Jad Orphée Chami

Jad Orphée Chami is a Canadian-Lebanese composer, performer and multidisciplinary artist based in Paris that has notably worked on the original soundtrack of the feature film Antigone by Sophie Deraspe, awarded Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and chosen as Canada's official selection for the 92nd Oscars. Born in Beirut in 1998 into a family of secular artists and activists, he began playing the piano at the age of 4 and studied classical performance at the conservatory in the Mediterranean city. His debut as a composer was at the age of 15 for the experimental documentary staged piece Umbilical Cord exploring the subject of war-induced forced separation. Shortly after, he moved with his family to Montreal where developed furthermore his interest for cinema, music creation and performance in its broad sense. During his time in Montreal, he composed and directed a series of multidisciplinary pieces and notably collaborated on experimental and animation short-films such as Coping (Official Selection in the 18th Sommets du Cinéma d'Animation). In early 2018, he collaborated as a composer with artist-researcher Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro exploring testimony-based performances. In late 2018, he composed and performed an improvisation-based suite for Pierre-Marc Ouellette's piece Marges de manoeuvre to be performed in collaboration with the Contemporary Dance School of Montreal in May 2019 at Tangente Danse. A recent BFA in Music graduate with distinction from Concordia University, he has been developing his research-creation project between Paris, Beirut and Montreal since 2019 on the question of memory, music and the performance of testimonies in the context of oral history performance. He is notably focusing on the oral histories of the families of the disappeared during the Lebanese civil war. He is also interested in the cross-cutting issues of art and its aesthetics/ethics contemporary conflicts.