Dickie Beau
LOST in TRANS

[En anglais]

In a recent episode of the podcast Food 4 Thot, a discussion on queer vocality began with one host revealing, “People’s voices are pretty much my favourite thing… their singing voices, their speaking voices. How they express themselves and how they modulate, and even what they betray.” These words could almost as convincingly be attributed to performance artist Dickie Beau, the persona of Richard Boyce, whose mining of the voice in his multimedia practice implies a similar sense of rapture. If Narcissus, one of the many characters elliptically portrayed in Beau’s LOST in TRANS, drowns in self-love, it is into the aesthetic and sensory pool of the voice that Beau himself delves with equal ardour.

LOST in TRANS collects an idiosyncratic array of sound fragments, songs, props, and visceral images, suturing them to form a mythical love-letter. For Beau, the initial recipient was Echo, the nymph whose unrequited desire for Narcissus led her to retreat, as Beau writes in his production’s postscript, “to a cave where she wasted away, until all that was left of her was the sound of her voice.”