Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster
Intro: Choices!
Creating a drag persona involves making countless aesthetic, artistic, conceptual and political choices.1
In the early stages, as drag performers, our first choices might be circumstantial, random, or out of our control:
"My drag mom gave me all these outfits — not sure they're my vibe yet"
"I'm still figuring out my eyebrow shape, oh well . . . "
However, our personality, the vision of our dream persona and our expectations of what drag is — or should be — are often so strong, that some choices don't feel like choices at all:
"Of course I am congenial and helpful to my peers"
"Of course I wear hip-pads and a breast-plate"
"Of course I do lipsyncs, splits, and dance"
As we grow and as our skills improve, our choices become increasingly deliberate. We make decisions based on our developing artistic vision, our instincts, needs, and wants:
"I am obsessed with 70s fashion, I need to channel more of that!"
"I'm witty and good with audiences, I want to host more shows!"2
I would guess that the agency to make our own choices and to curate our own persona is quite important to most drag artists. Drag is an artform of cultural reference and of self-curation, whether artists rely on their own skillset or combine it with outside help and resources in the form of drag families or hired collaborators, designers, stylists, or MUAs (make up artists). The end goal is to feel our fantasy, to bring our dream persona to life, to uplift it and perfect it as we deem fit. Hopefully, the relation between our self-expression and our fictional persona is genuine enough that it strikes a chord with the audience we seek to engage (whether it be a toxic fanbase or another . . . choices!).
I've never really pictured myself being on Drag Race, nor have I contemplated applying to Canada's Drag Race. Even still, I am engrossed by the show: I watch year after year, season after season. I fall in love with a fair number of queens, impressed by their artistry and captivated by their onscreen personas. I engage with the franchise critically, as a fan who is both liviiing and side-eyeing.
I'm never sure whether this is universally obvious or if it's an occupational hazard, but deliberate and self-curated musical choices are near impossible on Drag Race. Contestants traditionally encounter music in standard Drag Race formats, with varying levels of agency:
- Level-0 Agency: Lipsyncs (for your life, for your legacyyyyy, for the crown!), which are "randomly chosen" (but likely pre-determined) songs.
- Level-1 Agency: Rusicals, which are precomposed, either lipsynced or voiced by the contestants themselves. Here, contestants might be able to pick what part they will play.
- Level-2 Agency: Girl-groups or final numbers, which are precomposed songs, with additional "blank" verse written and voiced by the contestants themselves — here, contestants can infuse a bit of their personality through their singing or rapping.
- Level-3 Agency: VIP only, reserved for All-Stars. Talent-shows, where queens can choose the type of number they will present, including performances of original songs and, occasionally, musical performances that depart from the expected styles usually pushed by the franchise.
The thing is: as a drag artist who is also a musician, I crave Level-10 Agency. There is an obvious incompatibility between Drag Race's standardized music and my preferred forms of artistic expression. So here goes a reflection on the role of music, voice, lipsync, and sound in my drag practice as Bijuriya!
So How About Drag?
My drag journey as Bijuriya officially started at the age of 37 in 2018. My previous background was as a music composer, vocal performer, interdisciplinary artist, and reluctant academic who has been procrastinating on their PhD thesis with all sorts of projects. My strongest incentive in creating Bijuriya was to explore the intersection between my mixedness/brownness and my queerness — admittedly the most vulnerable tension point of my personal life, which is also a highly stimulating artistic playground. Another central motivation in my drag is my craving to engage audiences, communities, subcultures, and individuals that I wasn't seeing in the spaces delimited by the networks I was already navigating. Gradually, then very intensely during the pandemic, I have been self-distancing from institutionally bounded networks, craving to explore my creativity otherwise.
