A collaboration across borders

Chennai youngster Niranjana Ramanan’s ambitious initiative involves releasing a series of videos that brings together different art forms — and if the success of her first one Maathey is anything to go by, her brainwave is a hole-in-one already.

“I was a part of a popular reality show on TV, after which I realised there is so much more to explore other than classical music. After the reality show, I lent my voice for the Tamil movie Marudhu for a folk duet with Anirudh Ravichander for music director D. Imman. I was content, but always wanted to get back to my roots — traditional classical music. That’s when this idea first came to my mind,” begins Niranjana, who considers singing chorus for the likes of A.R. Rahman and Illaiyaraja as one of her favourite memories.

Wanting to experiment with traditional art forms and giving them a refreshing twist, she approached contemporary classical band Staccato (the only band from Chennai to perform at the 2012 Olympics) to work with her. “Soon things started falling into place and we felt that bringing another art form would give a multi-fold effect to the audio and visual content,” she recalls.

Then Maathey happened. “I knew my first song should be about women, beauty and serenity. Staccato loved the composition and wanted to give a new flavour to it instead of the traditional way. We roped in Sudharma, a classical dancer, who performs in the December Margazhi season regularly. The most beautiful part of the whole process was how things just fell into place. There was no need to tell each other what to do!” Niranjana recalls, with a smile.

The music video was a huge hit in the music community and on social media. Now, she’s already planning her next. “The next song is going to be in Tamizh. Dancers from various parts of the world have shown interest in collaborating with us for our next video. Even in the YouTube comments section, many have reached out to us. We are looking at featuring various other art forms in our next — contemporary dance, painting, sand art, and modern art, among others.”

Niranjana, who gives credit to her father and her guru, the late Sulochana Pattabhiraman, for making her realise that music was her calling, adds that she plans to train in Western classical music as well.

“I want to bring in arts and artists together from all parts of the world. This form of collaboration needs to become more mainstream and I also want to perform live, where there is an audio and visual connect. If youngsters start humming and connecting my music, that would be my greatest success!” she concludes.