Performance artist, Dickie Beau has been hailed as a star of the performance art circuit and his interpretation of Judy Garland has disturbed, thrilled and bewildered audiences around the world. Here he explains how he embraced Judy and why he's pondering Marilyn Monroe.

About five years ago, whilst communing with the cosmos on magic mushrooms, I was introduced to some notorious tapes of Judy Garland speaking into a dictaphone, ostensibly making notes for a memoir that was never written. These tapes are perfectly compelling because they are by turns wittily humorous, privately poignant and very, very angry. I was haunted for a long time after listening to them.  It wasn’t just the naked human need I'd heard in the tapes, but how they captured the denuded emotional entropy of a 'fallen idol' who was in exile, not only from society, but also from herself.

Some time later, whilst finding my feet on the performance art circuit, I returned to these tapes and, discovering them to be just as much of a 'trip' the second time around. I edited them into a three-act theatrical vignette, framed by the music of Britney Spears and Sakamoto. I performed the culminating piece, in nightclub drag terms, as an 'epic' lipsynch, for experimental performance forum, 'UnderConstruction', at Bistrotheque. The aim was not so much to impersonate Judy Garland, as attempt to embody the rock bottom of a dying swan. I omitted explicit references to her identity in the material, and presented 'Judy' as a cross between Dorothy Gale and a washed-up marionette, with a clown-face. I called the piece, in a nod to Vaudeville, 'An Episode of Blackout'.

Apparently, it worked. A big part of what made it work was the spectral presence of Judy's voice – it turned out to be a piece of theatre in which the lipsynching aspect, conventionally framed as a 'low-culture' activity, supposedly belonging in the back alleys of nightclub drag, actually elevated the piece and was essential to its success.

This got me thinking, and I started to explore the idea of developing a series of neo-Vaudevillian vignettes, or 'blackout skits', using existing audio artefacts of the voices of our most troubled pop culture icons, to play out the dysfunctional dramas that seem to make them so compelling. Duckie commissioned me to be artist-in-residence and I created an additional two 'Blackouts', one based on Marilyn Monroe, the other on a fusion of Amy Winehouse and Judy Garland.

As I scouted around for soundtrack ingredients, I learnt of the existence of tapes containing Marilyn Monroe’s last interview before she died, poignantly published in 'Life' magazine only a day before her demise, in which she talks candidly of her troubled childhood and the trials of fame. Some of this material had been used in a documentary called Marilyn on Marilyn, which I discovered in my research. Through the producer of this film, Paul Kerr, I tracked down the journalist, Richard Meryman, who had conducted the original interview. He is now an elderly man living in New York.

I made a telephone call to Mr Meryman in the summer of 2008. Intrigued by my approach, he agreed to let me listen to the tapes, but was reluctant to give me a copy of the material outright, having had experience of such generosity being abused in the past. So, he regretted that I would have to be in New York to hear them. I held a fundraiser at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to raise money for a flight and several of my peers, including David Hoyle, Timberlina and Ryan Styles, showed support by generously performing for free. I was successful in covering the cost of a flight and went to New York in October 2008.

Across two afternoons, in Mr Meryman’s charming West Village living room, I listened to the five-hour interview, originally conducted nearly fifty years ago across two afternoons in Marilyn's living room at the infamous address on Fifth Helena Drive in LA where she died. These tapes are not as viscerally dramatic as the Judy tapes, because Marilyn was giving an interview to a journalist and, having been fired from 'Something's Got to Give' in the weeks before, was doing the interview as a PR exercise. But, nevertheless, there are authentic glimpses of her fragile humanity – mostly in the moments that might be considered too banal for broadcast in a conventional documentary (and after she'd supped a few glasses of champagne). It was a thrilling privilege to be one of very few people in the world who have heard this final interview in its entirety.

Although understandably protective of the tapes, Mr Meryman's curiosity was sufficiently aroused for him to confirm a willingness to let me use some of the material, upon agreement of a fee. At the time I didn't have the means to make a transaction, however modest, so I thanked him for his time and told him I'd be in touch. I went off, continued developing my ideas, and earlier this year I spent a three-month sabbatical as a nanny in the Australian outback writing an Arts Council proposal for a grant to 'write' a digital audio 'script' for Blackouts as a 'lip-synched musical' – an inversion of a traditional Hollywood musical paradigm in that the spoken word content would be performed by lipsynching to the edited audio, and the 'numbers' would be performed live.

My experimental tenure as a nanny, isolated on the other side of the world from my very adult network of friends and associates in London, and spending almost all of my time with children, widened my eyes to a novel perspective of the project I was planning. As well as upending the Hollywood musical paradigm, I woke up, whilst inventing bedtime stories for my charges, to a further artistic inversion: Blackouts would be a collection of surreal fairy tales – but not for children, for adults; a kind of adult 'Alice in Wonderland'.

In pre-Victorian times, the concept of 'childhood' did not exist as we know it today. Children, instead, were viewed as 'little adults'. Through inverting, and consequently challenging, conventional notions of 'childhood' and 'adulthood' as tangible stages of human life, it may be possible to open the door to an imaginary world of the unconscious in which no one is really an adult - internally, we’re all just playing at being grown-ups. In my perception of the world, it is 'adulthood' that does not really exist - we’re all just 'big kids'.

My principal preoccupation with Judy Garland is in part because she embodies this idea so pertinently. In talking of Garland, her daughter Lorna Lufte has said that, whilst she is wary that the word “victim” can be misused, she feels it is appropriate in connection with her mother - “because it is a word that pertains to children”. And, in Lorna Lufte’s eyes, her own mother was a child who never truly grew up; mainly because, perversely, she was never given a ‘childhood’ to begin with.

Marilyn, too, was deprived of a conventional secure 'childhood', growing up in orphanages and foster homes. Consequently, a significant part of her charm was the childlike quality she possessed, and there is something distinctly warped about the fact that this is often acknowledged as central to her 'sex appeal'. That she harboured fervent hopes to have children of her own is well-known and there’s a bleak irony in the Hollywood tittle-tattle, designed to harm her reputation, that held her uterus was so scarred by having endured too many (studio-enforced) abortions that her body was unable to support a pregnancy to full-term.

If I can find, in the tapes of her last interview, a taste of Marilyn's tragic truth, told in her own tell-tale timbre, and am able to rephrase it theatrically, I have a hunch I might be onto something. It's nearly two years since I first heard the tapes, and my quest is akin to a crumb trail: I've no idea where it leads. I'm only hoping, if I'm lucky, to discover something like the opposite of a happy ending.

Main photo by Darrell Berry