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Ep. 51 - Unclassifiable (Bijuriya)

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เนื้อหาจัดทำโดย PuSh Festival เนื้อหาพอดแคสต์ทั้งหมด รวมถึงตอน กราฟิก และคำอธิบายพอดแคสต์ได้รับการอัปโหลดและจัดหาให้โดยตรงจาก PuSh Festival หรือพันธมิตรแพลตฟอร์มพอดแคสต์ของพวกเขา หากคุณเชื่อว่ามีบุคคลอื่นใช้งานที่มีลิขสิทธิ์ของคุณโดยไม่ได้รับอนุญาต คุณสามารถปฏิบัติตามขั้นตอนที่แสดงไว้ที่นี่ https://th.player.fm/legal

Gabrielle Martin chats with Gabriel Dharmoo, who is presenting Bijuriya at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on January 28 and 29 at the ANNEX, with Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival and support from the Government of Quebec.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Gabriel discuss:

  • How do we artfully engage with colonialism?

  • What does it mean to have a transcultural perspective?

  • What does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of high and low, east and west?

  • Have you always worked across so many forms and disciplines or was there a trajectory that led from one to the other?

  • Are you more interested in self-directed projects these days?

  • What does it mean for you to investigate queerness?

  • Can you talk about the direction of your aesthetic since Anthropologie Imaginaire?

  • What are you working on next?

About Gabriel Dharmoo

Gabriel Dharmoo is a composer, vocalist, improviser, interdisciplinary artist and researcher.

After studying with Éric Morin at Université Laval, he completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Serge Provost, graduating with two Prix avec grande distinction, the highest honour awarded. His works have been performed in Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and South Africa. He has received many awards for his compositions, including the Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for his chamber work Wanmansho (2017) and the Conseil Québécois de la Musique Opus Award for his opera À chaque ventre son monstre (2018). He was also awarded the Canadian Music Centre's Harry Freedman Recording Award (2018).

Having researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai (India) in 2008 and 2011, his musical style encourages the fluidity of ideas between tradition and innovation. He has participated in many cross-cultural and inter-traditional musical projects, many led by Sandeep Bhagwati in Montreal (Sound of Montreal, Ville étrange) and in Berlin (Zungenmusiken, Miyagi Haikus).

As a vocalist and interdisciplinary artist, his career has led him around the globe, notably with his solo show Anthropologies imaginaires at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival (2015) and the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016). They also explore queer arts and drag artistry as Bijuriya (@bijuriya.drag).

He is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Centre and a member of SOCAN, the Canadian New Music Network, and the Canadian League of Composers. Since 2015, Gabriel has been a PhD candidate at Concordia University's PhD "Individualized Program" with Sandeep Bhagwati (Music), Noah Drew (Theatre) and David Howes (Anthropology).

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Gabriel joined the conversation from what is now known as Montreal, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka, a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst many First Nations including the Kanien’kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron/Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabeg.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights intersectional exploration and drag-pop aesthetics.

00:18

I'm speaking with Gabrielle Darmout, artist behind Bijuria, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 28th and 29th, 2025. In this quirky yet poignant examination of the intersections between queerness and brownness, Gabrielle Darmout engages in a self-reflexive dialogue with his drag persona, Bijuria.

00:38

This musical conversation delves into the power of song to express the hybrid, multifaceted layers that coexist with an identity, offering an insightful reflection on the fluidity of human experience.

00:51

Gabrielle Darmout is a music composer, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist. He was awarded the 2017 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music, following up on his internationally acclaimed solo, Anthropologie Imaginaire.

01:05

His new production, Bijuria, merges music, drag, and theatre, and has been presented a dozen times in Canada since 2022. Here's my conversation with Gabrielle. So just before we dive into really getting to know you, I want to acknowledge that I am participating in this conversation today from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

01:35

So the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh. I'm a settler here, and it's my responsibility to continue to think about what that means, my relation to decolonization and restitution, and educating myself.

01:52

And that looks differently each day. And recently, I mean, I refer to this actually quite often. in these land acknowledgments is acknowledging Yellowhead Institute because it's an incredible wealth of information and an incredible educational resource.

02:10

So I've been reading their cashback red paper and it really does a great job of framing what cashback is all about, about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth. And framing it that it's not a charity project and it's a part of decolonization and understanding that colonization is an economic project based on land theft that requires a political system that operates through domination and violence to maintain theft and therefore enriches the settler state necessarily,

02:49

impoverishes or in enriching the settler state and necessarily impoverishes and criminalizes the colonized. And I just find it so, their writing is so clear in how they frame these things that, yeah, I learn a lot.

03:04

Gabrielle, where are you joining this call from today? Thanks for sharing that. I am talking to you from home in Montreal or Joe Chaggy. Here's land of the Kanyakahaga, who are recognized as the custodians of the land and waters.

03:21

I have Indo-Caribbean ancestry from my father's side. So a whole history of indenture and a race sort of cultural ties to the South Asian subcontinent. And my mother is a French Canadian, present of such things, so I'm half white, half brown, but are they really halves?

03:46

You can't quantize it that way, but that's been my, yeah, my art is a good way for me to actually engage with all questions related to identity and power or decolonization or reflecting on coloniality as this thing that is part of everything and that we have to mindfully engage with.

04:15

And art for me has been the channel. Thank you for sharing that. And definitely I can relate to an aspect of what you're saying, and it's just a very kind of simple way of also being half-half, half-black, half-white, if we can call it them halves, it's much more complicated and richly complicated than that or complex.

