolved from traditional harvest-festival celebrations in India’s Punjab state. Outside of Asia, the music and dance have become popular in the past 10 years, especially in the U.K. In Vancouver, their popularity is soaring. The Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration (www.vibc.org), which runs February 29 to March 8, is in its fourth year. VIBE (Vancouver International Bhangra Explosion)—the city’s multi–award winning, internationally touring breakout bhangra team—split up last year, but its work in fanning the flames of competitive bhangra won’t be forgotten. (Both Sian and Sinha were members.) Now, the Lower Mainland boasts about 200 bhangra teams of seven to 14 dancers and drummers each, according to Sian. Bhangra was even featured at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 2007.

Sinha noted that community-centre classes are representative of the communities they’re in: at Killarney, Asian women take her class; at Sunset, the group is largely South Asian; at the Roundhouse and in Coal Harbour, they’re Caucasian. At the studio in Surrey, older women show up to exercise in traditional Punjabi suits. Sinha noted that the dance is at least as intense as a gym-style aerobics class, and it particularly strengthens your thighs, calves, and shoulders.

So bhangra is a dance, an exercise, a competition, and a cultural celebration. It’s also key to healing Vancouver’s multicultural divide and breaking down the myth of the mainstream in this city, according to the on-the-ball high-school teacher who invited South Asian Arts to her class.

“Not all cultures listen to Christina Aguilera,” Eric Hamber Secondary School dance teacher Tristesse Seeliger told the Straight in a phone interview. “We assume everyone knows who she is because she has the loudest voice. She represents corporate, mainstream culture. Bhangra is an answer to the capitalist mainstream. As a teacher in a high school that’s very multicultural, I feel it’s my responsibility to speak to that.”

The faces seen in Hamber’s halls are mainly Asian Canadian, along with smaller numbers of students that are South Asian–, Euro-, and African-Canadian. Though Seeliger’s heritage is European—she’s a tall, muscular blond from Victoria with a background in ballet, jazz, and contemporary dance to match—she’s striving to make her classes representative of the school. Thus, bhangra, along with the African and flamenco dancing she’s already introduced, and the Chinese- and Filipino-dance instructors she’s searching for.

Plus, she said, bhangra is a workout worthy of a gym class.

“You’re just sweating buckets,” she said.