Art to SMart: Automation for BharatNatyam choreography

Abstract

BharataNatyam (BN) is an ancient Indian Classical Dance. The manuscripts namely Natyasastra and Abhinayadarpana are the only source of documentation for this Classical dance form of South India. Although few archives are available for the heritage preservation, automation is hardly attempted for the choreographic process. Choreography is an art which most of the people staunchly consider as a human domain. We have attempted to use a computer to automate the process of choreography for pure dance movements in BN. Using the power of Information Technology, an attempt has been made to aid the choreographer in this creative process. Hence we have named it as Art to SMart where SMart means System Modelled art. In this paper, we present an evolutionary algorithm, which generates multibeat sequences. It takes an initial dance pose as an input along with n, the number of beats and generates a sequence of n feasible consecutive dance poses starting from the input initial dance pose. The experimental results and dance expert ratings of these results are promising to continue further research in this direction.