Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Stage Left: Sound of the Beast an eye-opener at Belfry's Spark Festival

It’s hard to believe, but the Belfry Theatre’s Spark Festival has reached the 10-year mark. This worthwhile annual endeavour aims to provide Victoria with smart, innovative, eclectic and, well … sparky theatre from across Canada.
C5-beast.jpg
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard in Sound of the Beast, on stage tonight at the Belfry Theatre's 10th annual Spark Festival.

It’s hard to believe, but the Belfry Theatre’s Spark Festival has reached the 10-year mark. This worthwhile annual endeavour aims to provide Victoria with smart, innovative, eclectic and, well … sparky theatre from across Canada.

Sound of the Beast, which has its final performance tonight at the Belfry, is among the most anticipated shows. Performed and written by Toronto’s Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, it’s a semi-autobiographical look at the city’s hip-hop culture and the uneasy relationship that can exist between people of colour and law enforcement.

Hip-hop aficionados might guess the title of St. bernard’s 85-minute show tips its hat to Sound of da Police, the hard-driving single by Bronx rapper KRS-One. The song, about police brutality, features a notorious “whoop whoop!” refrain mimicking the sound of police sirens.

The squad-car whoop also features in Sound of the Beast. Police surveillance is a recurring theme in the show, essentially a collection of spoken word and rap. “Have you ever been slow cruised?” St. Bernard asks us ominously. She’s referencing the police practice of slowly driving by while unsmilingly checking pedestrians out.

A poet as well as a playwright (St. Bernard was a Governor-General’s drama award finalist) she describes the menacing whoop as a “mobile minaret” — an example of her deft wordplay.

As St. Bernard intends, it’s an eye-opening piece. Stalking an almost bare stage in red lace-up boots and a black hoodie, she brought the subject of racially motivated police oppression vividly to life at a Spark performance this week.

Law-enforcement surveillance lurks everywhere in Sound of the Beast. St. Bernard says undercover cops often surface at hip-hop shows, fooling no one with their AC/DC T-shirts and crew cuts. Another thread is the story of Tunisian rapper Weld El 15, who in 2013 was tossed in jail for two years for releasing the song titled (in English) Cops Are Dogs.

Sound of the Beast is no one-sided anti-cop rant. There’s some complexity in St. Bernard’s point of view. A sometime political activist, she recalled watching a policeman sweat under 65 pounds of riot gear at a political rally. At that point, St. Bernard stopped seeing him as a symbol of oppression and recognized him as a fellow human, asking his name and offering him water.

The approach worked — the cop introduced himself and even suggested that, 10 years ago, he would have joined her on the protest line.

Moments of nuance and irony within Sound of the Beast raise it above typical agitprop theatre. Tongue in cheek, St. Bernard describes the protest rally as a gathering intended to indicate “you don’t like something.”

Elsewhere, she expresses her ambivalence at how, as a woman of colour, she sometimes receives preferential treatment from police, who pass her over in favour of targeting darker-skinned comrades.

While the show has strengths, not everything works. One wonders whether Sound of the Beast probes deeply enough. Heavy-handed law enforcement gets the brunt of St. Bernard’s outrage.

Yet surely unfair police conduct is symptomatic of deeper problems within society as a whole — something that’s not particularly investigated. As well, the show is sometimes disjointed, coming off as a mish-mash that would benefit from stronger narrative through-lines.

St. Bernard sings and raps to recorded music by Blunted Beatz. She’s a likeable, cheerfully profane performer able to create an intimate relationship with the audience. Those intrigued by the subject matter likely won’t be disappointed.

Also at the Spark Festival

• Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story: Nominated for six Drama Desk Awards, including outstanding musical, this acclaimed show was inspired by the true story of how playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s grandparents came to Canada in 1908. The show, starring Ben Caplan, is created by Moscovitch, Caplan and Christian Barry. It runs March 20 to 24.

• Pathetic Fallacy: The twist to Anita Rochon’s show is that a different local actor stars each night. It explores the relationship between ancient weather gods and our current climate-change crisis. It runs March 19 to 23.

• Good Morning, Viet Mom: Franco Nguyen wrote and performs this autobiographical show, which was a hit at the Toronto Fringe Festival. It’s a comedic look at a second-generation Canadian of Asian descent being raised by his single mother. Final show is March 16.