Here comes an app to help enthusiasts learn dance at home and help improve the classroom experience of beginners.

Well-known dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant has created the dance practice app called ‘Natyarambha’.

The app helps classical dance students practise and hone their ‘adavus’ or basics outside the classroom. It seeks to provide teachers and gurus with a useful training tool, said Ananda Shankar, Railway Services officer, popular speaker on dance forms and guru herself. She has conceptualised the web application ‘Natyarambha’, that can serve as a personal Bharatanatyam coach. It has been produced and created by Shankarananda Kalakshetra, the Hyderabad-based, not-for-profit institution set up by Ananda, who is also a cancer survivor. The subscription-based digital app attempts to blend tradition and technology.

“The first-of-its-kind Bharatanatyam practice app, scheduled to be launched in Hyderabad on January 22, is inspired by the Prime Minister’s ‘Digital India’ initiative and aims to motivate students to practice and rehearse their basic training beyond the classroom’,” said Ananda, who has been teaching and choreographing dance for over four decades.

Guru-home practice

“My idea of creating the app was to bridge the gap between classroom training and home practice. It links Guru-home practice with a range of video, audio and commentary. In today’s fast-paced lifestyle, formal training in Bharatanatyam by a teacher is only possible for a few hours a week, making practice at home a necessity,” she told BusinessLine .

The app comes with guidance, mnemonics, music, and visuals, replicating the format of a Bharatanatyam class, and a range of practice options that will make practice at home easy and interactive.

Helping Ananda in the effort is software professional and Bharatanatyam dancer and teacher Sneha Magapu, who led the Project Natyarambha and enabled a traditional dance form ride the technology wave, by synergising software and dance forms.

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