Sad news this morning: the dancer, mime artist and choreographer Lindsay Kemp has died aged 80. Kemp, of course, worked with David Bowie and Kate Bush and played Alder MacGregor, pub landlord of the Green Man Inn in The Wicker Man. I spoke to Kemp in May, 2017 for a cover story on Bowie's formative...
Ziggy rehearsals. Was there a correlation back to Dance Centre?
Yes, it was all there. Everything that I taught him, he had absorbed. He was a great absorber. He absorbed everything that was around him, everything that he might find useful. Everything I taught him showed him was there, nothing was forgotten at all. Especially what was impressive was his stillness. I failed as a teacher with poor Kate Bush in many ways, because I didn’t manage ever to get her to keep still – which David demonstrated so marvelously in ‘My Death’, when he sat on stool and didn’t move at all, except for his fingers strumming his guitar, and that was the most moving and potent part of the show. That production of Ziggy Stardust changed the whole look of rock’n’roll. But it didn’t really need my baroque input. The songs stood up on their own. Tony Defries was right when he said, “Sorry David, we’re not going to take Lindsay and the troupe to the States because I don’t really think we need them.” When I went to David’s dressing room at the end of the Ziggy Stardust concert to congratulate him, he was in floods of tears. He said, “They don’t want to take you to the States with us.”
Who were the Astronettes?
Angela came up to Edinburgh, where I was living and where I was performing in my production of Flowers. It was a piece I did based on Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of The Flowers. She came up with the record of Ziggy Stardust and a note from David saying, “Listen to the music and if you like it, you might be interested in directing a theatrical production and maybe appearing.” It immediately caught my appetite. Angela came to see Flowers that night and took a fancy to quite a few boys in the company and she declared, “Well, we could take them all, or some of them down to London to participate in the show.” To my surprise, they were named the Astronettes. They were a group of six dancers from my company, including the Incredible Orlando, who was blind; an incredible performer who was a particular favourite of David and mine. I was the Starman and Queen Bitch, I performed.
Tell me about Natasha Korniloff?
Natasha designed quite a few of the costumes for that production. I designed quite a few costumes, Natasha did a few costumes and of course that incredible Japanese designer made some beautiful costumes. The show looked marvellous, and sounded marvellous, and baroque; it had a very big impact visually on the audience. They hadn’t seen that kind of theatricality in a rock show before, it was a marriage between my avant garde theatre and rock’n’roll. A very good marriage, I have to say.