Up Front: Enchanted evening
Published in the Home News Tribune 8/20/04
Robin Renee used to be a rock singer. Now she's all that, and
more: Renee has morphed that style with her new passion, leading
kirtan, a form of devotional Indian chanting involving the repetitive
call-and-response of divine names from the Hindu religion. The
result? "mantra-pop," as Renee likes to call it.
But when Renee leads kirtan just about every month at the Princeton
Center for Yoga & Health with percussionist Karttikeya, who
often plays the South Indian naal (double-headed) drum as well
as a variety of found objects, they stick to tradition -- one
that continues to move them.
Q: (Kirtan) seems to erase the line between
performer and audience.
A: Right, exactly. It's not about performance. It's about having
an experience together.
Q: Tell me why you were drawn to it.
A: . . . A couple of years ago . . . (spirituality) really grew
in my life in huge proportions. A friend asked me if I wanted
to do some chanting. It didn't really, really grab me until a
few months later. It became a really, really powerful tool for
me. And I think that comes from -- music is my vehicle, really
. . . And it was sort of (about) finding that right combination
of elements.
Q: What does it mean for you to be spiritual, and how is chanting
connected to that, if at all?
A: For the most part, spirituality is a very direct experience
for me. It's about communication directly with spirits. I've never
been drawn to traditions that mandated that someone else had to
mediate that for us. So really for me it's been that solitary
experience of finding the deep silence and meditation and things
like that. (Also), when you begin to chant those names -- one
of the things they say about Sanskrit is that, the language, the
words and the things are equivalent, so as you chant, you actually
become one with that energy.
Robin Renee
Devotional singer Robin Renee's got the
spirit, and she's bringing it to Skillman.
Q: How do you connect that silence with
the sound of music? How do those both work?
A: It's a different approach to the same result, ultimately, I
think. In kirtan, you lose yourself in the sound, ultimately,
especially the repetition . . If you say "Hare Krishna"
over and over, you're able to dissolve into that. And after a
while, your thinking mind can go away a little bit, and the sensing
and the directness that we're divine comes forward because it
sort of allows us to get rid of all the chatter that tells us
otherwise.
Q: What does this give you that your own music doesn't, the music
that you've worked on in the past?
A: It's not about me, I would say. It's very liberating for it
to be about just being with a group of people and singing the
names and feeling a oneness and finding peace. It's not about,
if I present this to a record label, what will they think about
it?
Q: So it's really affected the work that you're doing.
A: Oh, absolutely. For a while, I felt I was two separate people
walking around, Robin Renee, rock singer, and then Robin Renee,
devotional singer, and that's not what I want to be, ultimately.
For the most part, I want to see myself as a whole being all the
time, and I want to be just as comfortable to talk about my spirituality
and perform music that incorporates that in a club as in a yoga
center. So it has been a journey to get to a place where I'm more
and more comfortable with that.
-- Laurie Granieri
VITAL STATS
WHO: Robin Renee
WHAT: Singer/songwriter/musician
WHERE: "Kirtan-o-Rama!" chanting with Karttikeya, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, Princeton Center for Yoga & Health, Montgomery Professional Center, 50 Vreeland Drive, Suite 506, Skillman. $10 suggested donation. (609) 924-7294, www.princetonyoga.com or www.robinrenee.com.