Whilst exploring my drag identity online, I found great joy and belonging within the diasporic South Asian queer community. In Montreal, I mostly connected with the queerdo scene, or the more independent, subversive, weird, non-conforming spaces of the city's queer subculture. While navigating both Montreal's local drag community and the global community online, I found most of my drag peers' ambitions were linked to Drag Race, either as a model to follow, a dream to dream, a career path to pursue, or a way to gain more clout, fame, or wealth. I've never disrespected my peers' aspirations, but I've often felt a discrepancy between theirs and mine. From my perspective, the Drag Race phenomena represents a segment of queer culture that has capitalist and mainstream targets, whereas I have always felt compelled to create art in the fringes, without much consideration for commercial success or celebrity culture. It should be stated that being an artist who isn't obsessed with commercial success in the Canadian context is made possible by public funding for the arts. Although these grants are competitive, art council funding is realistically attainable for different phases of artistic creation, from research-creation to production.3
In March 2022 at "Montréal, Arts Interculturels" (MAI), I premiered "Bijuriya"— the theatrical solo drag performance I had dreamed about creating for years. I've never come closer to living my drag fantasy!
The 80-minute show is a hybrid of musical and theatrical performance. It includes 5 original songs, sound design based on my work as a music composer, character work, and conceptual episodes where I explore different relationships between the voice and the body, including singing, lipsyncing, and ventriloquism. Anyway, "squirrel-friend, when this paragraph ends, just open up the video trailer. Go ahead! I support you."4
Exhibit A: Original Songs
Original songs are the perfect way to curate my drag identity and to inject talent, skill, and personality into what I share with audiences. Song-writing involves deliberate choices around aesthetics, musical style, and lyrical content. In "Bijuriya Chamke," I state my drag-manifesto: my desire "to shock, ignite, empower and delight — make art, connect, engage, and reflect." Split into two parts, the song tells my story and sets my point of view to music. This is the closest I've come to a standard Drag Race format, but I get to have Level-10 agency and creative control!5
Audio 1: Bijuriya Chamke, Pt. 1
Bijuriya Chamke, Pt. 1
Part one of the song happens very near the beginning of the show. I am wearing a bejeweled blue mermaid dress, a high blue and yellow wig, South Asian jewels, and a bindi.
Each verse addresses one of the factors that led me to explore drag. Verse 1 is about my mixed identity.
I have Indian ancestry
Can't you tell from my bindi?
My daddy is a Trini!
My father has ancestry from, and is a product of, the Indian indenture system enforced by the British in Trinidad & Tobago. When performing this song, I point to the bindi in the middle of my forehead. Take a hint, I have Indian ancestry and this sticker isn't cultural appropriation!
I'm also white and Frenchy
Bonsoir Québécoise mommy!
Yeah, that's my family history
As much as my drag persona draws inspiration from her Indian roots, there is no denying my half-whiteness and being raised in French-speaking, predominantly white Quebec City.
I'm on a quest for learning
The different parts of me
Like many people with multiple origins, there is a sense of belonging to and critique of all cultures. I've been naïve, critical and/or sensible at one point or another — and I see no end to this process of identity formation.
A layered onion bhaji
A reference to Shrek and his onion layers, but desified (i.e. rendered Desi, or South Asian)
My Indianness has benchmarks
In shapes of question marks
My level of "Indianness" is something I constantly and futilely measure and compare, which leads to more questions than answers.
And that's when lightning sparks
First reference to my drag name's definition. In Hindi, bijuriya means lightning or thunderbolt. Lightning strikes: a new idea is born, inspiration hits me and transforms me.
I'm gonna do drag!
What a great idea! A South Asian-presenting drag persona could allow me to counter the feeling of being inauthentically Indian and help me connect to a broader community of queer brown people.
Chorus
To shock, ignite
I don't want my drag to be mild or tepid, it should shock, provoke or elicit strong reactions from people.
Empower and delight
Instead of seeking fame and power, I'd rather channel what form of power I already have to empower and uplift others. Turns out you can do that and stay fun!
I'm Bijuriya!
(Bijuriya Chamke, Bijuriya, Bijuriya)
In Hindi, bijuriya chamke means lightning strikes. I sampled part of a Hindi song here, I'll remain vague cuz I don't want to get sued, but it is from a movie that got me hooked on Bollywood and learning about Indian culture through films and film songs.
Make art,
In my drag priorities, art supersedes everything. Art is always at the forefront of my mind.
Connect,
Engage
Dissatisfied by the type of connection and engagement I was getting in my other artistic work, I saw drag as a way to meaningfully interact with a broader community of peers and audience members who share similar stories, backgrounds, tastes, and passions.
and reflect.