04:38

But this is something that I'm super interested about your practice is the trans-cultural perspective. And it really stands out in your work, both in the perspective you bring to the work. and in the disciplines that you engage with and the historical context for those forms that you're working with.

04:58

So as a composer, you completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal with people I'm not familiar with, but who sound very important, and you graduated with two pre-Vécagrand distinction, the highest honor to be awarded, and you've since won numerous prestigious awards.

05:20

Your compositions have been performed around the world, and as well as studying in Western music traditions, you researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai over several years, and you're a drag performer.

05:34

So what does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of Western and Eastern artistic practices, as well as the intersection of high and low or popular art forms? First, I just want to say how I can't see how it could be any other way, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

05:55

It's not very straightforward of a path that I've had, but I've always kind of balanced all these ingredients that we just mentioned, whether we think of it as geography or in terms of type of art form, like with quotation marks high and low or popular or sophisticated art forms.

06:21

It's always been kind of a balancing act because I did undergo kind of training in music, which is very, very directly linked with Western classical music. So we could call it like urological. Santi Bhagwadi calls it urological.

06:43

So it's Eurocentric, but it's not anymore. It's everywhere. This type of music is everywhere, but it follows rules that have been born out of arts music at a certain period of history in a certain place.

06:57

And the tough part is like, it's kind of great music in many ways, but it's hard for me to be all in and it's hard for me to do only that. Even if I look at it from an avant-garde kind of position, because I could easily say I don't like classical music from the past.

07:17

Now I'm in the present doing that. That's one way of looking at it. But I don't feel like that sphere is where I want to have both feet in. So underground arts or I guess grassroots arts or hybrid forms, formats have always interested me.

07:42

And I also don't disavow the existence of art that's linked to through capitalism or commercial art or pop culture and all that. But I, so I engage with everything and I also am critical of everything in a way.

08:03

And the only way I can exist with this is through playfulness and through question marks, just asking lots of questions about it and thinking that it's both super, super, super serious and also kind of not really at the same time and sort of not funny, but something that can be, you know, poked at for the subject of satire or exploration.

08:33

Have you always been working in all of these forms? Like, for example, have you been you know, expressing yourself in drag, as well as pursuing this formal education in classical music? Or has there been kind of a trajectory that led you from one to the other back to the other?

08:53

Or yeah, how did that work? And also with with your training in Carnatic music as well? Yeah, no, it's, it's closer to the second part of your your second hypothesis is closer to the truth in the sense that I was, I'm, I say that I kept balancing it, but the proportion that it occupies in my life, or my activities or my projects have shifted has shifted.

09:21

So when I was a student at the conservatoire, for sure, I was way more invested in that type of urological music composition, and very invested in playing that game. I think near 20s is kind of the era of seeking a validation as well.

09:39

And validation from peers and from a network or from a community was something that I, I kind of was very, you know, that it affected a lot of decisions in a lot of ways that in choices, not necessarily negatively, but sometimes I do feel like that's a big part of it's such a formative decade.

10:06

And I've spent a lot of it in that field. But at the same time, I was doing other types of projects. But I also always had in mind that I wanted to go to India and study classical Indian music Carnatic music, which is one of two systems of classical Indian music from the south of India.

10:25

And I went there after my after I graduated from conservatoire. So that's 2008 11 ish that I went there. And then drag came 10 years after that. So 2018 that I started. And I guess if I look at the broad patterns, with hindsight, I'd say that I've been gradually and mindfully distancing from the more urological contemporary or new arts performance, interdisciplinarity, and that involved drag as well.

11:16

So it's a balance, but there's also a direction to it. Now when I take on projects that I feel are more linked to contemporary music, I choose them more, I don't know, I choose them. I weigh the pros and cons way more.

11:38

And I take less and less of this for different reasons. And is that also maybe because in those projects you are, are those opportunities to come in as a composer or a musician? I'm curious about also the relationship between, is more of your work expressed these days as like self-directed projects?

12:00

And is that a priority of yours? Or do you also enjoy working as a musician on other people's compositions? So with composition and say composing in that tradition of being commissioned to write a piece for a specific ensemble, et cetera, I've done a lot of that in the 2010s and it became a less and less.

12:23

And then the pandemic just really made me go like, okay, like, let's, let's, let's consider what this is. And if I like it, I never actually really liked it. I never liked composition, the act of being alone and writing the notes, that part I've, I've never felt healthy doing that.

12:43

It's always felt very, it was hard for me to find joy, except maybe at the beginning and then near the end when you're like, this is actually going to be performed. I'm actually going to work with people.

12:55

And so that social part of it is very rewarding for me. So I've kind of I've been drawn to projects where I have more agency also in what I can engage with. And that's not necessarily a question of like permission, like people wouldn't want me to do a piece on identity.

13:21

It's not so much about that. It's for me, it's more, I can't see how the media matches the message of what I'm trying to put out there. So with the piece that I did in 2014, kind of live arts performance.

13:41

I knew that I wanted to explore power, coloniality, voice, satire, all tons of stuff I wanted to explore with that piece. And I could not do that with Wood Quintet's commission, like it makes no sense to me.

14:01

So I knew that this was a live theater slash music slash voice hybrid that I had to do and self produce. And so that's been kind of what I've been craving. It's because I still like to collaborate on things.

14:20

Because it just makes for a more balanced kind of creative cycle as well to sometimes be involved in other people's things or to perform or to not be the one organizing everything and all of that. I think that's a very healthy balance, but for sure.

