News about Lindsay Kemp's death in Livorno, Italy, arrived last weekend: the British choreographer and mime, who turned 80 this year, had been busy rehearsing for his Italian tour with his company when he suddenly died last Friday.
Born in Wirral, Merseyside, and raised in South Shields, Tyneside, Kemp trained at the Ballet Rambert school in London and then studied mime with Marcel Marceau in Paris and dance with the Viennese expressionist Hilde Holger.
He founded his own dance company in the 1960s and started experimenting with avant-garde performances: he found fame with a show entitled "Flowers" (based on Jean Genet's Notre Dame des Fleurs) performed in the '70s and became better known for choreographing and performing with Bowie at the singer's Ziggy Stardust concerts in 1972, irreverently combining in this show theatre, dance and glam rock.
Bowie attended Kemp's classes in the '60s and the two had a brief affair that turned into a strong creative friendship, but other singers and actors learnt from Kemp how to express their feelings and communicate with their bodies, among them Mick Jagger and Kate Bush (who saw "Flowers" and enrolled in classes with Kemp).
Yet Kemp wasn't appreciated by dance critics who saw him more as an actor, a mime combing Commedia dell'Arte and operatic gestures with an irreverent eroticism.
Kemp, who had a passion for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Kabuki, the world of the music halls, silent films and opera, also appeared in films every now and then (he starred in Derek Jarman's "Sebastiane" and "Jubilee", Ken Russell’s "Savage Messiah", Robin Hardy's "The Wicker Man", and Todd Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine" among others).
The artist eventually moved to Italy where he worked for the stage and designed operas, settling down in Livorno, Tuscany. Kemp nurtured a genuine passion for make-up and costumes and last year he took part in a unique collaborative event with fashion design students.
In June 2017 Kemp was the protagonist of a project that coincided with the Pitti Uomo trade show, but was organised by the IED (Istituto Europeo di Design – European Institute of Design) in collaboration with the Museo Novecento in Florence.
The event consisted in a workshop with the IED students and in a final performance in the museum cloister, entitled "Kemp Dreams Kabuki Courtesans" and featuring Kemp covered in stark white make-up reproducing with fabrics movements similar to Loïe Fuller's "Serpentine Dance" and professional dancers and students, accompanied by Japanese musician Joji Hirota.
The main inspirations behind the project were the Kabuki theatre and Ukiyo-e prints from the Edo period (between the 17th and 19th centuries).
One of the main rules Kemp taught the students was to leave behind all inhibitions and be unconventional. The artist and choreographer prompted the students to reinvent the tropes of Kabuki and its costumes, avoid copying and come up with the same creative approach he used while working in a theatre in Broadway and spent the day before the show assembling things together with pins and a glue gun in a creative frenzy.
The event coincided also with an exhibition of Kemp's drawings (sailors are often a reccurring motif in his work since his father who was a sailor drowned when he was a child) printed on textiles and bandanas by silk manufacturers in the Como area, and an exhibition of his costumes from three productions - Elizabeth I, The Magic Flute and the Maschere by Mascagni.
There are great lecturers in universities all over the world, but this initiative was admirable since it offered design students the possibility to learn more about body moving, costumes and communication directly from an irreverently visionary mind. While Kemp will be greatly missed, especially in Italy where he was developing more projects in Livorno, the model of workshop developed with him at IED could maybe be adopted by other universities and institutions - design students would indeed certainly benefit from being exposed to more radical artistic figures that could help them ponder more about the power of the body in connection with costumes and make up.
Comments