Despite being artistic and whimsical, I like when my drag (or other people's drag for that matter) is thought-provoking.
I'm Bijuriya!
(Bijuriya Chamke, Bijuriya, Bijuriya)
Verse 2
Verse 2 is about my background as a music composer.
Before the wigs and lipstick
I'd always been artistic
With flair for sound and music
I played cello as a child, wrote songs, and was always musically inclined.
To cultivate this passion
I sought an education
Which led to composition
I was lucky to have a family that supported my desire to pursue the arts. I studied music in CEGEP (Quebec's equivalent of college) then did my undergrad in music composition.
Yeeaah I'm a trained composer
Jot music notes on paper
In Quebec City, if you happened to be creative (which is not a given in music programs where many musicians train to perform classical repertoire) the natural option was to study Western Art Music composition in the music undergraduate program, where the standard is the use of musical notation on written scores.
As if my ears don't matter
Western classical music is very eye-based and there is a reverence for scores that sometimes overtakes actually hearing or listening to the music.
From chamber to symphonic
Styles of Western classical music I composed for and that the audience hears in the sound design.
It felt so academic
It felt so Eurocentric
I played by the rules for many years. I won composition awards and gained some clout in that community. After several years, I could no longer overlook the scene's exclusivity, how academic and Eurocentric the models of creating music were.
So how about drag?!
Chorus
To shock, ignite, empower and delight, I'm Bijuriya!
Make art, connect, engage and reflect, I'm Bijuriya!
Reiterating my drag manifesto!
Instrumental break
During this instrumental break, I get the audience to cheer by hiking up the mermaid dress to reveal yellow tights and red Converse high heels.
Rap
Bijuriya, Bijuriya,
Bijuriya Chamke!
That means: Lightning strikes
I tried my hand at writing an 8-bar rap, the same way a Drag Race contestant would in a girl group challenge! Because spitting a drag rap feels so Drag Race, I had to include a few lyrics in there that hint at my critical stance. My goal was for the rap to feel sincere and parodic at the same time.
Queers of my descent I wanna represent
But I feel so insufficient
Half-white half-brown
Even though I seek to engage the South Asian queer community and its diaspora, my mixed-culture causes conflicting feelings of insufficiency.
I'm a musical clown
A nod to the queerdo scene I've grown to love in Montreal. In self-identifying as a clown, I underline a distinction between my drag and more conventional forms of drag that strive to achieve realness, beauty, and polish by mostly engaging with mainstream culture in their song choices.
No desire for a crown
Poking fun at Drag Race contestants' clichéd lyrics, which often hint at "the crown" and their desire to win.
Storm's a-brewing
I'm a thunderbolt
Additional references to the meaning of my name.
Reminder: Drag is a revolt!
Something that bears repeating. These lyrics counterbalance just how Drag Race-sounding this whole rap was, placing importance on the subversive political and social contours of drag.
Audio 2: Bijuriya Chamke, Pt. 2
Bijuriya Chamke, Pt. 2
Halfway through the theatrical production, I am now wearing the red dress I wore for a "Whitesplaining Bollywood" character. Instead of donning a blonde wig, I've switched back into my staple hair color, black.
To shock, ignite
Empower and delight
Make art, Connect,
Engage and reflect
The words from the chorus echo as I sit at the makeup table.
Verse 3
Verse 3 is about how Bollywood music and films helped me connect to my Indian culture, but there too, I found problems that I could tackle through drag artistry.
Bewildered by my culture
I felt like an imposter
Is Bollywood the answer?
Perhaps consuming the products of mainstream culture in India was a way for me to learn more about it.
I watched a million movies
I built an expertise
Between 2000 and 2009, I'd been obsessed with Bollywood films, music and even celebrity gossip. I learned more about Indian culture through film than I had from lived experience. I even had an Excel file where I kept track of which movie I saw, with cast and crew credits and my rating.
In repertoire and cheese
As I consumed Indian media, I did not discriminate — I watched repertoire films as well as very commercial films. The quality of these films widely varied.
I recognized my genes
in the faces on the screens
I thought I'd found my queens
I was finally seeing brown-skinned people in media, not only as stereotypes, but as empowered heroes and heroines with good looks, layers, and sex appeal. I never related with Hollywood in that way, so it was refreshing to engage with the Indian film industry instead.
