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In his new piece, performance artist Dickie Beau channels the voices of the dead. Three dark figures connect themselves to laptops and their bodies and faces contort while posh ghostly voices seem to come from their mouths: it’s a kind of séance for the digital age.
In ‘Camera Lucida’, Beau develops a technique with which he has become synonymous. In his heralded precision lip-synching 2012 show ‘Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols’, he transformed into the likes of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe, dressed like them and mouthed along to recordings of their voices played overhead.
Here, in his directorial debut, there’s also lip-synching, but no drag and Beau is joined by three other actors. The stage is covered in tables with laptops, where people clad in black sit, tap their keyboards and convulse as we hear mostly unidentifiable voices. There’s the remarkable recording of a séance in which Harry Houdini’s widow tries to contact him in the realm of the dead, a radio call-in show and literally, it seems, people talking from the other side. Red wires run between everything, a green matrix screen flickers overhead and a strange lady totters silently about the stage.
It’s a slow, marginally unsettling and occasionally witty experience, which doesn’t deliver on its mix of intriguing ideas. Though you can see the themes Beau is playing with – the connection between death and language, the phenomenon of mediums and the living’s need to hold on to the departed – the abstractions, lack of intensity and repetition obscures them.
Going to ‘Camera Lucida’ would not be a night wasted but, for all the thought that has gone into it, it emerges as little more than a vague, slightly frustrating oddity.