“I’d like to see more freaks, faggots and queers on the mainstream”- Vaginal Davis

To enter this space between the live and the cinematic is to be located at a threshold; Dickie Beau is the guide, recalling the glamour of Hollywood and echoing its otherness through a narrative encounter on the edges of the uncanny. His work engages with elements of the theatrical, the drag, the clown; in his words, “Edith Piaf meets Brady Bunch”. In this playful eeriness, Dickie wanders onstage like the ghost of a character who now occupies the screen; behind him a series of poses.

This intervention materializes some of the discourses present in the documentary This Is Not A Dream, fleshing out the immediacy and plurality of performance and its engagement with video. The DIY mode of production is used by artists to engage in a different form of discourse with a much wider audience, travelling from high to low culture, subverting mainstream forms of entertainment.

This is Not A Dream is a film that makes visible a cultural history of the video revolution and its appropriation by artists and performers, from Andy Warhol’s Portapak to Scottee’s You Tube videos, from forgotten Channel 4 DIY shows to the X Factor. It investigates not only the effect that the increasing availability of video has had on shaping artistic practice, but also how that in turn has allowed artists to engage with the mainstream through subversion, appropriation and a growing discourse on gender politics and queer culture penetrating the public sphere and reaching a much wider audience.

Part of the creative research project Performance Matters, currently in its final phase, This Is Not A Dream raises an urgent and complex question on the visibility of these interdisciplinary practices in mainstream culture. It underlines the problematic discourses that surround these practice, highlighting a cultural reticence arising from the playful interaction between a trashy aesthetic, gender politics, popular culture and mass media.  It’s a highly engaging journey whose focus on cultural history, its engagement with artists and its contextual referents through an impressive range of archive material strips bare the artistic process and cultural engagement of an important group of artists and their contribution and relationship to a wider ecology. It is a film capitalizing on social concerns, formal subversions and engagement with a diversity of popular forms, from soap opera to Chatroulette, from the experimental to the escapist.

A collaboration between Visual Cultures academic Gavin Butt and Time Out’s Cabaret editor Ben Walters, This Is Not A Dream takes on the formal character of its content, being the directors’ first encounter with film. For that reason, its tone, scope and mode of critical presentation change and develop throughout. The content is guided by the artists’ interviews, yet within these dialogues there are provocations, recounts and histories retold; the film begins with an overview of artists’ engagement with video and the moving image with a particular focus on New York in the seventies through work from artists such as Dara Birnbaum and Nao Bustamante, then moves on to explore how these technical developments were appropriated by performance and live artists, from Vaginal Davis to David Hoyle, Scotte and Cole Escola, shifting the public eye by subverting forms of popular entertainment.

The film juxtaposes the chronology of the moving image with the less well-charted history of queer performance and live art, through video and television work as well as the internet.  Dara Birnbaum’s early video pieces manipulate extracts from the TV show Wonder Woman to subvert the iconography of femininity, whilst Kalup Linzy’s appearance as a performance artist on the American soap-opera General Hospital led to the development of his playful  subversion of the construction of mainstream archetypes in his own soap-opera hybrids. David Hoyle’s own Channel 4 show Divine David Presents, a David Bowie- like presenter sharing his thoughts on everything odd and wonderful, and Glenn O’Brien’s guerrilla TV Party, are both instances in which the structure of a TV show was toyed with to great effect.  These works, which toyed with the freaky and the trashy, also raised the question of just how much it was possible for video and the moving image offer to change hierarchies of meaning. Video is seen as a source of empowerment, given its formal flexibility and ease of distribution. For artists like Scottee, the moving image has allowed his work to reach audiences without geographical constraints; for Nao Bustamante, video was a space to explore escapism and the meaning of utopia in contemporary culture.

What surfaces is the variety of forms of engagement; This Is Not A Dream capitalizes on the possibilities of cinema to change hierarchies of meaning and underlines video as a form of empowerment, given its formal flexibility and distribution. For artists like Scottee, the moving image has meant a wide access to an interested audience beyond geographical constraints, and a place where a performative identity can be integrated; for Nao Bustamante, a space to explore escapism and what utopia means in contemporary culture.

Ultimately, This Is Not a Dream is a labour of love from both its participants and makers, underlining the infinite possibilities of artistic production and discourse that interdisciplinary work offers, whilst also providing a much-needed cultural history ignored by the mainstream.

This Is Not A Dream is part of the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. For more information visit the Festival Microsite.