But they use fairness creams
Many film stars endorse fairness creams, products that reinforce skewed, colorist beauty standards. Colorism, or shadism, is a problem in South Asian culture (as it is in Latinx, Black, and other cultures) and it is disheartening to me that celebrities with clout and influence reinforce those biases.
Live the capitalistic dream
My love for Bollywood is always tainted by the fact its personalities often have very different values and attitudes towards social justice and money.
And . . . I kinda hate mainstream
Yup . . . I've always gravitated towards the countercultural, the alternative, the subversive. Being interested in Bollywood in the predominantly white cultural context of Quebec felt "countercultural," but in a global sense, it's quite mainstream.
I'd rather do drag!
All in all, I can't take Bollywood too seriously. Through drag artistry, I'm free to pay homage to the elements I embrace, while critiquing or making fun of what I find problematic. How fun!
Chorus
To shock, ignite, empower and delight, I'm Bijuriya!
Make art, connect, engage and reflect, I'm Bijuriya!
Reiterating my drag manifesto!
Verse 4
Verse 4 is about my travels to India.
I went on an adventure
Compelled by my ancestors
From India to Indenture
For 6 months in 2008 and 3 months in 2011, I traveled to India. I like to think my unknown ancestors would be supportive of this soul-searching.
It took me on a journey
Where self-discovery
Met with music artistry
In addition to seeking life experiences that would connect me to my ancestral land, I wanted to broaden my musical horizons.
I learned to play Carnatic
I went there to study South Indian classical music (Carnatic music) on the cello (whereas Carnatic violin is a staple of the genre, Carnatic cello is quite rare), as well as through singing lessons.
Connected to that music
My musical expertise had been biased by an education and training in the Western Art Music paradigm. Carnatic music blew my mind and it resonated with me deeply.
Melodic and majestic
Carnatic music is reputed for its melodic complexity, rich in ornamentation and flourishes.
I sang Ni Sa Ri Pa Ga Ri
Ni Sa Ri Pa Ga Ri are swaras, or solfège notes, of the Carnatic music genre, chosen here to fit the melody of my song.
In Kalyani and Thodi
Two ragas that I learned in my studies.
Quite superficially . . .
Even if I gained so much knowledge in Carnatic music, even if it expanded my musical ear and provoked a deep appreciation, the reality is I've only skimmed it superficially. As much as I want to engage with my musical roots, I lack the years of immersion in the culture and language to help make it feel that it is something worth pursuing. Also, Carnatic music is a classical music genre; access to it is not dissimilar to the Western Art Music I sought to distance myself from.
You wanna do drag?
Why even try to pursue Carnatic music when drag is an artform with freedom, subversion and so many ways of making it our own?
Chorus
To shock, ignite, empower and delight, I'm Bijuriya!
Make art, connect, engage and reflect, I'm Bijuriya!
Reiterating my drag manifesto!
Exhibit B: Porous Lipsyncs
When I perform typical drag numbers in a club, I always pick songs that I musically or personally connect with. Performing Hindi songs in Montreal or other Canadian cities is my way of showcasing my culture to a broad-ish audience, as well as a means of eliciting meaningful responses in any audience members who hopefully feel represented.
My show includes specific cultural references, such as Bollywood songs. Rather than lipsyncing to copyrighted tracks, I wanted to isolate the lead female vocals, consequently removing the musical accompaniment that reveals era and style. To achieve this, I collaborated with Vidita Kanniks, a singer with experience in South Indian Carnatic music, Hindi film songs, and Western Art Music through her university training. I curated a selection of songs based on symbolic, personal and lyrical value. Heard at different moments in my show, Vidita's voice comes to represent "her": Bijuriya's aspirational vocal sound — an ideal of both femininity and Indianness. This aspirational voice is outside my body, out of reach, but I embody it through lipsyncing. I subvert the expected convention of lipsyncing by fleetingly erasing the female voice from the sound design to then sneak in seamlessly with my own voice (often in a lower octave, sometimes amplified, other times acoustic). This choice creates an interplay between my voice, "her" voice, my given body, my body in the form of Bijuriya's, and "her" invisible body. I call such episodes porous lipsyncs.
