A traditional Bharatanatyam beginners’ class moves with the unhurried pace of ritual. Students stand in aramandi — knees bent, feet turned out — holding the posture until their legs ache, while the teacher, seated with a thattu kazhi, taps an unchanging rhythm into a wooden block. One adavu is introduced at a time, each repeated endlessly with only occasional corrections to elbows, knees, or posture. The class is a loop of teaching and watching, until the movement settles into muscle memory. Eventually, the students are allowed to sit, only to begin memorising mudras: the teacher demonstrates each gesture, announces its Sanskrit name, and makes the class repeat it over and over — patakam, tripatakam, ardhapatakam, kartarimukham. By the end, little has been “learnt” in the modern sense, but every detail has been measured, repeated, and absorbed in slow, deliberate increments. The rhythm follows them long after they leave.
But what if classes didn’t have to follow such a fixed, predictable sequence? Imagine a teacher who simply guided the students, inviting them to roll a dice to decide the day’s movement practice — a form-and-style-neutral exploration that encouraged curiosity over convention. Over time, each student could discover and choose the style that resonated most with them. What if even experienced practitioners could roll the same pair of dice to spark unexpected movement combinations, opening doors to entirely new compositions? In place of uniform repetition, there would be play, surprise, and the possibility of invention in each class.
Enter Atam — a sleek black-and-white tool, where white is for on-beat movements, and black for the off-beat movements, with cubical slots to hold dice whose faces display postures. Alongside are two sets of dials: one to determine which leg to use, the other to indicate direction. The dice are paired with colour codes — blue, orange, and brown — each linked to a specific action: a leap, a stomp, a jump, and so on. With every roll and turn of the dials, a unique sequence emerges, transforming practice into an ever-changing choreography. And the students, dice in hand, ready to roll, hold the power to decide what their next movement will be.
This Montessori-inspired tool, invented by Jayachandran Surendran as a part of his doctoral research at IIIT-Hyderabad, became one of the few arts-based innovations to receive patent recognition in India. “Initially, there was no idea of a tool. I come from a traditional training background where there is a teacher teaching the student with a nattuvangam or a thattu kazhi. I still believe in teaching that way, but ‘Can that be made easier?’ was the question that came up,” explains the engineer and dancer.
He draws parallels to how music, in any form, is easy to document as it follows the seven notes and certain scales of rhythm. “It is a grander idea that is in practice. So, I wanted to implore if there can be something equivalent to that in dance,” he adds.
One might expect a software engineer to develop an AI-driven system or a sleek app, but Jayachandran chose a different path. He set out to create something simple, tangible, and physical — a tool one could hold, roll, and interact with directly, free from screens and algorithms. “I was inspired by the Montessori method of education in Kalakshetra Foundation, where children would play with physical objects and learn. That caught my attention during my tenure as a faculty member. Especially the cubes, the building blocks, and the dice. So the idea of a cube was always in the back of my head. I decided to use it and stick postures to each face of the cube,” he explains.
According to Jayachandran, who along with several other dance teachers, used the tool on their students for his research, the combinations of movement that emerged made it seem like different forms of dance. Some felt like Ballet, some like our Tamil folk dances, some Mohiniattam, some Bharathanatyam, and so on.
Although it developed from the idea of helping his beginner-level students take interest in dance, especially his B.Tech students who had a dance course at IIIT-Hyderabad, the tool, he says, now offers more to advanced practitioners. “It is helping practitioners to compose new dance moves. What was a teaching tool for students, has become a tool for the teachers today,” he concludes.