As well as telling their own stories, artists often explore stories from history, pop- culture and more. Dickie Beau uses existing recordings, stories and texts as his stimulus. Through clever editing and beautiful performance skills he takes the audience on a brand new journey showing stories in a new light. Solo work so often focuses on the self and it places much emphasis on the idea that the artiest must be present. I know that if my performance is on the two female writers, Virginia and Plath, I couldn’t just simply act them out. Therefore, I have chosen to combine multimedia, as well as the use of imagery, and the use of Verbatim to portray the two women. I am constantly thinking about the impact my show must have on the audience. A good solo piece, in my view, must engage the audience as much as possible. I want the audience to feel a connection to my piece and although I am talking about two women, of one who died 51 years ago and they other 73 years ago, I still want them to emotionally connect to these two women. Consequently, I feel that a small inter-mate audience would be more beneficial to my performance.
The video above is of the artiest Dickie Beau’s. He uses Verbatim to represent the famous actress and singer Judy Garland. His over stylized portrayal of her works beautifully and it works tremendously well as a piece, as it posses all the good qualities that a solo performance should have. His work as inspired me to play around with different ways of playing the two characters within my piece.