Panj ਪੰਜ

The Performance

Panj is a solo interdisciplinary performance weaving together storytelling, live psychedelic rock fusion music, and video. At its heart, it is the story of a son and his father. A river of silence had grown between them after Himmat came out as queer — words left unspoken, reconciliation that never came. When his father died suddenly in 2006, those questions remained unresolved. Turning to his mother Surjit for support, Himmat begins to walk back through family history. Panj follows the journey of his Punjabi Sikh family across five pivotal moments in their history — from the trauma of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, through migration from Britain to Canada, to the emergence of Himmat's identity as a queer artist. Through retrieved memories and his father's extraordinary photographic archive, he discovers that love had always been present — his father speaking in a visual language he hadn't yet learned to read.

Premiered at Montréal Arts Interculturels (MAI) · Festival Accès-Asie · May 2022

The Making of Panj

Panj emerged from a parallel process of embodied healing (mindfulness and EMDR therapy), deepening conversations with my mother, and the discovery of my father's photographic archive. He had documented our family life for decades. Reviewing the images he had taken of me throughout my life became a meditation. I began to see myself through his lens.

I was listening for his words, but he was speaking in a visual language, one I hadn't yet learned to read.

The music draws on everything that made me: western classical training, the shabads and Bollywood soundtracks of my childhood home, Indian classical and folk traditions, and the British Art Rock of my adolescence. I have baptized the style "Psychedelic Rock Fusion."