14:37

all the projects that I dream up of are are usually also not very typical in their formats and need me to have a very slow time in the slow gestation period. I don't know if that's a word in English as well.

14:58

Yeah. And so these I'm curious to learn a little bit more about these forms. Like, was there a moment of kind of rupture where you just got introduced, you know, where you immerse yourself in in drag or karmatic music, or I know that you're also working in other with other forms and disciplines as well.

15:20

Or it sounds like it's kind of been more an organic process of, you know, those being the natural forms to to realize the dramaturgy necessary. But I am just curious to learn a little bit more about that integration of these different practices and what that what that was like to start working.

15:44

And maybe also it was like to start being having your work in those forms received by different public or the same public differently. Yeah, I think it's been organic, but very mindful and also a process in which I allow myself space and grace, I guess, because there's lots of overlapping things.

16:11

And if you look at it like chronologically, I'm still like I have an album of chamber music with the National Arts Center Orchestra musicians that came out last year, which kind of celebrates stuff I was doing in the 2010s.

16:26

I'm still it's, it feels like a bit of a bubble in time to go back to that. But I would I still felt proud. I still feel proud of that work. And I still want to kind of engage with it, but that also came with the question, do I want to write a new piece for orchestra?

16:44

And my gut feeling was no. But let me look backward and see what I want to do with the NAC Orchestra, and that it was to celebrate things that already existed, and that didn't take creative energies away from the stuff that I feel is me now or me in the future.

17:04

So I guess I finished my PhD last year, and my whole thesis was just kind of research creation around voice and theater music and anthropology. And my framework is one of alignment, or seeking alignment, or in my case, seeking vocal alignment, where I want my literal voice that sings and speaks and does things.

17:37

the voice that sounds and then the more conceptual voice, like what we want to say as artists or as people, and to have those kind of aligned and different projects. So you're like, huh, I'm actually using my voice to be my voice.

17:52

Anyways, it's a little confusing kind of thing, but just to kind of bring all of that together. And for me, that takes time. And it takes a bit of accepting contradiction also, because you, you can't, you can't switch.

18:08

We can't switch so fast. I think maybe some people are wired that way. But for me, I kind of need to really feel things out. And that's been so I think this, this like seeking alignment thing, this, this process has has been what led me to, to think like, oh, I did this project.

18:31

And these are the little things about it that I feel are still a bit misaligned. So how can I address that in the next one? And, oh, maybe this way, oh, maybe going more, more. So maybe less commissioned work, more self directed work, that was one step, and then maybe more Indian music influence and less of that European stuff.

18:53

That was another way of aligning. And then with the jury, it was the queer kind of like really going into more of a queer way of, of doing things and of engaging with queer culture as well. And this intersects well, because you're talking about queerness, which, you know, Visuria engages with.

19:13

And I would just love if you could talk a little bit about more about how your practice investigates queerness, and specifically with this work. Yeah, of course, Visuria is a drag persona. It's the name of the show, but also the name of my my drag personality.

19:32

She's she's a character. who's also me, and the explanation between my queerness and my brownness has been really not that it was impossible to do it before I did drag, but really accelerated that and got me the confidence to tackle my South Asian-ness with more confidence and with less of this imposter syndrome that lots of mixed people have sometimes, when in reality, because it's a feeling, because the reality is that every South Asian person,

20:13

even if they're like fully South Asian, will have huge differences in terms of cultural language, religion, background, family history, journey across the globe and all of that. So it's kind of, it's a bit self, not self-centered, but like it's.

20:37

It's easy to just think of like how we are different when in reality, the experience now of engaging more with the South Asian queer community has just revealed how many, all the different ways you can feel like a misfit, it could be because of all these reasons that I've mentioned.

21:00

And for me, Bijiria really helped me to lean into this queerness, not just in theory, because I've always been attracted to that queerness as a lens kind of approach, you know, that you kind of look at things sideways and you have different ways of working on and against dominant culture, the kind of Munoz, this identification model, like I really related to.

21:31

But this was, this felt more real, more grounded in community and challenging myself to not stick with the cultural reference, with the cultural references, say, of the canon and more of the communities I'm already engaged with.

21:52

So Bijiria kind of offers me the opportunity to have lots of different influences and cultural references intermingle in my work from Bollywood to Trinidad stuff to Quebec stuff to sound design that's more experimental, which comes from my work as a composer.

22:18

Yeah, so I feel like the queerness and Bijiria go hand in hand for sure. And you've also been reflecting on coloniality on the new music scene and you unpack how coloniality is reflected in your music making community.

22:40

How have your kind of more academic observations influenced the direction and formats of your work? I think I like the idea that to tackles power. So in a sense, coloniality is just like this structure of a power that we can write off the top of our heads, like white male patriarchy, wealthy, et cetera, North American, European, all of these things that we associate as intersect.

23:14

If you have that as part of your intersection, you have more privilege in a sense. But I like the model that thinks about having a multitude of counter discourses to channel, to challenge the fact that There's not one way of being in the world, which is such an evident kind of statement to do, but it's mind-boggling to me that it's not integrated at all.

23:47

So I tend to want to really lean into specificity of who I am or what I'm thinking or just specificity as a kind of counter-cultural suggestion. You know, it's not like everyone be like me, and that's not what's interesting here.

24:07

It's to have a community of artists that are offering different types of non-standard ways of doing, and that's artists, and that's not the end either. We need artists, we need militant, we need activists, we need all sorts of people to do this.

