CANADIAN BEATBOXING CHAMPIONSHIPS at Lee’s Palace (529 Bloor Street West), Friday (November 6), 7pm. $20. beatboxcan.com. See listing.
Sparx has a bit of a cough.
The Sudbury-born, now local beatboxer says one of the less glamorous parts of competing is sharing mics, which can mean sharing colds. But it’s also a symptom of where she’s been over the past year: New York City for the American Beatboxing Championship and Berlin for the Beatbox Battle World Championship.
Now, Sparx (whose real name is Emilie Carrey) is poised to be the first-ever female competitor at Friday’s Canadian Beatboxing Championships. It’s not that they didn’t previously allow women to compete, it’s that by her count anyway, the number of female beatboxers in Canada is extremely small.
“The ratio for beatbox girls and guys is about one for every 20,” the 19-year-old says. “It’s insane. There’s really not a lot of beatbox girls, that’s all there is to it. In all of Canada, there’s about – that I can name – four.”
Four women is an astoundingly small number, but Sparx thinks there are likely more. They’re just not necessarily out in the open.
“It’s something that’s underground,” she says. “It’s hip-hop – it’s known as a guy thing, beatboxing. When you describe a lady, you don’t picture a lady spitting everywhere, you know? The amount of times I’ve been told by old men while I’m street performing, ‘Oh, that’s not something a lady should be doing!’ Even online, people have been like, ‘Girls shouldn’t do this, it’s unattractive.’… It’s weird, but I think because of that, girls haven’t always been welcome.”
Sparx estimates that around 85 per cent of the beatboxing videos online only include men. “When you see something where it’s all men doing it, you don’t know for a fact, but you grow the speculation that only guys can or should do it.”
Despite the uneven ratio, she says she’s never once ran into sexism within the beatboxing community, which she likens to family – it’s only come from the aforementioned clueless and online trolls.
Still, in the interest of growing the numbers, she does beatboxing workshops and has started building a digital community for women interested in beatboxing that has already gained a solid following. The closed Facebook group Global Female Beatbox currently has 82 members, and Instagram account @GlobalFemaleBeatbox posts short beatboxing videos from women all over the world. Even though the Canadian championship is still very important, she wants to focus on growing that community even more.
“Overall, what I want to get from beatboxing as a whole. I feel fulfilled with my skills, I feel fulfilled with the shows I do, but I want to push others, too. I want to see this girl move up now,” she says, pointing to imaginary potential competitors. “And this girl, and this girl.”
music@nowtoronto.com | @MattGeeWilliams