The most elaborate porous lipsync of the show is actually not to a Bollywood song, but to "Vanajakshiro"— a classical varnam in raga Kalyani, which I learned both on voice and cello during my research of Carnatic music in Chennai. As hinted in Verse 4 of "Bijuriya Chamke," although I connected with Carnatic music, I only dipped my toes in the genre and any attempt in singing this repertoire in front of people feels illegitimate. In the excerpt below, you can probably sense I cling to the aspirational voice whose sound, pronunciation and stylistic nuance I can only dream to achieve. Through porous lipsyncing, I fall in and out, with varying levels of success, finally singing fully with both voices in unison.
Exhibit C: Sound Design
Although the songs I create as Bijuriya are pretty accessible (yet genius) pop masterpieces, my show's audience is also introduced to a whole other dimension of my musicianship: my work as a serious and overly-trained award-winning composer.6 Although I mention my education in Western-rooted music in Verse 2 of "Bijuriya Chamke," I provide additional context for this dual-musical identity during on-stage costume changes. This takes the form of pre-recorded internal dialogues between both versions of myself: Gabriel the music composer and experimental vocalist, and Bijuriya the drag artist engaging with South Asian culture.
My sound design incorporates a number of past musical compositions I have written for solo instruments, chamber, or orchestra.7 These compositions are not presented as they would be in music concerts; they are recontextualized and remixed with Bollywood samples, South Indian classical Carnatic music (as above), and field recordings of my travels to India. Despite my self-distancing from the new music scene, the art form I immersed myself in for so long has left an imprint on my artistic identity and sensibility, allowing me to engage with sound in creative and meaningful ways not easily accessible to non-musicians. I take pride in how my journey as a musician and composer has shaped my drag artistry. It is a large part of how I have curated Bijuriya, her choices, and the formats of her artistic output.
In the "Vanajakshiro" video excerpt, you may have noticed the presence of a string quartet? That's right, I sneaked in one of my serious compositions: Avec et sans feinte, performed by Quatuor Bozzini. In this piece and many others I have composed, elements of Carnatic music such as ornamentation and melodic fragments coexist with Western Classical contemporary techniques and aesthetics. Whereas Carnatic melodies usually soar over the drone of a tambura — harmonically stable, grounding — this string quartet's textural background travels through different levels of dissonance and instability, transforming into dense textures of swells and glissandos, high-pitched screeches and bow scratching sounds. When combined to Vidita's voice singing Carnatic music, both sound worlds collide — a common occurrence in my multicultural brain, but perhaps disorienting to other listeners. Despite the dissimilarity of both sound sources, my sound design seeks to weave them together, converging towards shared peaks and valleys.
Exhibit D: The Concept of Vocal Drag
My show explores different relationships between voice and body: porous lipsyncs, live singing and occasionally, uncanny ventriloquism. As the show unfolds, the audience has glimpses of my interest in exploring the boundaries of voice and body. However, it is only towards the end that I address it directly. In this video excerpt, I speak of the transformative power of drag available through voice and draw links between lipsyncing in drag artistry and in the Indian film industry.
Transcript:
Bijuriya smiles and delivers the text below without moving her lips:
Looks, fashion, costumes, hair, song, dance, music, comedy, theatre . . . reality TV?! and Weirdness!
Bijuriya's lips stay still as she repeatedly vocalizes and deforms the word "weirdness"
and also . . .
Bijuriya stops ventriloquism
. . . voice!
Bijuriya breaks character and starts talking casually, to the audience, as she takes off elements of her costume, one at a time.
My favourite thing about drag is its transformative power. And I think when we think of the transformative power of drag, we often think of it as a body-based thing, an image-based thing. We explore, push, play with the boundaries of gender . . . or of our humanness.
But I also love to think of the transformative power of drag available through voice. I mean the same way we transform our bodies to embody others . . . others we might admire, respect, or want to see what it feels like to be them . . . well, the same is true for drag, and lipsyncing, and voice. When we lipsync . . . we sort of ride the wave of someone else's vocal sound. It transforms us.
By that time, Bijuriya is out of her costume, solely in tights and padding. She starts walking to the clothing racks, and gradually dons her next costume, a black sari.
