Delirium: Queen Ka

Photo credit: Sophie Samson

“
Slam performer takes the stage with violinist Blaise Borboën-Léonar

Elkahna Talbi provides a lesson for our times in terms of her will power and perseverance, a lesson as well in stepping up to the plate and never backing down. She’s a little dynamo who’s revolutionizing slam’s male-only image on the American continent.”
Babnet.com

“Slam isn’t an end in itself for me, but a way of bringing an audience into a kind of groove with my words. Slam is the coming together of everything I like about art and performance.”
Queen Ka

Queen Ka is the rising star of Canadian slam. Joining the slam artist Grand Corps Malade in performance in 2008, she shook up the place with lyrics that are both solid and delicate, rockin’ and sincere.

The performers

During her debut performances in 1991, Queen Ka, whose real name is Elkahna Talbi (El Kahina, which means Berber queen), performed her interpretations of poems by Prévert and Baudelaire, the fables of LaFontaine, and monologues by Chekhov and David Mamet.

Opening in 1994 for Mimosa in Montreal, she enchanted audiences with her sound, which is instilled with lyrical finesse.  She exudes poetry. It has been through the efforts of the group Ivy that slam has made inroads into French Canada. Queen Ka was involved in a number of projects in Montreal through an association with Pierre-Philippe Coté. They worked together in the painting-in-the-streets festival, “Slamalgame,” as well as Montreal’s annual all-night music festivals and Francopholies. She gradually became the rising star of Canadian slam music. Before she began exclusively writing her own work, Queen Ka took part in competitions like “Poetry Face-Off” at the 2008 Voice Festival of the Americas and in the 2008 “Grand Slam.” In addition, that year she was a special guest performer for Grand Corps Malade and also created her own show, her first, called Verbal Delirium, with violinist Blaise Borboën-Leonard.

An eclectic violinist as well as violist, Blaise Borboën-Léonard was classically trained. Among his renowned teachers are violinists Frédérique Lefebvre and Kati Sebastyen, violists Jocelyne Bastien and Ervin Schiffer and composers Michel Gonneville and Michel Fourgon.

Displaying his penchant for rock, in 2007, he became the official violinist of the avant-garde metal-band ensemble Unxpect, with whom he has toured, performing more than sixty concerts in one year throughout Canada and the U.S.
Borboën-Leonard is interested in the group having a cosmopolitan feeland has therefore increased the number of his performances with musicians from all over the world, including with pianist, poet, and composer Frans Ben Callado, the theater group Of The Moment (de l’Instant), Greek violinist Costas Anastassopoulos, drummer and acoustic artist Merlin Etorre and, last but not least, Canadian slammer Queen Ka, with whom he performed in the original work Verbal Delirium.

Cast

Queen Ka: Slam performer
Blaise Borboen-Léonard: violin accompaniment

Program

Verbal Delirium – length of performance is one hour.
The show consists of a stage performance of lyrics written by Queen Ka, which she has been performing for an array of audiences for several years. In a one-hour show, Queen Ka provides a tight performance that is accompanied by the music of Blaise Borboèn-Léonard, which brings all the nuance and subtlety of her work to the fore-ground.

Link to audio clips of Queen KA: http://www.myspace.com/thequeenka
Link to audio clips of Blaise Borboën-Léonard: http://www.myspace.com/blaisebl

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