Not Fade Away
Fondly remembered this month…
Artistic mentor to Bush and Bowie (1938–2018)
“TO call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist,” said Kate Bush of Lindsay Kemp. “He was very brave, very funny and above all, astonishingly inspirational.” the choreographer taught Bush the art of interpretive dance after she’d enrolled on one of his courses with the advance from her original EMi contract. she duly paid tribute to Kemp on “Moving”, the opening track from her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside, and later enlisted him for her short film The Line, The Cross And The Curve.
Years earlier, Kemp had been a mentor to one of Bush’s other touchstones, David Bowie. the pair first met in 1967, when the 20-year-old Bowie signed up at the Covent Garden Dance Centre. Kemp involved him in his stage production Pierrot In Turquoise, followed by a BBC play, The Pistol Shot. By august 1972, his student and sometime lover, then enjoying major stardom as Ziggy stardust, asked Kemp to help turn a three-night stint at London’s rainbow into a theatrical spectacle. He also appeared in Bowie’s video for “John, i’m Only Dancing”. “i really taught him how to be on the stage,” Kemp told Uncut last year. “How to make an entrance, how to make an exit, and quite a few things in between.”
Born in Birkenhead and raised in south shields, Kemp studied with austrian dancer Hilde Holger and mime artist Marcel Marceau, before starting his own dance company in the ’60s. among his most provocative and celebrated productions was Flowers, based on Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady Of The Flowers, which debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 1968.
Kemp also made appearances in films, including 1973’s The Wicker Man, as the pub landlord, and as a pantomime dame in Velvet Goldmine (1998), although his true calling was always the stage. “i was born dancing,” he once declared. “For me, dancing has always been a shortcut to happiness.”