The old archetypes are dying but our stories still need to be told. Join Kenna Burima as she retells her Hero’s Journey in song form from birth to death. Using the narrative template of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, Kenna weaves together twenty years of songs and a lifetime of stories into a 40 minute noon hour listening experience.
In her adopted hometown of Calgary (Moh’kinsstis, Treaty 7), Kenna Burima has earned a reputation as someone who can turn ideas into big projects, teach the unteachable, and inspire people to come together.
Since doing her time in the institutional hallowed halls of classical music education, Kenna’s love for all musical forms has driven her involvement in a diversity of projects.
From the indie-folk of Woodpigeon, the sweaty garage sludge of Brenda Vaqueros; grandiose projects abound, nurturing Kenna’s compositional skill and style. Her cherished collaboration with Calgary theatre company, One Yellow Rabbit has offered the unique opportunity to compose for the largest and loudest of instruments, the Calgary Tower’s carillon.
To this day, you can still hear the bells of The Calgary Songs Project, an ambitiously transcribed thirty-song playlist of Calgary songwriters spanning thirty years. This work dovetails into her daytime concerns of offering city street singalongs to unsuspecting citizens, teaching music, and currently developing a songwriting program “The Song” that uncovers the mysteries of songwriting to anyone regardless of training or experience.
But the best way to figure out what drives Kenna is to delve into her solo albums; classical-cabaret-pop affairs that draw on her vast musical know-how.
The complexities of her songwriting reflect the heart of an artist who is never content to restrict herself to one genre, one project, or one ideal. With her third solo album While She Sleeps, the angry intensity of her sophomore release Hymn (2016) turns inward to unravel the quiet mysteries of creation.
This concert is a proud Community Co-Presentation with the High Performance Rodeo, Calgary’s International Festival of the Arts