24:29

So that's why I kind of like to emphasize that I'm an artist, and there are hints of critique and activism to what I engage with, but I feel like what I do best is be creative about the question marks and about the challenges and just be glad that there's other people that are wired to do it differently, and all together we contribute, hopefully, to some sort of questioning or, what's the word, kind of disintegrating the rigidity of what is considered to be a standard way.

25:23

And standard ways exist in so many different spheres. It could be political, it could be social, it could be different things. but it could be about arts as well. So I'm kind of always been wary of artistic figures, kind of emphasizing that this is the way to do this.

25:49

This is how that to me makes absolutely no sense. And I think as artists, we have to just really tap into what we have and go strong in that direction. Speaking about directions, Anthropologie Imagineur was presented by Push and Music on Main in 2016 to much acclaim.

26:14

And can you talk about the direction trajectory of your aesthetic, formal conceptual interests from Anthropologie Imagineur to Visuria and beyond? Yeah, Anthropologie Imagineur for listeners who haven't seen it is a solo performance for myself as a vocal performer who does not actually speak but more so vocalizes and kind of evokes traditional-ish song or vocalization that you could assume are linked to cultures that are on the verge of extinction if not extinct.

26:59

But in reality they are it's all fake so it's kind of a mockumentary. So behind me, I'm the only performer on stage, but behind me is a projection with five speaking heads who you assume are anthropologists or musicologists who have an increasingly flawed and problematic analysis of the sounds that I'm doing.

27:28

So with that project, it was already a very big step from from being a composer. I've always been a improviser and I've used my voice a lot in different performance settings, mostly underground, and this was kind of bringing this vocal exploration with a theatrical framing.

27:50

I'm super proud of that piece, but I knew from its success, I guess, that I wanted to do another one and my hunch for a long time was really that this next piece tackles something a bit more vulnerable and personal, which is my intersection as a queer and brown person.

28:15

So this is what Pejoria allowed to do and in terms of formal kind of like how my my artistry has developed in a way that there's There's more, like the theater part of it takes up more space, because in in Autopolégy Maginart I framed it, I've used theater to frame it, which was and the script did not me speaking it, it's like it's the mockumentary doing it.

28:47

So with drag it allowed me to lead more into character work, if we, you know, sound-wise and music-wise got me to tap into songwriting in a more of a drag-pop aesthetic, which is something I used to do more as a joke.

29:09

I've written lots of joke songs in my life, but never like genuine songs. So carrying that through instead of composing orchestral or chamber music, but really like accepting how I can play with other types of music that I do enjoy but haven't really done.

29:34

I did this in collaboration with a co-composer Gabrielle, another Gabrielle, Gabrielle D'Eau. And so this is how, I guess, my trajectory expanded in each piece. So Bijerio kind of embraces more of the performance and the speaking and the theater side of it.

29:59

And, I mean, the makeup and the drag artistry, which is also a huge thing to learn, very long learning curve. And it's a skill I'm very glad to have developed and really sharpened my visual brain, having been an ear-based person in my work for all of my life.

30:25

And would you say that an approach more rooted in theater is the direction that you see yourself going, or that's just this project? And are you working on something next? Do you have inklings of what you want to explore from here?

30:46

Yeah, I have a project in mind that I'm working on, which would be also at the intersection of music and theater, I'd say. It's too early to kind of be able to say what the proportion is. But to say the truth, I don't really know what theater means, in a sense.

31:07

I think we have kind of fixed ideas of what every art form is. And when we haven't trained in it, we can think of it as the cliche version of what it is. So for me, it's very easy to think in a very nuanced way about music and about sound.

31:29

and I know that some of the stuff I do that's more theater leaning isn't music, so I call it theater, but I don't have, yeah, it's hard for me to identify with the field in a sense, because I don't feel that's where I come from, and that's not where my points of reference are, except when I go see, except as a viewer, but as a viewer, I tend to go see more of a interdisciplinary form of theater, stuff that you'd have at Bush,

32:09

for example, but in Montreal, the F.T.A., for example, or all the O.F.T.A. and all the, that kind of community, the Arvizant, or live arts, I guess you would translate. So yeah, I see myself, yeah, going towards theater, but in a hybrid and...

32:29

unclassifiable sort of way, I guess. And I love dance as well. And sometimes I've been programmed as because you're in dance festivals. So in a sense, all these communities see things in the work that fits, but usually what they're looking for is a fresh take also on what those art forms are, what those boxes are.

32:55

And in some way it's a benefit to not come from a field but kind of like dapple with it. But I think only if you really lean into what you do have and the stuff that you do have a grasp over, which for me is sound and music.

33:14

So that'll always be kind of at the center of my process. And hopefully as the formats expand, it can relate to other artistic communities as well. Thank you so much Gabrielle for this conversation. It's been such a pleasure.

33:33

Thank you. And I look forward to visiting your city. You just heard Gabrielle Darmou in conversation with Push Artistic Director Gabriel Martin in support of their work, Bijuria, appearing as part of the 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival on January 28th and 29th at the Annex.

33:55

Bijuria is presented with our good friends at Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival with support from the Government of Quebec. My name is Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles.

34:08

Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.

34:29

And on the next Push Play. So it was very important for us not to be in a moralistic approach or scientific approach because I mean we are first of all telling a story and trying to put all the means to tell that story.

34:45

Yeah and humor, poetry, it's really something that we always search for.

