So high, solo!

Tara Baswani is the first Asian to sing at the Cirque du Soleil, for a show titled Kooza.

A slim, 29-year-old Tara Baswani welcomes me into her brother's home in Delhi that she is visiting on a short holiday from her day job at the Cirque du Soleil.

As we sit talking about her amazing career trajectory, from singing for a lark without the benefit of any formal training, she herself seems unaffected by her success as the first Asian performer at the Cirque. Needless to say, it is an honour that's not easy to come by.

Baswani's chilled-out demeanour about singing at the Cirque may have something to do with the way her life has taken happy twists and turns without her having to resort to tedious planning and plotting that normally accompanies such success.

Says Baswani, "Work has always come my way. I actually started singing when I was 13 years old and I did a lot of jingles, also a lot of theatre." This early grounding stood her in good stead even before she embarked on this stint with the Cirque "" when she did live shows with bands like Euphoria and Mrigya.

The Cirque "" Baswani does not elaborate why "" decided that they needed to look in India for the singer for their new show titled Kooza. They contacted Teamwork Films' Sanjoy Roy for possible names and a casting director flew down to Mumbai.

Says Baswani, "Sanjoy used to manage Mrigya and he has always stayed in touch with me. He suggested that I should give the Cirque a try."

In the same breath she says, "The Cirque is taking a huge risk with me. They have never worked with an Indian before. You do feel the onus of projecting India's image."

Baswani, once she cleared the auditions and got a two-year contract as the lead singer for Kooza, was the last to get to Canada, where the Cirque is based. She had to plunge into rehearsals almost immediately. But that wasn't really a problem: "The Cirque is amazing. They take care of everything for you. It is very efficient."

Efficiency notwithstanding, the job as the lead singer for any show can be both taxing and tedious. The repetitive nature of performing the same show day in and day out, sometimes twice a day, can be challenging.

Says Baswani,"I waited almost four months after I had selected to sign on as I thought that doing the same show for two years would be boring. I did become restless after the first one and a half months. The hardest part of the show is to keep the consistency going."

Kooza, a three hour show whose main focus (like with all Cirque shows) is the circus acts, premiered in April this year in Montreal, Canada and has travelled to Quebec and Toronto. Each show is watched by about 2,500 people. Says Baswani, "If you go for a Cirque show, it's an evening out. And the music is meant to enhance the acts."

But such is the professionalism of those performing that nothing, absolutely nothing stops the show and each performer must be prepared to improvise, especially at moments of crisis, Baswani says.

During one show, for instance, a trapeze artist fell and broke a bone mid-way through the act. But Baswani, as the sountrack for the show, had to carry on.

Baswani sings from a range of different musical traditions: Celtic Arabic, jazz, Indian classical and funk to a Hindi song.

Baswani has also had the pleasure of making up words for lyrics. Says she, "The Cirque encourages you to do that and it is so much tougher to write gibberish."

But more than the music what Baswani found tricky was the make-up, as all Cirque artists are expected to do their own. She says, "I really suck at make-up so I was apprehensive."

After her two years at the Cirque will be over, Baswani says she would be open to doing another Cirque show, if asked by them, or plans to return to India and finish her album.

She adds, "I want to keep performing live and I want to keep making original music." But, surely, her experience at the Cirque will be a hard act to follow.