Found Sound
Dickie Beau channels icons in Blackouts
By Suzannah Friscia
About halfway through Dickie Beau’s Blackouts, which had its U.S. premiere at the Abrons Arts Center earlier this month, an image of Beau appears on a dark screen: a pair of elegantly-gloved hands, and a floating face painted with clown makeup, mouthing the words to a German version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As the song goes on, the image of Beau’s face transforms, as though layers are peeling away. The makeup begins to look less heavy, and his features more abstract. The original face he’d painted on gives way to something more like a blank canvas.
Like a canvas, Beau tries on multiple identities in Blackouts. Often called a drag fabulist and known for the singular way he draws on the tradition of lip syncing, Beau incorporates elements of drag, clowning, and mime into his work. His website cites his “process of dissecting, then re-membering (literally, putting back together and embodying), found sound.” In Blackouts, he culls that sound from recordings of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and journalist Richard Meryman, who interviewed Monroe for LIFE magazine in 1962 — the last interview she gave before her death. Beau not only gained access to Meryman’s tapes of the Monroe interview, but met with him and recorded him speaking about the experience. In the show, Beau lip syncs along to these various recordings, not only mouthing the words but letting the sound run through his whole body, affecting every movement. In a way, he becomes each of these people, allowing them to speak to us through him.
The show feels like a seance. Instead of taking seats facing the proscenium in the main auditorium, we are guided backstage, stepping over wires in the dark, to an arc of chairs and cushions facing the back of the stage curtain. An old-fashioned trunk and suitcase sit stacked beside rolls of film on the ground. From the beginning, the behind-the-scenes setting gives the sense that we’re about to see something more unfiltered, and less rehearsed, than what is typically shown on the other side of the curtain.
The association Beau creates between Garland and Monroe by including both of them in his show is an apt one: both women became stars at young ages, spent much of their lives in the public eye, and died tragically of drug overdoses. Both also had little control over the way they were perceived by the outside world, and little opportunity to speak for themselves. Through the recordings, we get a look behind another curtain, the one framing their public personas — a truer picture of who each of them was, and how they felt about their situations. By applying their identities like makeup, Beau draws attention to the fact that these women played roles their whole lives — on and off the stage.
In a video posted by the Homotopia festival in Liverpool, where Blackouts had its premiere in 2011, Beau explains that he felt a connection with Meryman when they met, and saw a similarity between Meryman’s work and his own. After all, in some ways a journalist is also an architect of “found sound,” piecing together fragments from interviews, conversations and observations. In Blackouts, screen projections, fragments of music, and bits of costume from each of the stars’ most well-known films add to the show’s collage-like nature. Beau wears ruby slippers like those in The Wizard of Oz, and dons a blonde wig and white dress to recreate the “billowing dress” moment from The Seven Year Itch. These are the images that made Garland and Monroe icons, but by juxtaposing them with the recordings, Beau forces us to see them for what they always were: performances.
At one point, Beau pulls a seemingly never-ending strip of ticker-tape paper from his mouth — a classic illusion that feels unsettling in this case, with the words printed on it jumbling and coiling to the ground. It’s as though he is expelling all the references and voices and stories he’s gathered, processing and synthesizing them like a machine. In the recordings, Monroe and Garland both express a distrust for the mechanical. “We must remember we’re not machines,” says Monroe’s voice. Later, Beau-as-Garland, with long red pigtails, sits in a chair and repeatedly expresses frustration with the device she is using to record her thoughts. When there’s a glitch in the recording, Beau tenses and twitches with it, hunched forward in a chair, embodying that element of the sound too. It serves as a reminder: we can hear her voice, but only through a machine. Even in life, this was often the only way Garland was truly heard.
“All I have to do is talk, and all you have to do is listen, and believe me,” says Beau-as-Garland toward the end, voice rising in anger, “the way you believed me when I sang all those songs.” Standing up from the chair, Beau literally slashes the fourth wall, using a knife to slice the sheer screen separating him from the audience. A few minutes later, we hear perhaps the most famous words Garland ever spoke, a line from The Wizard of Oz: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” There’s something touching, and also heartbreaking, about that moment, when the voice of a much younger Judy Garland breaks through, a voice that isn’t yet colored with pent-up bitterness and resentment. Two versions of herself collide in space and time, through sound, through Beau. In that moment, she doesn’t seem like an icon — just a woman, who wants desperately to be understood.
