Lindsay Kemp – Mime Artist, Teacher and David Bowie Collaborator

Lindsay Kemp grew up largely in northern England and developed an interest in performance at an early age. After attending art classes in Bradford and completing national service with the Royal Air Force, he pursued professional training in dance and theatre.

Kemp attended the Ballet Rambert School in London. He also studied with French mime artist Marcel Marceau and with Hilde Holger, the Viennese expressionist dancer and choreographer. These different disciplines became important components of his own approach to performance.

Kemp did not restrict himself to conventional ballet or mime. His developing theatrical language combined dance, mime, costume, make-up, music and highly controlled physical expression. European theatre, expressionist dance, commedia dell’arte and literary sources all became part of his work.

He formed the Lindsay Kemp Company in 1962 and gradually built an independent reputation through experimental stage productions. His work often existed between established artistic categories, drawing responses from theatre critics as much as from the dance world.

Bowie’s documented period of study with Kemp began in 1967. He attended dance and mime lessons with Kemp at Floral Street in Covent Garden, London.

At the time Bowie was still in the Deram period of his recording career. His self-titled debut album had appeared in June 1967, but its commercial reception had been modest. During the same period he was increasingly looking beyond the conventional role of a pop singer.

Mime gave Bowie a practical means of exploring performance without relying entirely on dialogue or song. Through physical control, gesture, facial expression and movement, a performer could suggest emotion, character or an imagined environment.

Kemp regarded movement as a central means of communication. His work did not treat choreography simply as decorative movement surrounding a performer. Instead, posture, timing, facial expression, costume and gesture could become part of the character itself.

In a 2016 interview, Kemp described one of the lessons he believed he had given Bowie directly.

Kemp also recalled discussing make-up, costume, stagecraft, performance technique, music hall, avant-garde theatre, kabuki and the work of French writer Jean Genet with Bowie.

These recollections do not mean that every aspect of Bowie’s later performance style originated with Kemp. Bowie continued to absorb ideas from music, theatre, visual art, film, fashion and literature throughout his career. Kemp was one important teacher within that much larger development.

Bowie’s studies with Kemp soon developed into a professional stage collaboration. After approximately a month of training, Bowie made his first appearance with Kemp’s company in Pierrot in Turquoise on 28 December 1967.

The production drew upon characters and imagery associated with commedia dell’arte, but transformed them through Kemp’s distinctive mixture of mime, dance, music and visual theatre.

Bowie appeared as Cloud. Rather than occupying the stage as a conventional pop singer, he became part of Kemp’s theatrical environment while contributing music to the production.

Bowie’s appearance as Cloud is particularly significant because it survives from the period before the famous stage identities of the 1970s.

It demonstrates that Bowie had already begun working within a theatrical framework in which a singer could assume a defined visual and dramatic role.

Cloud should not, however, be described as an early version of Ziggy Stardust. There were several years, numerous musical developments and many additional influences between Pierrot in Turquoise and Bowie’s creation of Ziggy.

What can safely be said is that the role gave Bowie practical experience in performing his music while simultaneously participating in a constructed theatrical world.

An important part of the Bowie–Kemp collaboration survives because Scottish Television recorded a version of the production in Edinburgh in 1969.

The approximately 25-minute television production is associated with the titles Pierrot in Turquoise and The Looking Glass Murders and dates from 1970 in British television records.

Bowie appears as Cloud alongside Lindsay Kemp and Jack Birkett. During the programme Bowie performs When I Live My Dream while positioned high on a stepladder, one of the most recognisable surviving visual documents from his period with Kemp.

Bowie continued using mime after his first work with Kemp. During 1968 theatrical performance became an increasingly visible part of his activities.

Among the pieces he performed was the Tibetan-inspired mime Yet-San and the Eagle. Bowie presented mime on bills that otherwise contained musical performers, placing his theatrical work directly alongside contemporary rock and pop culture.

The period is important because Bowie had not yet established a stable commercial identity. Instead of abandoning performance when his recording career stalled, he expanded the range of forms in which he worked.

In 1968 Bowie also experimented with combining music and performance through the short-lived groups Turquoise and Feathers.

Turquoise brought Bowie together with Hermione Farthingale and guitarist Tony Hill. After Hill’s departure, John Hutchinson joined Bowie and Farthingale in the configuration known as Feathers.

Their performances incorporated more than songs alone. Music, poetry and mime could exist within the same programme, reflecting Bowie’s growing interest in presenting performance as a combination of disciplines.

These projects should not be described simply as extensions of Kemp’s company. Bowie was beginning to adapt ideas he had encountered in theatre and use them within projects of his own.

