Scaling heights

Sanjay Jayaraman, an alumnus of the New York Film Academy, is a spirited man these days. The reason — his recent dance video, Acceptance, in which he did the choreography and dance, has been selected at the prestigious Screendance festival to be held in Barcelona, Spain.

“The screening is on April 29 and I am excited about it — this is the only entry from India for the dance festival! The video is about how we accept our cultures in a globalised world. In Acceptance, we are showing how Bharatanatyam and Western dance can collaborate with each other,” starts Sanjay.  

A passionate dancer, Sanjay has learned salsa, jazz and hip-hop. He was also a winner of reality show Jodi No.1. “I went to Brazil and then Argentina, and taught dance workshops all over the two countries. People there are aware of Bollywood dance styles, but haven’t heard of our kuthu style. I wanted to introduce this dance style to them and they happily agreed. So, I decided to teach them both, but everyone ended up liking the kuthu more!” reminisces Sanjay.

Though his dancing talent helped him scale heights, Sanjay always wanted to become an actor. So he decided to pursue acting from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. “I learnt the nuances of acting, and it was a very different experience. I did  short films after that. One of my recent Tamil short films, Kolza has been well received on Karthik Subbaraj’s YouTube channel Bench Culture, garnering more than 75,000 views,” he tells us.

Sanjay has also directed and acted in a video called Yellow Horizon, completely shot in Hong Kong. “We were scouting for locations, and decided to shoot somewhere outside India with a budget below five lakhs! We shot for eight days and the whole video was completed with just three people. Through this project, we wanted to give the audience a refreshing experience — instead of shooting in and around Chennai, anyone can go abroad and shoot with the same budget,” he concludes.