London-based physical performer and intrepid drag fabulist, Dickie Beau,

is a postmodern cultural pickpocket, maverick theatre-maker and twisted video star;

looting a range of performance traditions, from “low culture” to “high art”,

in the creation of distinctive performance experiences.

The principle shtick for which Dickie has been gaining notoriety of late is as

a pioneer of “playback” performance: the uncanny embodiment (or “re-memberment”)

of found sound - a style of performance that emerges

from the drag tradition of lip synching.

“Playback” positions the body as an archive, especially of the "missing"

- re-visioning and playing back voices from the margins:

voices of figures we might not normally hear in the mainstream,

in ways that we might not be accustomed to hearing them.

“Playback” also engages with ideas of the body as a medium -

as both the material carrier of images, and also as the lead performer of a seance,

“channelling” the dead. It relates to Hans Belting’s image theory that traces the origins of all human picture-making to the earliest rituals of the funereal realm.

Within his approach, Dickie draws on many other performance traditions,

including clowning, theatre, vaudeville, dance and mime,

without being exclusive to one school’s rules.

He merges the sensibility of contemporary culture

with queer twists and informed echoes of the past.

Increasingly combining his own original video and sound work with live performance,

he crosses over, stands at the edges, and lies in between conventions.

He has taken his work to a wide range of audiences in truly diverse settings:

nightclubs, art galleries, cabaret bars, cinemas, museums, theatres, fashion shows, festivals,

online, in stores and on the street.

Dickie has performed at The Southbank Centre, Cafe de Paris, Wilton Hall, Madame JoJos,

the Barbican, the British Film Institute, Chelsea Theatre, the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club,

the ICA, the Royal Opera House, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Battersea Arts Centre,

the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Roundhouse, Ronnie Scotts,

the Hackney Empire, Stratford Circus and Soho Theatre, to name a few.

Notable festival appearances include Latitude, Fierce, Cork Midsummer Festival,

Dublin’s Queer Notions Festival, and the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

As well as winning Best Alternative Performer in the 2012 London Cabaret Awards

Dickie was also recently the recipient of a prestigious Jardin d’Europe contemporary dance award,

an endowment  being used toward making a queer-feminist solo performance

for the Southbank Centre, due to be presented at the Purcell Room in July.

The project is provisionally called ‘LOST in TRANS-’.

Dickie used his residency at the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm in December 2012

to begin developing work for ‘LOST in TRANS-’ with the project’s dramaturg, Julia Bardsley.

An Art Council Grant for the Arts Award in October 2012 enabled Dickie to present

his first major solo theatre show, ‘BLACKOUTS: Twilight of the Idols’,

at the Homotopia Festival, Liverpool (Unity Theatre). Following subsequent sell-out runs

at Contact Manchester and London’s Chelsea Theatre, the show will run at Soho Theatre in July 2013

and plans are afoot for further touring activity.

“Touching, bizarre and visually gorgeous ...

a thing unlike any other ...

it is the drag show at the end of the world ... superb.”

- Time Out on ‘BLACKOUTS’

‘BLACKOUTS’ is a surreal theatrical trip in which Dickie shapeshifts through

the subconscious underworld of a future self, channelling the ghosts of his childhood idols.

The project has been supported by the ARTS COUNCIL

at both the research and production stages of its development.

The approach to writing the show’s script is unorthodox in that it was “digitally written”

entirely from audio/visual artefacts, and is unique in featuring never-before-heard audio footage

from Marilyn Monroe’s final interview, to which Dickie is the first person to have ever

been granted full access by Richard Meryman, the journalist who conducted

the iconic interview that was published in ‘Life’ magazine just days before Marilyn’s death.

Read reviews of first performances here and here.

In summer 2012, Dickie appeared in artist Mel Brimfield’s exhibition,

‘Between Genius and Desire’, at the Ceri Hand Gallery in Covent Garden.

The exhibition set out to explore the enduring romantic image of the heroic artist

as a conduit for violent creative passion. Mel’s collaboration with Dickie culminated

in two films in which Dickie plays twisted versions of both Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock.

Further collaborations with Mel are underway...

Dickie’s solo video-interactive work recently featured as an integral part of the

creative documentary, ‘This is Not a Dream’, a new film about

artists using moving images to promote freakery

and explore stranger regions of fantasy,

directed by Dr Gavin Butt of Goldsmiths University

and journalist Ben Walters (Time Out, Sight & Sound).

The film was presented as a “live cinematic event” at the BFI in March 2012.

The event featured bespoke live performance created by Dickie.

“Brilliant”      

                                      

- The Guardian on ‘This is Not a Dream’

, Dickie has recently been privileged to work with the

ground-breaking performance company, Hydra Poesis, based in Perth, Western Australia.

Most recently, in January-February 2013, Dickie took up a residency with the company

to begin work as a core librettist on an ambitious new project, ‘Wikileaks the Ballet’.

Dickie is also a collaborator on another pioneering Hydra Poesis project, ‘Prompter Live Studio’.

This is a multi-locational theatre project exploring the interplay between outsiders and events,

bringing together a group of international artists to make up a remote “chorus” of bedroom bloggers

engaged in acts of “performative psychosis”, streaming live into a central performance space.

It is an exciting project that harnesses the potential for global artistic collaboration

through digital media and virtual spaces. The project furthers Dickie’s work

with the moving image, moving beyond the orthodoxy of real-world performance spaces

At the end of 2011, Dickie appeared on the main stage at the Barbican

as a principal performer in an innovative new show, ‘Copyright Christmas’,

        produced by Olivier Award-winning theatre-makers & club creatives, Duckie.

  Dickie has worked extensively with the Duckie collective,

who have made an immeasurable contribution to Dickie’s artistic development.

Dickie was artist-in-residence for Duckie, in Summer 2009,

for whom he developed the original trilogy of performance art vignettes

that has evolved into the theatre show ‘BLACKOUTS: Twilight of the Idols’.

Dickie brings a diverse background to his work:

a degree in Drama from the University of Manchester;

an avant-garde training in physical theatre in Italy;

professional classical acting;

development work in Film & TV Drama,

including a period as a Script Reader for BBC Films;

and extensive experience of twisted nightclub drag.