Abstract
Bharatanatyam is one of the most celebrated classical dance
forms in India. It is performed and enjoyed by art enthusiasts all over the
world. It comprises expressions, hand gestures, footwork, rhythmic patterns,
eye, neck and head movements, lyrics, and music. These basic components
are integrated and woven into a beautifully crafted visual story.
However, beneath this creative visual craft lies a structured compilation
of technical, mathematical, computational, and modular aspects. In this
paper, we provide a database schema to store the artistic components in
a structured relational database model. By providing a database schema,
we provide a layered approach to store Bharatanatyam choreographies.
This layered approach helps in building choreographies by working individually
on different modules of the art form like the foot work, hand
movement, etc, and consolidating them to form and store sequences.
Bharatanatyam choreographies are a collection of sequences. In this paper,
we discuss how complete choreographies are modelled through the
logical sequencing of these components. Our paper lays the foundation
for bridging traditional knowledge of the performing arts with technologies
to help in digital archiving, cultural analytics, and choreography
suggestions.