Camera Lucida: a truly spine-tingling experience

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/28/camera-lucida-dickie-beau-seance

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Right at the back of the Barbican’s Pit theatre, a glowing green fluorescent table seems to magically float in the velvety purple darkness. Downstage, three actors – two male, one female – sit in the eerie reflected glow, twitching, gurning, flailing, as if possessed.

But by far the most ghostly and troubling element of Camera Lucida – a radical multimedia seance that opens on 28 October and will channel the voices of the dead into the Pit over Halloween – lurks unseen, right above the audience. Looking like a corrugated cruise missile and operating at an audio frequency 18.9 hertz, this is what is known as an infrasound device.

It won’t be heard conventionally by the ear, but will instead resonate in the tendrils of the digestive system, the medulla oblongata of the brain and the myelin sheath protecting the spinal cord – inducing ethereal trills, mystical vibrations and supernatural shivers in members of the audience. This production will be metaphorically and physiologically spine-tingling.

Its creator – the intriguingly named Dickie Beau – has emerged from the world of underground cabaret to produce shows of dazzling weirdness and experimentalism, and has been credited by some with the foundation of a new genre called “playback performance”, building performances around existing sound archives.

Starting life under the rather more sober moniker of Richard Boyce, he emerged from the gay club scene and transformed himself in the noughties into his current incarnation, performing covers of Nina Simone as well as his own outre compositions, a period he now calls his “bewilderness years”.

It all changed again when he stumbled on recordings that Judy Garland made in the 1960s for her never-to-be-finished autobiography – late-night rants full of bile and spite and self-loathing: ‘I’m the one who’s had to live with me!’ runs one notable self-lacerating line.

Beau ditched the songs and began lip-syncing to the Garland archive, dressed in the full carroty-pigtail outfit of The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy. He expanded it into a full show, entitled Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols, where the Garland tapes were presented alongside Marilyn Monroe’s final interview: “This is the drag show at the end of the world,” wrote one critic.

He followed up Blackouts with the much more complex work Lost in Trans, which combined Ovid’s Metamorphoses with stories about transsexual experience. By now, he had perfected the technique of channelling every nuance of the archive voices: “I first do an impersonation of the voice out loud so that I can develop the movements and the facial expressions,” he says, “Then I take it away, reduce it to a whisper and eventually the voice is entirely gone.”

Moving around the Pit, Beau whispers instructions to the tech crew. In many respects, his everyday persona – from the shaggy jumper to the crunchy post-structuralist terminology that he often employs to explain his work – appears to be a deliberate reaction against his cross-dressing “drag clown’ alter egos. The tattoos on each forearm reveal his club-performer origins: one a thorny red rose, the other a dagger and a fluttering ribbon.

The inspiration for Camera Lucida was disarmingly straightforward: “One reviewer said that Dickie Beau is the closest thing this country has to a genuine medium,” he recalls. This plunged Beau into a frenzy of research and reading, ranging from Roland Barthes – whose 1980 work about photography and mourning gives the piece its title – to the history of the Victorian seance, with all of its theatricality, mysticism and charlatanry. Behind the shrieks and the shifting glasses, Beau saw a real, hard social function: “The whole objective was to make the dead available again,” he says, “to resocialise them.”

The resulting work, which will be the first time he has employed other performers, uses extraordinary audio archive to raise three figures from the literary mausoleum: Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and the cultural critic Terence McKenna, all of whom he chose because of their unique relationship with death. “Woolf killed herself and McKenna, the cerebral intellectual, died of a brain tumour,” he says, “William Burroughs killed his wife, so walked around with death looming over him.”

But if this all seems wilfully macabre, it is offset by a multimedia torrent of lighter, comedic moments: the infamous recording of the Houdini Halloween seance in 1936, and the testimony of a 50s housewife on LSD.

And then, of course, there is the infrasound device. It was inspired by an allegedly haunted laboratory in the University of Warwick: “People began seeing weird things, seeing ghosts and feeling that there were presences in the room,” says Beau. The culprit turned out to be defective extractor fan, which was emitting a frequency of 18.9hz, right in the infrasound spectrum: “It was precisely the right frequency to make the eyeball vibrate, producing hallucinations.”

While the device in the Pit will be considerably less powerful, Beau does hope that it will complement what is happening on stage, making this a singular theatrical experience: “I want it to enhance the performances,” he says, “Some of these infrasounds are around anyway – they are deep in the tunnels of the tube, for instance. But you will feel a perceptible resonance. You ‘hear’ it in the most unexpected places – in the tips of your fingers.”

• Camera Lucida runs from 28 October to 8 November. Venue: Barbican, London.