Article by Jay Acharya
Our featured artist has had an extraordinary journey to becoming an international spoken word artist and performer. Her video and live performance poetry pieces are as relatable as they are foreignly beautiful. Possessing the rare skill of setting wordplay to odd-time signature, Lisa’s performances hypnotize the audience with a masterful blend of rhymes, prose and wordplay on topics ranging from the personal to community and social justice issues whilst drawing on her vast, culturally diverse life experience.
There is a quality of raw, cutting honesty and transparent authenticity transmitted through Lisa’s poetry that lends dimension, layers, textures, and a certain signature feel to her work that is distinctive and bewitching. While few spoken word artists, or even vocal artists of any kind in the West attempt to perform in odd time signature, it is almost imperceptible when Lisa is masterfully gliding her way through pieces in 7/8, tossing in rhymes and sliding in alliteration with a metronome ticking faithfully somewhere inside. A listener is inevitably focussed on the depth of meaning and feeling that her words impart rather than the technique involved, making her a musician’s musician. Mirroring her one-of-a-kind approach to the art form is an intriguing and unique journey that led Lisa to this point.
Lisa was born to perform. As a kid, she put on dance shows and plays that she wrote and directed for the neighborhood. Her father and her grandfather, both accomplished writers in their respective fields of philosophy and journalism, inspired her to use writing as an anchor and a means of processing her experience. During her early teen years, Lisa filled dozens of journals and books with her poetry, occasionally sharing contents with friends. She took acting classes and bought herself a drum kit at a pawn shop at 16 with every last dollar to her name. She worked her way up to lead in her school play. Suffice it to say that Lisa was incessantly creating avenues of self-expression, in part to escape an increasingly difficult home life, in part to face and digest it, and in part because that’s simply what wanted to come through.
Combining her love affair with the arts with a growing care for the planet and its inhabitants, Lisa began to feature a political or environmental subtext in her creations during her college days. This served both as an outlet and a clever, subtle way of disseminating important information. Still, Lisa eventually came to believe that art on a dying planet was a selfish endeavor. “Later in life, the fun and games subsided as I came to learn of how this planet was in the midst of undergoing the largest ecocide since the extinction of the dinosaurs and how our species has been choosing a collision course with all the natural elements necessary for human and non-human life with assaults on topsoil, clean air and water and biodiversity.”
At this point, Lisa’s passion for ecological conservation took over the driver’s seat. Viewing art as indulgence during a time where decisive action was required in order to address planetary devolution, Lisa joined the frontlines of various activist protest movements and causes. This included attempts to defend marine wildlife for several campaigns onboard a ship belonging to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, dedicated to the preservation of marine wildlife through the enforcement of international marine law. At 19, alongside Capt. Paul Watson and his crew of swashbuckling eco-pirates, Lisa participated in high seas direct action in the USA, Costa Rica, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, Tasmania, New Zealand, Antarctica, and beyond in defense of sharks, whales, seals and marine life. She was eventually named Sea Shepherd crewmember of the year in 2005.
In 2002, Lisa left the ship to live in New Zealand, continuing her work in animal rights and social justice movements as well as her foray into rhythm, samba and percussion. As is common on the activist scene, she reached the point of severe burnout a couple years later and was left with little choice than turning her focus and attention inward. She used the healing arts; yoga, meditation, energy work and herbology, and of course, writing, to recalibrate.
In 2006, Lisa moved to New York City where she re-kindled her love of the arts, and became actively involved with a well-known all-female artist collective, The Galaxy Girls. The artist collective established the everlasting Body Temple parties in Brooklyn, and they founded Vitality, an eclectic space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The wild parties and Vitality featured musical performance, dance, bodywork and body painting, raw vegan superfood treats and teas, yoga swings, an oxygen bar, workshops and essential, awareness-based community atmosphere. Lisa ran the spoken word component of the events, bringing a synthesis of different aspects of her experience to the parties and festivals that were a mix of fun, introspection and expression.
