Powerful performance comes from rich content
Sound of the Beast
(out of 4) Written and performed by DonnaMichelle St. Bernard. Until May 7 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. Passemuraille.ca or 416-504-7529.
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard is a mercurial talent — MC, theatre artist and award-winning playwright.
Her latest piece is an evening of performance poems, raps and minilectures. Although its references are individually allusive, they accumulate into a thought-provoking but formally indeterminate commentary on clashes between people of colour and authority, internationally and here in Toronto.
The show was inspired by the story of Weld El 15, a Tunisian rapper who was sentenced to two years in prison in 2013 after posting a music video online called “The Police are Dogs.” This is part of St. Bernard’s ongoing series of 54 plays, each inspired by a different African country ( Gas Girls, about the Zimbabwean sex trade, is one of her two Governor General’s Award-nominated scripts).
Weld El 15’s story of complicated engagement with institutional power — his music is appropriated by a politician on the rise, who then imprisons the artist when he takes office — pops up sporadically in the show but doesn’t come across as St. Bernard’s primary focus.
Although it’s not directly referenced by name, Black Lives Matter is the clear backdrop for the piece. The title refers to the 1993 rap song “Sound of da Police,” which places contemporary policing in the history of oppression of people of colour in the U.S.
I don’t have the experience of being marginalized because of my ethnicity, and some of the most-effective, disturbing and enlightening sections of the show for me were St. Bernard’s accounts of being in- timidated by the police while doing nothing more than walking down the street alone.
The production is an excellent showcase for her varied talents as a writer, from her rapper’s rhymes to her imaginative range of reference (when asked “Who are you?” by a police officer, she responds “I’m a secret agent. I’m a fried egg. I’m Margaret Thatcher. I’m none of your f--ing business”).
In another powerful series of monologues she gives advice to her non-existent son about what he needs to survive in today’s world, which includes “a vapid resting face devoid of emotion . . . knowing two ways out of any place you’re in . . . saying sir without sarcasm” and the ability to open a live-streaming app on his phone in a number of seconds.
There’s also a strand of narrative about her experiences as a performer working with two men named Jay and Zed who have increasingly vio- lent encounters with authority, but this trails off.
St. Bernard performs against David Mesiha’s sound design, and shifting lights by Rebecca Vandevelde and projections by Cameron Davis help create a club-like atmosphere.
For all the violence and injustice highlighted in the show, St. Bernard comes across as gentle and introspective, someone who wants to generate dialogue and bring different perspectives into contact.
This curatorial instinct is also apparent in the interspersing of video projections of poems in American Sign Language (subtitled in English) by the activist artist Tamyka Bullen, and the invitation of a different performer each night to provide a short coda (at the performance I attended it was the excellent dancer Shakeil Rollock). Andy McKim and Jivesh Parasram are credited as co-directors and codramaturgs. The clear choice seems to have been to keep the evening free-form, but at nearly two hours’ running time this leads to diminishing returns. The lingering sense is that the theatrical framing of this show doesn’t quite match its content nor fully follow its impulses towards a collaboration of mingled voices.