Artist
Dickie Beau

UK
www.dickiebeau.com

Dickie Beau draws on performance traditions including clowning, theatre, vaudeville, dance and mime. He merges the sensibility of contemporary culture with queer twists and informed echoes of the past, realizing an exquisite interplay of digital content.

A pioneer of playback performance, emerging from the drag tradition of lip-synching, Dickie Beau is influencing the practice of a whole new generation of performance-makers. His work is increasingly studied on contemporary theatre and performance courses in the UK and he’s in demand as a workshop leader and visiting speaker. Dickie has worked as artistic mentor for SPILL Festival’s National Platform as well as for MA students at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Chichester. In October 2015 Dickie joins Queen Mary University of London Department of Drama as an Associate Research Fellow. He will also continue to hold an Associate Research Fellowship at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at the University of London. In 2014 Dickie was the recipient of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award.

© Dickie Beau. Photo Maltais Bayda.

Performance
Lost in Trans by Dickie Beau

Curated and presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of Progress

Dickie Beau presents a poetic performance of peculiar personas. LOST in TRANS takes Dickie’s sensational multimedia aesthetic to hallucinatory new heights. Continuing his shtick of using playback, in which he ‘channels’ voices he sees as being misplaced, misrepresented or misunderstood, Dickie breathes new life into found sound, ‘re-writing’ audio artifacts and playing them back through his body to become a live performing archive of the missing.

Presenting a compelling constellation of vivid characters inspired by cultural antiquity and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, LOST in TRANS is an off-road trip through the cultural archives. Cyclops, the one-eyed giant, becomes a third eye through which we view the world anew, including a radical re-visioning of Echo, the Nymph, of whom all that remained when she died of a broken heart was the sound of her voice…

Phenomenal talent… a powerful and moving artist… breathtaking.
—Time Out, London

Dickie Beau is the closest this country has to a genuine medium, an auteur of the airwaves, who can put flesh onto recorded sound in a manner both gripping and disturbing.
This is Cabaret, London

CREDITS
Conceived and performed by: Dickie Beau
Producer: Sally Rose (UK)
Dramaturg: Julia Bardsley (UK)
Lighting design: Marty Langthorne
Sound design: Will Saunders (UK, Toronto)
Video filming and post-production consultant: Lukas Demgenski
Lighting operator: Nao Nagai (UK, Toronto)
Video consultant: Gillian Tan (UK)
Video operator: Aaron Pollard (Toronto)
Pegasus: Stephen Lawson (Toronto)
Production manager: Deborah Lim (Toronto)


LOST in TRANS was originally a Southbank Centre commission supported by a Jardin d’Europe contemporary dance award and a residency at Cullberg Ballet, Stockholm and has been presented at: Southbank Centre in London, Contact in Manchester, Homotopia Festival, Liverpool, Artsadmin, London, and City of Women Festival, Ljubljana (curated as part of the Live Art Development Agency’s Just Like a Woman programme).

Progress, an international festival of performance and ideas is presented in partnership by SummerWorks Performance Festival and The Theatre Centre. The festival is collectively curated and produced by a series of Toronto-based companies, operating within a contemporary performance context. Progress 2018 is curated by: SummerWorks Performance Festival, The Theatre Centre, Anandam Dancetheatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, Little Black Afro Theatre Company, Toronto Dance Community Love-In, and Volcano Theatre.

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer