Avant-garde performer who influenced David Bowie
As a mime artist, dancer, actor and choreographer, Lindsay Kemp personified the avant-garde, shocking audiences with over-the-top, sexually explicit productions. But he was best known for his influence on other performers: he taught David Bowie (whom he judged too stiff to be a natural dancer) to move and showed a timid Kate Bush how to be a “savage on stage”. Nicknamed “the British bizarro”, he divided critics, said The Guardian: while some admired his fusion of British glam rock and punk with “the subversive European strain” of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, others considered him “an epicene purveyor of tripe”.
Born in Birkenhead in 1938, Lindsay Kemp, who has died aged 80, was raised by his mother after the death of his father – a merchant seaman – in the Second World War. While still at primary school, he formed a duo with the local undertaker’s son, tap-dancing on coffins. His mother sent him to a naval boarding school, where he performed the Dance of the Seven Veils in the dormitory; when it became clear that he wouldn’t make a seaman, he enrolled at Bradford art college, where he became friends with David Hockney. At 17 he won a scholarship to the Ballet Rambert school, said The Times. He was thrown out for being “temperamentally and physically unsuitable”, but that didn’t stop him training under Marcel Marceau and the Austrian expressionist Hilde Holger. In 1962, he formed his own dance company; five years later, Bowie knocked on his dressing-room door and asked to study with him. The two briefly became lovers, and though Kemp was profoundly distressed when he found Bowie in bed with a woman, they remained friends and collaborators: in 1972, Kemp staged Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust concerts at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, London.
In 1968, he turned Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers into the show that made his name, Flowers. Following a transvestite through a world of criminals, prostitutes and angels, it provoked a police raid when it opened at the Edinburgh Fringe, but later transferred to London and New York. Kemp also embarked on a film career, with roles in The Wicker Man and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. He made peace with Ballet Rambert, for which he co-created the spectacular Cruel Garden, and after moving to Italy, he turned to directing opera. Although drink and drugs took their toll – “Stash the hash, boys, it’s a bust,” he’d cry when his parties were raided – he was still working a month before his death. “It’s an encouragement for the public to dream,” he said of his work. “I want the audience to leave the theatre transformed – dancing, flying.”