Gabriel Dharmoo brings his Desi drag-queen diva Bijuriya to Vancouver
The shapeshifter’s performance is copresented by PuSh Festival, Indian Summer Festival, and Music on Main
Gabriel Dharmoo, Bijuriya. Photo by Paul Neudorf and Jonathan Goulet
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Indian Summer Festival, and Music on Main present Gabriel Dharmoo on January 28 and 29 at the Annex
GIVEN THAT THE newly elected president of the United States has declared that some 1.6 million of his fellow citizens do not exist—that being a low estimate of those Americans who openly consider themselves trans or gender-fluid—it seems appropriate to honour an artist who not only blurs the line between male and female, but postulates that humans don’t have to confine themselves to a single species.
Do me a favour, if you will, and watch Gabriel Dharmoo’s video Portraits, in which the singer and composer introduces us to a handful of his multiple identities. There’s Qülps, elfin and birdlike, with a vocal repertoire of clicks and pops and squawks. If the forest canopy had a ballroom scene, Qülps would be its reigning monarch. Rwohg is a mossy Prospero, a sorcerer casting spells with vocal fry, harmonic singing, and the lichenous sideburns of a slight and short Ent. Definitely masculine but not necessarily male, they could be dropped into even the most outlandish production of The Tempest and fit right in. Bymnef is even more avian than Qülps, but conflates what could be South Asian bridal finery with a Karen-blonde wig and rainbow eyeshadow. “Seemingly lost in fanciful states of daydreaming, they are actually connecting with benign energies that hover beyond the physical realm,” Dharmoo tells us in his accompanying text. And then there’s Dacji, an ethereal soprano whose arias might defeat even Cathy Berberian but which float into the stratosphere unimpeded.
“No man is an island,” John Donne once said, but these are not men and each is pretty much an entire continent unto themselves.
Even without makeup, Dharmoo is himself something of a shapeshifter. The son of a Trinidadian father of South Asian descent and a French Canadian mother, he can code-switch with agility. He can also leap from Baroque singing to free-form improvisation, has impressive skills as a writer in both of Canada’s official languages, and can pen mockumentary multimedia dramas such as his astounding Anthropologies imaginaires in a way that is both philosophically provocative and eye-wateringly funny.
It’s almost a shame that when Dharmoo comes to the Annex on January 28 and 29, he’ll be limiting himself to just one of his roles. But when the character in question is his Desi drag-queen diva Bijuriya, few will complain—especially as we will be treated to a full-length performance rather than a short but spectacular star turn.
It’s a transitional time for Bijuriya, Dharmoo admits in a Zoom interview from his Montreal home. That Bijuriya’s performance is being jointly sponsored by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the Indian Summer Festival, and concert producer Music on Main is one indication: while Dharmoo gives full credit to Montreal’s burgeoning drag scene for giving him license to explore without constraints, it’s time, he feels, to seek a wider audience.
“I’m kind of leaning towards spaces that I want to be in with that character, which is leaning into stuff that makes more room for music, and for hearing my singing for longer durations,” he explains. “In the drag scene, you do one or two numbers, for maybe five minutes. So I’ve been doing less, but with more intention, and more of a passion. This is the Bijuriya Experience!”
He laughs, and adroitly sidesteps the question of whether he’s trying to integrate the various aspects of his artistic life: singer, composer, academic, videographer, makeup virtuoso, satirist. (There are more.) But he points out that in recent months Bijuriya has teamed up with a Montreal-based early-music ensemble to perform 17th-century works from the pen of Henry Purcell, and then rocked out with a loud electric band at a Sinéad O’Connor memorial concert.
“I’m exploring more of what Bijuriya can do as a singer,” he says, adding that “drag artists carry culture a lot,” presenting the mores of “whatever generation they come from, through a camp or a queer lens”.
“So I want to be mindful of the music that I interact with,” he continues. “If I were to do more shows of covers, I’d really go with artists that I can get behind. There’s not a dearth of drag artists paying homage to what’s current and what’s mainstream and pop and capitalist. I think the queer community isn’t as critical as it could be of the media we engage with, so I try to engage with stuff that I find has cultural relevance for me, at least.”
Dharmoo teases that he might be working toward what he describes as an “alt.queens” revue, an on-stage survey of the women who have shaped his musical sensibility. “Women that had a great perspective, either in the political content of the songs that I would choose or in the style, what they come to represent,” he says, citing Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Sade, and O’Connor as exemplars. “People that had had some amount of success and that left an imprint on the cultural landscape, and that were kind of… interesting. People that survived in cultural memory.”
As ever, their contributions would be viewed through a queer and South Asian lens. And would there be a political dimension to this work, considering the growing toxicity shown toward queer, trans, and minority populations? Not explicitly, Dharmoo says.
His Bijuriya personality “might land differently” in 2025, he notes, but the character hasn’t changed. “There are things in the piece that are already critiquing that,” he points out. “Just being unabashedly what you are as an artist is challenging that discourse as well. So in a sense I just do what I do, and I’m aware that it will have different implications or readings according to what’s happening in different contexts.”
We have time for one last question: will Dharmoo ever return to the more-than-human entities he explored so well in the Portraits video?
Perhaps, he says.
“If I didn’t have the mission of representing much more of a South Asian, feminine, brownness embedded in the reasons why I started doing drag, I would probably be doing more of that. But how many months are there in a year?”
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