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เนื้อหาจัดทำโดย PuSh Festival เนื้อหาพอดแคสต์ทั้งหมด รวมถึงตอน กราฟิก และคำอธิบายพอดแคสต์ได้รับการอัปโหลดและจัดหาให้โดยตรงจาก PuSh Festival หรือพันธมิตรแพลตฟอร์มพอดแคสต์ของพวกเขา หากคุณเชื่อว่ามีบุคคลอื่นใช้งานที่มีลิขสิทธิ์ของคุณโดยไม่ได้รับอนุญาต คุณสามารถปฏิบัติตามขั้นตอนที่แสดงไว้ที่นี่ https://th.player.fm/legal

Gabrielle Martin chats with Gabriel Dharmoo, who is presenting Bijuriya at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on January 28 and 29 at the ANNEX, with Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival and support from the Government of Quebec.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Gabriel discuss:

  • How do we artfully engage with colonialism?

  • What does it mean to have a transcultural perspective?

  • What does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of high and low, east and west?

  • Have you always worked across so many forms and disciplines or was there a trajectory that led from one to the other?

  • Are you more interested in self-directed projects these days?

  • What does it mean for you to investigate queerness?

  • Can you talk about the direction of your aesthetic since Anthropologie Imaginaire?

  • What are you working on next?

About Gabriel Dharmoo

Gabriel Dharmoo is a composer, vocalist, improviser, interdisciplinary artist and researcher.

After studying with Éric Morin at Université Laval, he completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Serge Provost, graduating with two Prix avec grande distinction, the highest honour awarded. His works have been performed in Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and South Africa. He has received many awards for his compositions, including the Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for his chamber work Wanmansho (2017) and the Conseil Québécois de la Musique Opus Award for his opera À chaque ventre son monstre (2018). He was also awarded the Canadian Music Centre's Harry Freedman Recording Award (2018).

Having researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai (India) in 2008 and 2011, his musical style encourages the fluidity of ideas between tradition and innovation. He has participated in many cross-cultural and inter-traditional musical projects, many led by Sandeep Bhagwati in Montreal (Sound of Montreal, Ville étrange) and in Berlin (Zungenmusiken, Miyagi Haikus).

As a vocalist and interdisciplinary artist, his career has led him around the globe, notably with his solo show Anthropologies imaginaires at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival (2015) and the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016). They also explore queer arts and drag artistry as Bijuriya (@bijuriya.drag).

He is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Centre and a member of SOCAN, the Canadian New Music Network, and the Canadian League of Composers. Since 2015, Gabriel has been a PhD candidate at Concordia University's PhD "Individualized Program" with Sandeep Bhagwati (Music), Noah Drew (Theatre) and David Howes (Anthropology).

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

Gabriel joined the conversation from what is now known as Montreal, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka, a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst many First Nations including the Kanien’kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron/Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabeg.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights intersectional exploration and drag-pop aesthetics.

00:18

I'm speaking with Gabrielle Darmout, artist behind Bijuria, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 28th and 29th, 2025. In this quirky yet poignant examination of the intersections between queerness and brownness, Gabrielle Darmout engages in a self-reflexive dialogue with his drag persona, Bijuria.

00:38

This musical conversation delves into the power of song to express the hybrid, multifaceted layers that coexist with an identity, offering an insightful reflection on the fluidity of human experience.

00:51

Gabrielle Darmout is a music composer, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist. He was awarded the 2017 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music, following up on his internationally acclaimed solo, Anthropologie Imaginaire.

01:05

His new production, Bijuria, merges music, drag, and theatre, and has been presented a dozen times in Canada since 2022. Here's my conversation with Gabrielle. So just before we dive into really getting to know you, I want to acknowledge that I am participating in this conversation today from the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

01:35

So the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh. I'm a settler here, and it's my responsibility to continue to think about what that means, my relation to decolonization and restitution, and educating myself.

01:52

And that looks differently each day. And recently, I mean, I refer to this actually quite often. in these land acknowledgments is acknowledging Yellowhead Institute because it's an incredible wealth of information and an incredible educational resource.

02:10

So I've been reading their cashback red paper and it really does a great job of framing what cashback is all about, about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth. And framing it that it's not a charity project and it's a part of decolonization and understanding that colonization is an economic project based on land theft that requires a political system that operates through domination and violence to maintain theft and therefore enriches the settler state necessarily,

02:49

impoverishes or in enriching the settler state and necessarily impoverishes and criminalizes the colonized. And I just find it so, their writing is so clear in how they frame these things that, yeah, I learn a lot.

03:04

Gabrielle, where are you joining this call from today? Thanks for sharing that. I am talking to you from home in Montreal or Joe Chaggy. Here's land of the Kanyakahaga, who are recognized as the custodians of the land and waters.

03:21

I have Indo-Caribbean ancestry from my father's side. So a whole history of indenture and a race sort of cultural ties to the South Asian subcontinent. And my mother is a French Canadian, present of such things, so I'm half white, half brown, but are they really halves?

03:46

You can't quantize it that way, but that's been my, yeah, my art is a good way for me to actually engage with all questions related to identity and power or decolonization or reflecting on coloniality as this thing that is part of everything and that we have to mindfully engage with.

04:15

And art for me has been the channel. Thank you for sharing that. And definitely I can relate to an aspect of what you're saying, and it's just a very kind of simple way of also being half-half, half-black, half-white, if we can call it them halves, it's much more complicated and richly complicated than that or complex.

04:38

But this is something that I'm super interested about your practice is the trans-cultural perspective. And it really stands out in your work, both in the perspective you bring to the work. and in the disciplines that you engage with and the historical context for those forms that you're working with.