Now, lipsyncing is obviously a central element of drag artistry, but it's also quite important in the Indian film industry. In most cases, Bollywood actors and actresses lipsync to the sound of other people's voices, called playback singers. So in movies, you have these song sequences, and who you see is not who you hear, and who you hear is not who you see. Even the biggest of celebrities will play and experiment with the magic of vocal drag, where someone else's vocal sound informs the way they move, emote, and feel a song. Invisible playback singers are lending their voice to other bodies.
My use of ventriloquism in this excerpt is meant to be playful and delightfully weird. I also use the technique in a less comedic manner in the opening number, woven in with porous lipsyncing and live singing. Within the first minutes of the performance, I sweep across those three voice/body relationships, which I develop further in the show. The opening number concludes with my repeating "I have Indian ancestry," my still lips donning an awkward smile, ventriloquizing that sentence with various vocal inflections. The stillness of my face evokes a mask. The inner monologue is full of insufficiency, self-doubt and vulnerability, only to lead us into the drag-pop "Bijuriya Chamke, Pt. 1" song, which starts with that exact sentence. When using ventriloquism, ambiguously foreign/internal thoughts resonate within my body, whereas porous lipsyncs explore a constellation of visible/invisible bodies and of sounding/lipsynced voices.
Exhibit E: My Breath in Her Body
I leave you with a glimpse of my closing number. You gotta understand I'm still trying to book this show . . . I don't want to give away too much! Nevertheless, here are the lyrics and the audio to "Geeta," written from the perspective of Geeta Dutt, my favourite Indian film industry singer from the 1950s and 1960s. The song is about a love triangle between herself, her husband Guru Dutt (acclaimed filmmaker, actor and producer) and Waheeda Rehman, an actress he was allegedly having an affair with. Guru Dutt's movies often had an implied autobiographical angle to them and there are films where he cast Waheeda in Geeta-like roles, yet in song sequences, we see Waheeda's body, face and lips . . . but hear Geeta's voice...in her body.
Geeta Dutt's impressive contribution as a playback singer is highly respected, but her cultural legacy seems to be tainted by this love triangle and her (and Guru's) tragic outcome. I do not bring this up in my show, but Geeta's death is generally attributed to liver cirrhosis, linked to depression and alcohol addiction, whereas Guru's death is debated as either an accidental overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills or a suicide (there were previous attempts). By channeling the memory, artistry and life of Geeta in my song, I try to revive the agency and meaning of her voice, through my own voice and body. At the same time, Geeta Dutt's voice channeled into my drag — not unlike Vidita's — brings me differently into my femininity and Indianness.
Audio 3: Geeta
Geeta
The song is sung from Geeta Dutt's perspective. "You" is directed to her husband Guru Dutt, whereas "her" refers to his alleged lover, actress Waheeda Rehman. I am wearing a black sari and a bindi. My hair is in a bun adorned with jasmine flowers, evocative of 1950s Bollywood aesthetics and photographs of Geeta.
Verse 1
Your mind on her
Guru Dutt's mind is on Waheeda.
Her eyes on you
Allegedly, it is reciprocal.
My breath in her body
I lend my voice to her
In Guru Dutt's song sequences such as "Waqt Ne Kiya"from the movie Kagaz Ke Phool (a direct inspiration for this song and its lyrical content),Geeta's voice is lent to Waheeda's on screen image.
Chorus
Silent Waheeda
Waheeda only lipsyncs; we do not hear her voice. Also, Waheeda has never spoken about the affair.
Master Guru
Guru is the writer, director, producer and lead actor . . . he controls the situation and the narrative.
And me
Ethereal Geeta
Geeta's beautiful ethereal voice resonates, symbolically through me — Bijuriya, on stage.
Verse 2
Time is cheating
We changed, I changed
This speaks to the married couple's relationship, which has shifted through time. The lyrics are also a reference to "Waqt Ne Kiya." The chorus could be translated as "Time has done such great injustice, You're no longer you and I'm no longer me."8
Our love is unbecoming
In the flesh of her lips
Somewhere between the flesh of Waheeda's lips, the meaning of lyrics that are sung, and Geeta's vocal sound, Guru and Geeta's love story rings untrue, unsuitable. I also use unbecoming as un-becoming — dissolving, disappearing.
