After posting a YouTube video of herself casually beatboxing in the back seat of a car, an Ottawa private-school girl with a 95-per-cent average is heading to the Beatbox Battle World Championships in Berlin, where she will face off against 20 other young women in a nightclub this weekend.
Julia Dales, a fresh-faced Grade 12 student from Ashbury College, won a YouTube contest for the wild-card spot in the competition earlier this month. The winning clip, which has been viewed more than 600,000 times, shows Ms. Dales remixing Justin Timberlake's SexyBack, Nelly Furtado's Say It Right and the Black Eyed Peas' My Humps. With her head languidly propped up on her hand, she spits her beats out in the school parking lot.
Beatboxing, Ms. Dales says, is making "drum sounds with your mouth." She replicates snares, high hats, as well as bass lines and DJ scratching. But she also throws in an assortment of other sounds, including a car engine and water dripping.
"With all that, you can make songs," says Ms. Dales, who is now working on "a good foghorn and a clown nose honking."
The daughter of a doctor and writing-skills professor, Ms. Dales also sings, writes music and plays guitar. She is on the track and field team and ran a five-kilometre race on Saturday, in between studying for exams.
"Young people sort of multitask," says her mother Johanna Blais, recalling a recent moment in the family car when Ms. Dales beatboxed, read Death of a Salesman and filmed herself with a cellphone.
Ms. Dales started beatboxing at age six, after lessons from her tennis coach. In Grade 9, a friend of older sister Laurence helped Ms. Dales improve her set. A grainy YouTube from back then shows her spitting beats in a purple hoodie at a talent show, a cardboard cutout house on the stage the only sign it's a school event.
The story has captivated largely because Ms. Dales is a private-school girl, and beatboxing is more traditionally associated with hip hop - making the peculiar sounds that pop out of her mouth even more surprising.
"I've always expected [that reaction]. I would be beatboxing in my uniform around the school and I'd always get, 'Woah! Didn't expect that from you.' "
School officials have encouraged her unconventional talent, letting her beatbox at assemblies.
"Her peers are in awe of her abilities," says school headmaster Tam Matthews, adding, "I think it shows how music, arts and creativity just transcend all borders and stereotypes."
Ms. Dales performed in California last Thursday, accumulating competitive experience for Berlin, Mr. Matthews says.
She is now in the process of picking her university: She plans to study global development and political science.