04:58

So as a composer, you completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal with people I'm not familiar with, but who sound very important, and you graduated with two pre-Vécagrand distinction, the highest honor to be awarded, and you've since won numerous prestigious awards.

05:20

Your compositions have been performed around the world, and as well as studying in Western music traditions, you researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai over several years, and you're a drag performer.

05:34

So what does it mean to be an artist at the intersection of Western and Eastern artistic practices, as well as the intersection of high and low or popular art forms? First, I just want to say how I can't see how it could be any other way, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

05:55

It's not very straightforward of a path that I've had, but I've always kind of balanced all these ingredients that we just mentioned, whether we think of it as geography or in terms of type of art form, like with quotation marks high and low or popular or sophisticated art forms.

06:21

It's always been kind of a balancing act because I did undergo kind of training in music, which is very, very directly linked with Western classical music. So we could call it like urological. Santi Bhagwadi calls it urological.

06:43

So it's Eurocentric, but it's not anymore. It's everywhere. This type of music is everywhere, but it follows rules that have been born out of arts music at a certain period of history in a certain place.

06:57

And the tough part is like, it's kind of great music in many ways, but it's hard for me to be all in and it's hard for me to do only that. Even if I look at it from an avant-garde kind of position, because I could easily say I don't like classical music from the past.

07:17

Now I'm in the present doing that. That's one way of looking at it. But I don't feel like that sphere is where I want to have both feet in. So underground arts or I guess grassroots arts or hybrid forms, formats have always interested me.

07:42

And I also don't disavow the existence of art that's linked to through capitalism or commercial art or pop culture and all that. But I, so I engage with everything and I also am critical of everything in a way.

08:03

And the only way I can exist with this is through playfulness and through question marks, just asking lots of questions about it and thinking that it's both super, super, super serious and also kind of not really at the same time and sort of not funny, but something that can be, you know, poked at for the subject of satire or exploration.

08:33

Have you always been working in all of these forms? Like, for example, have you been you know, expressing yourself in drag, as well as pursuing this formal education in classical music? Or has there been kind of a trajectory that led you from one to the other back to the other?

08:53

Or yeah, how did that work? And also with with your training in Carnatic music as well? Yeah, no, it's, it's closer to the second part of your your second hypothesis is closer to the truth in the sense that I was, I'm, I say that I kept balancing it, but the proportion that it occupies in my life, or my activities or my projects have shifted has shifted.

09:21

So when I was a student at the conservatoire, for sure, I was way more invested in that type of urological music composition, and very invested in playing that game. I think near 20s is kind of the era of seeking a validation as well.

09:39

And validation from peers and from a network or from a community was something that I, I kind of was very, you know, that it affected a lot of decisions in a lot of ways that in choices, not necessarily negatively, but sometimes I do feel like that's a big part of it's such a formative decade.

10:06

And I've spent a lot of it in that field. But at the same time, I was doing other types of projects. But I also always had in mind that I wanted to go to India and study classical Indian music Carnatic music, which is one of two systems of classical Indian music from the south of India.

10:25

And I went there after my after I graduated from conservatoire. So that's 2008 11 ish that I went there. And then drag came 10 years after that. So 2018 that I started. And I guess if I look at the broad patterns, with hindsight, I'd say that I've been gradually and mindfully distancing from the more urological contemporary or new arts performance, interdisciplinarity, and that involved drag as well.

11:16

So it's a balance, but there's also a direction to it. Now when I take on projects that I feel are more linked to contemporary music, I choose them more, I don't know, I choose them. I weigh the pros and cons way more.

11:38

And I take less and less of this for different reasons. And is that also maybe because in those projects you are, are those opportunities to come in as a composer or a musician? I'm curious about also the relationship between, is more of your work expressed these days as like self-directed projects?

12:00

And is that a priority of yours? Or do you also enjoy working as a musician on other people's compositions? So with composition and say composing in that tradition of being commissioned to write a piece for a specific ensemble, et cetera, I've done a lot of that in the 2010s and it became a less and less.

12:23

And then the pandemic just really made me go like, okay, like, let's, let's, let's consider what this is. And if I like it, I never actually really liked it. I never liked composition, the act of being alone and writing the notes, that part I've, I've never felt healthy doing that.

12:43

It's always felt very, it was hard for me to find joy, except maybe at the beginning and then near the end when you're like, this is actually going to be performed. I'm actually going to work with people.

12:55

And so that social part of it is very rewarding for me. So I've kind of I've been drawn to projects where I have more agency also in what I can engage with. And that's not necessarily a question of like permission, like people wouldn't want me to do a piece on identity.

13:21

It's not so much about that. It's for me, it's more, I can't see how the media matches the message of what I'm trying to put out there. So with the piece that I did in 2014, kind of live arts performance.

13:41

I knew that I wanted to explore power, coloniality, voice, satire, all tons of stuff I wanted to explore with that piece. And I could not do that with Wood Quintet's commission, like it makes no sense to me.

14:01

So I knew that this was a live theater slash music slash voice hybrid that I had to do and self produce. And so that's been kind of what I've been craving. It's because I still like to collaborate on things.

14:20

Because it just makes for a more balanced kind of creative cycle as well to sometimes be involved in other people's things or to perform or to not be the one organizing everything and all of that. I think that's a very healthy balance, but for sure.

14:37

all the projects that I dream up of are are usually also not very typical in their formats and need me to have a very slow time in the slow gestation period. I don't know if that's a word in English as well.

