Song Story – An immersive concert

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, 7/5/2026

Student Sessions at the RCS Glasgow

Producer: Dhakshini Jeganathan

Quite possibly one of the most uplifting and creative ways to spend a Friday night, Dhakshini Jeganathan's ‘Song Story’, is an immersive concert bursting with a riot of earnest lyrics, hand-made puppetry, and a surprisingly layered sound for a production of twelve musicians. This was an ambitious production with the song melodies written by Jeganathan and a score arranged by Milosz Czarniecki and Wentao (Samuel) Xue, surrealist painting (live!), and videos (pre-produced and live recording) – overflowing with the ideas and questions of youth with the desire to embrace them all at once.

As part of the RCS's Student Sessions productions, my two children (age 12 and 9) and I got tickets and joined a completely sold out performance held in the intimate Ledger Recital Room at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Far from being just university students, there were several other older children and parents scattered amongst the warm and supportive audience.

Three days later, and as I write, my sons are bursting into song. Jaganathan's ‘Little Person and the Big Person’ captured their imagination and clearly tapped into the developmental space of wondering just where one fits as one grows, not only in size, but awareness and self-hood. It is a question that she asks often in ‘Song Story’ which touches timeless questions of becoming that young adults ask of themselves and their world. Her songs and puppetry seem designed to evoke an emotional mood around a theme, which she helpfully described beforehand for each and every song in the programme.

Fourteen songs – sometimes manta-like, others more poems set to melody – make up ‘Song Story’, with four of them sung in Tamil, though Jaganathan's musical heritage informs her work in more subconscious ways as well. Her use of both Western and South Asian (Carnatic) scale unintentionally provides a window into her embodied and lived memory of song. When she composes and sings in Tamil one has the feeling that she's reaching into a preconscious memory of music, and that leaks into her English work in both the style of song writing, which is heavy on repetitions, and in her voice which carries experience of a folk singer (not the perfections of a classically trained vocalist). This makes her performance honest and relatable. In retrospect, it's easy to see how her lyric and melodic compositions draw heavily, and perhaps unconsciously, on a Carnatic tradition of repetition to create the emotional mood of her pieces – something that, when presented in English with a Western scale was at first confusing. However, when brought side by side with her Tamil pieces one can understand better the flow of ancestry underpinning her songs.

Supporting her songs were, of course, the puppets – shadow puppets, wooden kinetic puppets, audience participation puppets. Aside from the shadow puppets whose silhouettes were casually cast upon the back wall, her song ‘Fish Out of Water’, involved more than a dozen wooden fish puppets on sticks handed out to the audience for group participation. This delighted everyone, especially the children there. That said, the projections on the overhead screen were arguably a stronger visual point than the shadow puppets. While mostly they were images of Jeganathan's surrealist and abstract art (which she has been practising from the age of 10), for ‘The Journey Song’ she projected a video of her Indonesian shadow puppets visiting and journeying through Edinburgh in the sunshine. This was perhaps her strongest use of puppetry in the performance as it deliberately subverted the place of the puppet (which should be used in the dark, behind a screen) and brought it into a new context – just as Jeganathan often identifies herself as feeling out of place. And if I had one suggestion to this delightful young creative, it would be to explore more of how to take her puppets out into the world. In fact, I would love to see an entire series of puppets-out-of-place videos to complement her work.

In all, ‘Song-Story’ was a delightful evening of folk song, and of folk production. A way of expressing oneself and speaking to one's community, and in that way she sews her Tamil heritage into a young and contemporary European tradition of youth folk music performance. Jeganathan is a young woman who is searching for her artistic and creative voice bravely across many disciplines, many cultures – and it will be a delight to find out in years to come how she hones and directs her talent.