PANJ | ਪੰਜ | Excerpt
by Himmat Shinhat
Panj (ਪੰਜ — Punjabi for five) is a solo interdisciplinary performance weaving together live storytelling, psychedelic rock fusion music, and video. It traces five pivotal moments in the creator’s Punjabi Sikh family history: from the trauma of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, through successive migrations from India to Britain and from Britain to Canada, to the emergence of Himmat Singh Shinhat’s identity as a queer artist in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). At its heart, Panj is a biographical reckoning between a son and his father — a relationship fractured by silence after the son came out as queer, and never reconciled before the father’s sudden death in 2006.
Central to the work is the father’s photographic archive — decades of images documenting family life that become, in retrospect, a visual language of love the son had not yet learned to read. The performance enacts a form of biographical translation: recovering meaning across silence, across generations, and across the cultural rupture of Partition and diaspora.
A key dramaturgical element is the peti — a traditional Indian wooden chest, handmade by the father as a gift for his son, that recurs throughout the performance as a living metaphor. Family photographs are projected directly onto its open lid, collapsing the distance between personal archive and embodied presence, between the past that is carried and the body that carries it. This staging enacts the central biographical question of the work: what do we inherit, what do we lose, and what do we discover, too late, that we were always holding?
Panj premiered at Montréal Arts Interculturels (MAI) during Festival Accès-Asie in May 2022. It is the first movement of an ongoing autobiographical practice, continued in Milāpa (ਮਿਲਾਪ — reunion, coming together), currently in development as both memoir and performance.
