THE ACTOR

David Bowie was a kaleidoscope, every turn something intricate and brilliant, each new facet fascinating to behold, even if some inevitably struck you as more beautiful than others. This quality held over in the inevitable public mourning that meets every famous death. No two people were quite able to agree on which Bowie was the quintessential, every person finding their own version of him.

On social media, the pale distance of the Thin White Duke lived next to the electric weirdness of Ziggy Stardust, the bulging pop of Let’s Dance gave way to the popping bulge of the Goblin King. He was everything to a particular subset of teenage oddities and adult art freaks, at least partly because he was just everything, period. He was not just a promise that even your strangest corners could hold a home, but also that a new life was as possible as changing your clothes — that maybe they could be the exact same thing.

Bowie taught this to a lot of us, but it was something that Bowie — David Robert Jones at birth, Davie Jones in his earliest recordings — had to learn, too. By his own account, the face that gave him access to all the ones that lived inside belonged to Lindsay Kemp, a dancer and mime he befriended and studied with in the late ’ 60s. Kemp is his own style of genius, still performing on stages to this day.

In the popular imagination, such as he exists in it, Kemp is nothing but the person who turned Bowie into Bowie, which is a melancholy fate for any artist. Though as this is a day for dwelling on Bowie’s magic, maybe the best thing to say is that Kemp was the first avant- garde artist given a berth in a wider world by Bowie’s touch, the first in a line that would grow to include everyone from Iggy Pop to Arcade Fire.

The son of a sailor who died when he was two, Kemp would dance ballet in full makeup to entertain his postwar northern England town, an act of expression that got him sent off to boarding school by his mother. Moving to London to study ballet, he avoided army service by showing up to a military parade in eyeliner and sandals. This kind of brash queerness infused a lot of his early work, reaching its peak in a celebrated production of Our Lady of the Flowers in the mid-’ 70s, for which Kemp would frequently find his backup dancers by trolling pickup spots and plucking the most beautiful boys who were willing.

It was beauty — of not just Bowie’s alien visage but his angelic voice — that led Kemp to Bowie. They met when Kemp used one of his songs as an intro. As Bowie told Melody Maker in 1972, Kemp’s style rescued him from possibly becoming a Buddhist monk: “Meeting a nd working with Kemp … was as magical as Buddhism, and I completely sold out and became a city creature.” The key was in how Kemp unlocked the possibility of change through his use of shifting styles, from Japanese dance to commedia dell’arte: “That’s when my interest in image really blossomed.”

Bowie and Kemp’s most notable collaboration was Pierrot in Turquoise, an interpretation of the classic tale of Pierrot, in love with the girl Columbine, who betrays him for Harlequin. Bowie wrote the songs and narrated, and had a hand in turning the production into real-life drama.

The story is he was having an affair with both Kemp and a costume designer. When they found out, both attempted dramatic suicides, with Kemp reportedly slashing his wrists shortly before stepping on stage, playing the entire part that night with blood visible on his sleeves.

Bowie was eventually seduced back to music full-time, though he recruited Kemp to craft the stage show for Ziggy Stardust — both a persona and a concept that owed a considerable debt to Kemp’s teaching. Kemp recognized years later: “I taught him to exaggerate with his body a well as his voice, and the importance of looking as well as sounding beautiful. The mime uses gestures to convey his inner beauty … Bowie does that with his voice, so his gestures aren’t truly those of a mime. But he has learned to free his body, and he now dances constantly. This is what I endeavour to teach everyone who studies with me — to free what is already there.”

Once freed, Bowie never again evinced signs of boundary. He traced the roots of his reinvention back to working with Kemp, albeit obliquely. During an interview in his Berlin period, he laid out his philosophy: “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time.” The only periods Bowie seemed to regret were ones where he wasn’t shifting.

You can glimpse Bowie’s discomfort with this idea in a short promo film he made before returning to music, but after his collaboration with Kemp had ended. It’s a narrated mime piece in which a man finds a mask that allows him to entertain first his friends and family, and eventually the world. In its last bit, it turns horror, as the performer discovers he can no longer remove the mask, the beaming smile that made the world fall in love with him. After he dies on stage, Bowie the narrator explains, the papers say he was strangled on stage; “Funny though,” he adds as coda: “They didn’t mention anything about a mask.”

Bowie died two days after the release of his newest album, as close to a stage as he allowed himself in his final days. He escaped the tragedy of us never seeing his true face by always giving us another one, and maybe the purest sadness we feel is never knowing what he’d try on next.

But we know there’d be one, and that in its way is the hope he found all those years ago, a hope he was gracious enough to share.