14:58

Yeah. And so these I'm curious to learn a little bit more about these forms. Like, was there a moment of kind of rupture where you just got introduced, you know, where you immerse yourself in in drag or karmatic music, or I know that you're also working in other with other forms and disciplines as well.

15:20

Or it sounds like it's kind of been more an organic process of, you know, those being the natural forms to to realize the dramaturgy necessary. But I am just curious to learn a little bit more about that integration of these different practices and what that what that was like to start working.

15:44

And maybe also it was like to start being having your work in those forms received by different public or the same public differently. Yeah, I think it's been organic, but very mindful and also a process in which I allow myself space and grace, I guess, because there's lots of overlapping things.

16:11

And if you look at it like chronologically, I'm still like I have an album of chamber music with the National Arts Center Orchestra musicians that came out last year, which kind of celebrates stuff I was doing in the 2010s.

16:26

I'm still it's, it feels like a bit of a bubble in time to go back to that. But I would I still felt proud. I still feel proud of that work. And I still want to kind of engage with it, but that also came with the question, do I want to write a new piece for orchestra?

16:44

And my gut feeling was no. But let me look backward and see what I want to do with the NAC Orchestra, and that it was to celebrate things that already existed, and that didn't take creative energies away from the stuff that I feel is me now or me in the future.

17:04

So I guess I finished my PhD last year, and my whole thesis was just kind of research creation around voice and theater music and anthropology. And my framework is one of alignment, or seeking alignment, or in my case, seeking vocal alignment, where I want my literal voice that sings and speaks and does things.

17:37

the voice that sounds and then the more conceptual voice, like what we want to say as artists or as people, and to have those kind of aligned and different projects. So you're like, huh, I'm actually using my voice to be my voice.

17:52

Anyways, it's a little confusing kind of thing, but just to kind of bring all of that together. And for me, that takes time. And it takes a bit of accepting contradiction also, because you, you can't, you can't switch.

18:08

We can't switch so fast. I think maybe some people are wired that way. But for me, I kind of need to really feel things out. And that's been so I think this, this like seeking alignment thing, this, this process has has been what led me to, to think like, oh, I did this project.

18:31

And these are the little things about it that I feel are still a bit misaligned. So how can I address that in the next one? And, oh, maybe this way, oh, maybe going more, more. So maybe less commissioned work, more self directed work, that was one step, and then maybe more Indian music influence and less of that European stuff.

18:53

That was another way of aligning. And then with the jury, it was the queer kind of like really going into more of a queer way of, of doing things and of engaging with queer culture as well. And this intersects well, because you're talking about queerness, which, you know, Visuria engages with.

19:13

And I would just love if you could talk a little bit about more about how your practice investigates queerness, and specifically with this work. Yeah, of course, Visuria is a drag persona. It's the name of the show, but also the name of my my drag personality.

19:32

She's she's a character. who's also me, and the explanation between my queerness and my brownness has been really not that it was impossible to do it before I did drag, but really accelerated that and got me the confidence to tackle my South Asian-ness with more confidence and with less of this imposter syndrome that lots of mixed people have sometimes, when in reality, because it's a feeling, because the reality is that every South Asian person,

20:13

even if they're like fully South Asian, will have huge differences in terms of cultural language, religion, background, family history, journey across the globe and all of that. So it's kind of, it's a bit self, not self-centered, but like it's.

20:37

It's easy to just think of like how we are different when in reality, the experience now of engaging more with the South Asian queer community has just revealed how many, all the different ways you can feel like a misfit, it could be because of all these reasons that I've mentioned.

21:00

And for me, Bijiria really helped me to lean into this queerness, not just in theory, because I've always been attracted to that queerness as a lens kind of approach, you know, that you kind of look at things sideways and you have different ways of working on and against dominant culture, the kind of Munoz, this identification model, like I really related to.

21:31

But this was, this felt more real, more grounded in community and challenging myself to not stick with the cultural reference, with the cultural references, say, of the canon and more of the communities I'm already engaged with.

21:52

So Bijiria kind of offers me the opportunity to have lots of different influences and cultural references intermingle in my work from Bollywood to Trinidad stuff to Quebec stuff to sound design that's more experimental, which comes from my work as a composer.

22:18

Yeah, so I feel like the queerness and Bijiria go hand in hand for sure. And you've also been reflecting on coloniality on the new music scene and you unpack how coloniality is reflected in your music making community.

22:40

How have your kind of more academic observations influenced the direction and formats of your work? I think I like the idea that to tackles power. So in a sense, coloniality is just like this structure of a power that we can write off the top of our heads, like white male patriarchy, wealthy, et cetera, North American, European, all of these things that we associate as intersect.

23:14

If you have that as part of your intersection, you have more privilege in a sense. But I like the model that thinks about having a multitude of counter discourses to channel, to challenge the fact that There's not one way of being in the world, which is such an evident kind of statement to do, but it's mind-boggling to me that it's not integrated at all.

23:47

So I tend to want to really lean into specificity of who I am or what I'm thinking or just specificity as a kind of counter-cultural suggestion. You know, it's not like everyone be like me, and that's not what's interesting here.

24:07

It's to have a community of artists that are offering different types of non-standard ways of doing, and that's artists, and that's not the end either. We need artists, we need militant, we need activists, we need all sorts of people to do this.

