“There is something eternal about every
human being” – The Stage Manager, Our Town
The uniquely talented Dickie Beau – the mercurial Ariel in this summer’s The Tempest – shape-shifts across a haunted landscape of performance that stretches back for thousands of years, tracing its roots and branches across unexpected realms. A live lip-synching archive, Dickie summons spirits of ritual and transformation, from Greek tragedians to pantomime dames, from Beckett to the bodhisattvas.
In ¡Showmanism!, he takes us on a journey embracing the politics and puzzles of performing personhood in and out of the spotlight. Both meta and physical, and sometimes a little bit mystical, Dickie channels a multitude of voices into a love letter to the origins and orientations of performance.
Respectful of its forebears, yet irreverent in form, ¡Showmanism! will be a vivid poem-in-motion, which says things both outward and inward, about itself, about art, about the world, and
about being human.
“Dickie Beau raises lip-syncing beyond an art form” Sir Ian McKellen
“Dickie Beau is the closest this country has to a genuine medium, putting flesh on to recorded sound in a manner both gripping and disturbing” This Is Cabaret