Chorus
Silent Waheeda
Master Guru
And me
Ethereal Geeta
Verse 3
Spotlight on her
Waheeda, on screen, is the film star.
Acclaim for you
Guru is an acclaimed artist and celebrated for his role as actor, director, and producer.
But the world still hears
Geeta
My voice in the ether
Despite this, decades later, when people hear the film's songs (such as "Waqt Ne Kiya"), people hear and think of Geeta. She is timeless.
Chorus
Silent Waheeda
Master Guru
And me
Ethereal Geeta
Gabriel Dharmoo's artistic practice encompasses composition, vocal improvisation, drag, interdisciplinary performance and research. He explores voice, mixed-identity, brownness, queerness, imaginary culture, satire as well as the interplay between tradition and subversion. As a vocalist and interdisciplinary artist, his career has led him to travel internationally, notably with his solo show Anthropologies imaginaires which was awarded at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival (2015) and the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016). As a composer, his works have been performed in Canada, the U.S.A, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Singapore and South Africa. He has received many awards for his compositions, such as 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 has been developing his drag persona Bijuriya since 2018, working towards his 2022 solo production "Bijuriya," presented at Montréal Arts Interculturels, the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival, the Music Gallery in Toronto and Springboard Performance's Fluid Fest in Calgary. The drag music EP Bijuriya Chamke is available on all streaming platforms.
References
- You can find Bijuriya on Instagram at www.instagram.com/bijuriya.drag![⤒]
- These are all fictional quotes from fictional drag artists[⤒]
- I often joke that I'm from the House of Public Funding: a career development project through Montreal, Arts Interculturels allowed me to hire Pythia as a drag mother in 2018, and different grants from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed me to 1) research and create, 2) produce, 3) tour the live show I will be talking about. There are systemic reasons that explain why art council funding for drag is not the norm, but some of us are working on ways to change that. My art school background has definitely given me the tools and know-how to operate within that system.[⤒]
- I guess I should be rigid about my academic sources and specify I'm paraphrasing RuPaul's outro for multiple World of Wonder YouTube videos, circa 2016-18.[⤒]
- Credits for my original songs go as follows: Lyrics and vocals: Bijuriya, Music: Bijuriya, Gabriel Ledoux, Producing: Gabriel Ledoux, Final mix and mastering: Steven Doman.[⤒]
- The community I was part of, and am still somewhat engaging with, is alternately called the new music scene, contemporary classical music or Western contemporary art music. Sandeep Bhagwati aptly defines it as such: "The term 'art music' is an awkward parallel to the more appropriate French term 'musique savante' which means: learned music. 'Western art music' stands for a tradition of musicking that traces its origin to medieval practices in Europe and has maintained an unbroken tradition of musicking, enhanced by music notation and music reflection, since then." Sandeep Bhagwati, "Reasoned Glossary" Circuit - Musiques contemporaines 28, no. 1: (2018): 15-22.[⤒]
- Compositions included in the sound design are: Ainthu miniyeccars (flute, tabla, vibraphone), Sur les rives de (chamber music sextet), D'arts moults (symphony orchestra), Sung in a Rickshaw (solo trumpet), Avec et sans feinte (string quartet), Moondraal Moondru (chamber orchestra) Ainthu miniyeccars (flute, tabla, vibraphone), D'arts moults (symphony orchestra), Sur les rives de (chamber music sextet), Sung in a Rickshaw (solo trumpet), Avec et sans feinte (string quartet), Moondraal Moondru (chamber orchestra)- all works composed between 2006 and 2019.[⤒]
- English translation for "Waqt Ne Kiya": https://www.filmyquotes.com/songs/3832[⤒]
Related reading
Reading Challenges: A Feel Your Fantasy Introduction
Can I Get an Amen? or: Citation and the Speech of Fantasy
Drag Queens in Stars and Stripes
Queer Childhoods and Drag Race
“I Love You Dearly, Bitch”
Drag Queens Everywhere
Piñata Drag: Crystal Methyd and The Pleasures of Quirky Latinx Aesthetics
Drag is the Medium [Outro]