Modeling BharataNatyam Dance Steps: Art to SMart

Abstract

BharataNatyam (BN) like any other Indian classical dance comprises of a sequence of possible and legitimate dance steps. It is estimated that using the main body parts namely head, neck, hand and leg itself, more than 5 lakh dance steps can be generated for a single beat. Choreographers and even dancers usually repeat their favorite dance steps or the conventional casual dance steps taught by their teacher while performing for multiple beats. As a result several valid and many other significant non-traditional dance steps remain unexplored. Hence, we propose to have an auto enumeration followed by auto classification of significant BN dance steps that can be used in dance performance and choreography. In short, we try to transform sheer art into a System Modelled art i.e. 'Art to SMart'. The foremost and most challenging task is to have a computational model that represents different BN dance poses. In this paper, we have proposed a computational model to represent BN dance steps and have presented the detailed description of formulation of a dance position vector that comprises of thirty explicitly identified attributes to capture and represent all variations of a BN dance step. We have named it as a SMart system for modelling BN steps, where SMart stands for System Modelled art. We have also demonstrated sample dance steps and their corresponding representations with appropriate dance step images.