During her time in NYC, Lisa also performed at poetry nights at the famed Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican. While these clubs were and are still widely recognized as the top in the country, there was an aspect to these evenings that made Lisa uncomfortable. She questioned where the line was between using the platform as an emotional dumping ground for glorifying or wallowing in pain and using the platform to process wounding, reclaim power and lean into truth in order to own our stories, rather than have them own us. She held her question with an open palm.
Between 2005 and 2009, Lisa lived between Montreal and New York, splitting her time between ocean conservation, completing training in Anusara- based yoga, yoga therapeutics, reiki, herbology, aromatherapy, Gurdjieff work, studies at the Montreal Torah Center and other classes at the Natural Health Consultants Institute. She was also playing in various Montreal- based musical groups, developing and mastering her rhyming abilities. She was invited to join a samba-esque group, with a postmodern flavor, called “Kumpa’Nia” which twists traditional 4/4 Brazilian music into all manner of odd time signatures. She also did vocals, rhymes and percussion with “Fiesta de Santos de Guemilere,” “Max Bananaz,” and “Estacao da Luz.” As Lisa started writing spoken word poetry to match the rhythms of the bands she played in, she found herself writing in irregular time signatures on an increasing basis. Thus was born an extraordinarily outstanding caliber of uniquely rhythmic poet.
As her musical projects took off, Lisa performed before thousands at popular events and festivals across Montreal, Quebec City, New Brunswick, Ottawa and beyond, ranging from the ‘Just for Laughs’ festival, the ‘Carnaval de Quebec’, ‘Les Fêtes de la Nouvelle-France’, “The Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival” and “Nuits d’Afrique” to name a few. She played Montreal’s finest clubs, such as the Medley and Place-des-Arts and opened for acts as notable as Alpha Blondy, Groundation and Patrick Watson.
With a growing reputation, Lisa was invited to perform her poetry solo at events such as ‘Project Love’ and ‘The Openmind’. One event led to another, and Lisa was eventually approached and invited to perform at the Bhatkifest in Joshua Tree, California in 2014, at Unite in Babylon in Tel Aviv in 2018, and countless events following. She composed songs and poems in all kinds of time signatures, including one in 11/4 recorded with Yshai Afterman in Israel in 2015. Now internationally recognized as an odd-time signature aficionado in the world of spoken word poetry, Lisa has collaborated with exceptional musicians across the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Canada. She is next set to perform at the Wisdome in Los Angeles on April 14, 2022.
Ever a strong believer in acts of service, Lisa has also created a Spoken Word poetry program for adults and teens which she has been presenting in schools and conferences since 2015. Drawing upon her diverse life experience, coupled with her work in the performing arts and various healing modalities, she created “Spoken Wordicine; Your Words are a Powerful Medicine,” a six-week workshop series that invites adults and teens to dive into their stories, massage them into poetry and release them in a safe container. This program has life-altering transformational results for the participants. Learn more here: www.shalomtoyou.com
Lisa continues to have a seismic impact on the field of spoken word poetry, pushing the boundaries well past convention and out into uncharted and mesmerizing waters. An example and a witness to the power of storytelling and radical truth-telling through poetry, Lisa continues to push the envelope, weaving words into a medicinal balm for herself and others and teaching her students to do the same. She currently has several collaborative projects in the works with well-known artists, writers, and musicians. She refuses to say much about that at the moment, but she does mention that one of these collaborators is someone whom she has admired since her teens. Whatever is next for Lisa, be ready to have your socks knocked off, in an asymmetric, thought-provoking, completely enchanting way. We give you our word.
Lisa Shalom performs, records, and teaches spoken word poetry as a means of authentic expression to teenagers and adults.
Check her out on www.shalomtoyou.com
Look out for the upcoming performances!
Reach her for bookings on shalom.home@yahoo.ca
Or through her socials-
FB- www.facebook.com/lisababashalom
IG- @shalomlisa
Words4Culture 