24:29

So that's why I kind of like to emphasize that I'm an artist, and there are hints of critique and activism to what I engage with, but I feel like what I do best is be creative about the question marks and about the challenges and just be glad that there's other people that are wired to do it differently, and all together we contribute, hopefully, to some sort of questioning or, what's the word, kind of disintegrating the rigidity of what is considered to be a standard way.

25:23

And standard ways exist in so many different spheres. It could be political, it could be social, it could be different things. but it could be about arts as well. So I'm kind of always been wary of artistic figures, kind of emphasizing that this is the way to do this.

25:49

This is how that to me makes absolutely no sense. And I think as artists, we have to just really tap into what we have and go strong in that direction. Speaking about directions, Anthropologie Imagineur was presented by Push and Music on Main in 2016 to much acclaim.

26:14

And can you talk about the direction trajectory of your aesthetic, formal conceptual interests from Anthropologie Imagineur to Visuria and beyond? Yeah, Anthropologie Imagineur for listeners who haven't seen it is a solo performance for myself as a vocal performer who does not actually speak but more so vocalizes and kind of evokes traditional-ish song or vocalization that you could assume are linked to cultures that are on the verge of extinction if not extinct.

26:59

But in reality they are it's all fake so it's kind of a mockumentary. So behind me, I'm the only performer on stage, but behind me is a projection with five speaking heads who you assume are anthropologists or musicologists who have an increasingly flawed and problematic analysis of the sounds that I'm doing.

27:28

So with that project, it was already a very big step from from being a composer. I've always been a improviser and I've used my voice a lot in different performance settings, mostly underground, and this was kind of bringing this vocal exploration with a theatrical framing.

27:50

I'm super proud of that piece, but I knew from its success, I guess, that I wanted to do another one and my hunch for a long time was really that this next piece tackles something a bit more vulnerable and personal, which is my intersection as a queer and brown person.

28:15

So this is what Pejoria allowed to do and in terms of formal kind of like how my my artistry has developed in a way that there's There's more, like the theater part of it takes up more space, because in in Autopolégy Maginart I framed it, I've used theater to frame it, which was and the script did not me speaking it, it's like it's the mockumentary doing it.

28:47

So with drag it allowed me to lead more into character work, if we, you know, sound-wise and music-wise got me to tap into songwriting in a more of a drag-pop aesthetic, which is something I used to do more as a joke.

29:09

I've written lots of joke songs in my life, but never like genuine songs. So carrying that through instead of composing orchestral or chamber music, but really like accepting how I can play with other types of music that I do enjoy but haven't really done.

29:34

I did this in collaboration with a co-composer Gabrielle, another Gabrielle, Gabrielle D'Eau. And so this is how, I guess, my trajectory expanded in each piece. So Bijerio kind of embraces more of the performance and the speaking and the theater side of it.

29:59

And, I mean, the makeup and the drag artistry, which is also a huge thing to learn, very long learning curve. And it's a skill I'm very glad to have developed and really sharpened my visual brain, having been an ear-based person in my work for all of my life.

30:25

And would you say that an approach more rooted in theater is the direction that you see yourself going, or that's just this project? And are you working on something next? Do you have inklings of what you want to explore from here?

30:46

Yeah, I have a project in mind that I'm working on, which would be also at the intersection of music and theater, I'd say. It's too early to kind of be able to say what the proportion is. But to say the truth, I don't really know what theater means, in a sense.

31:07

I think we have kind of fixed ideas of what every art form is. And when we haven't trained in it, we can think of it as the cliche version of what it is. So for me, it's very easy to think in a very nuanced way about music and about sound.

31:29

and I know that some of the stuff I do that's more theater leaning isn't music, so I call it theater, but I don't have, yeah, it's hard for me to identify with the field in a sense, because I don't feel that's where I come from, and that's not where my points of reference are, except when I go see, except as a viewer, but as a viewer, I tend to go see more of a interdisciplinary form of theater, stuff that you'd have at Bush,

32:09

for example, but in Montreal, the F.T.A., for example, or all the O.F.T.A. and all the, that kind of community, the Arvizant, or live arts, I guess you would translate. So yeah, I see myself, yeah, going towards theater, but in a hybrid and...

32:29

unclassifiable sort of way, I guess. And I love dance as well. And sometimes I've been programmed as because you're in dance festivals. So in a sense, all these communities see things in the work that fits, but usually what they're looking for is a fresh take also on what those art forms are, what those boxes are.

32:55

And in some way it's a benefit to not come from a field but kind of like dapple with it. But I think only if you really lean into what you do have and the stuff that you do have a grasp over, which for me is sound and music.

33:14

So that'll always be kind of at the center of my process. And hopefully as the formats expand, it can relate to other artistic communities as well. Thank you so much Gabrielle for this conversation. It's been such a pleasure.

33:33

Thank you. And I look forward to visiting your city. You just heard Gabrielle Darmou in conversation with Push Artistic Director Gabriel Martin in support of their work, Bijuria, appearing as part of the 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival on January 28th and 29th at the Annex.

33:55

Bijuria is presented with our good friends at Music on Main and the Indian Summer Festival with support from the Government of Quebec. My name is Ben Charland and I produce this podcast alongside the wonderful Tricia Knowles.

34:08

Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi. New episodes of Push Play are released every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the 2025 Festival and to discover the full lineup of more than 20 works of theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances, visit pushfestival.ca.

34:29

And on the next Push Play. So it was very important for us not to be in a moralistic approach or scientific approach because I mean we are first of all telling a story and trying to put all the means to tell that story.

34:45

Yeah and humor, poetry, it's really something that we always search for.

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