Bowie’s recording career changed dramatically with the release and later success of Space Oddity in 1969. As music again became his primary professional focus, formal mime performances became less central to his public work.

The theatrical education itself did not disappear.

Bowie had gained direct experience of costume, character, controlled physical movement and visual presentation. He had also seen how a stage performance could create its own world rather than simply reproduce music recorded in a studio.

During the early 1970s those ideas became increasingly relevant as Bowie developed a stronger visual identity and began treating live performance as part of the overall presentation of his music.

By 1972 Bowie’s circumstances were entirely different from those of his first period with Kemp.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released in June 1972, while Bowie and the Spiders from Mars were already taking the Ziggy character onto British stages.

Ziggy combined music with hairstyle, costume, movement and an evolving fictional identity. Bowie’s presentation had become far more theatrical than that of a conventional rock frontman.

It would be inaccurate to credit Kemp alone for this transformation. Bowie’s Ziggy-period visual language involved numerous collaborators and influences, including costume design, photography, theatre, Japanese aesthetics, science fiction and contemporary rock culture.

Nevertheless, Bowie now had an opportunity to work again with the teacher who had introduced him to formal mime and movement five years earlier.

Kemp returned to Bowie’s professional world for the Rainbow Theatre concerts in London in August 1972.

Bowie presented three particularly elaborate shows involving Kemp and his troupe at the Rainbow on 19, 20 and 30 August 1972.

Kemp’s theatrical contribution expanded the visual scope of the Ziggy Stardust presentation. His involvement brought mime and choreographed theatrical elements onto a stage otherwise occupied by Bowie and the Spiders from Mars.

Kemp’s 1972 collaboration with Bowie also survives on film.

On 25 August 1972, between the three Rainbow concerts, photographer and filmmaker Mick Rock filmed Bowie during rehearsals for the promotional film for John, I’m Only Dancing.

Rehearsal footage featuring Lindsay Kemp and members of his troupe was incorporated into Rock’s completed film.

The footage provides a second important visual record of the Bowie–Kemp collaboration.

The strongest evidence for Kemp’s lasting importance comes from Bowie himself.

Bowie did not claim that Kemp had invented his characters or determined the course of his career. What he specifically credited Kemp with was teaching him about what could be achieved on a stage.

That distinction allows Kemp’s contribution to be understood without exaggeration.

Bowie’s later stagecraft was extraordinarily varied. Ziggy Stardust’s physicality differed from the controlled severity associated with the Thin White Duke, while the mature Bowie of later tours frequently performed without adopting a named character at all.

What remained consistent was an awareness of physical presentation. Bowie knew how posture, stillness, movement, costume and positioning could change the emotional effect of a performance.

Kemp was one of the people who helped give Bowie a formal understanding of those possibilities at a formative stage in his career.

Kemp’s influence was not limited to movement lessons.

In later recollections Kemp described discussing the French writer Jean Genet with Bowie, together with subjects including kabuki, music hall and avant-garde performance.

Genet became especially important within Kemp’s own theatrical work. Kemp’s production Flowers, based on Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, became one of his best-known productions during the 1970s.

It would be speculative to claim that a particular Bowie song or character resulted directly from one of these conversations. Their documented significance is broader: Kemp introduced Bowie to a theatrical and literary environment extending well beyond contemporary British pop music.

Kemp’s historical importance extends far beyond his association with Bowie. He built a substantial career as a choreographer, performer, director and teacher, working internationally for decades.

His production Flowers became a particularly important part of his reputation during the 1970s. Based on the writing of Jean Genet, the production travelled internationally and helped establish Kemp and his company with a much wider audience.

Kemp also returned professionally to the organisation where he had once trained. In 1975 he created The Parades Gone By for Ballet Rambert. The work received its world premiere at Leeds Playhouse on 25 March 1975.

Kemp also appeared as an actor in film.

Kemp’s film work included a role in The Vampire Lovers in 1970, although his scenes were deleted from the completed film. He subsequently appeared in Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah in 1972, The Wicker Man in 1973 and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee in 1978.

Decades later he appeared in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine in 1998, a film whose fictional glam-rock world drew upon aspects of the cultural period in which Kemp himself had worked with Bowie.

These film appearances formed only one part of a career that continued to encompass live performance, choreography, teaching, theatre and opera.

Bowie was not the only major British musician to study with Kemp.

Kate Bush also became his student after seeing his theatrical work. Kemp’s teaching became an important part of her development as a physical performer.

Bush later worked with Kemp and maintained a strong affection and respect for him. Following his death in 2018, she described herself as having been extremely fortunate to study and work with him.

Bowie and Bush developed very different forms of musical theatre, and their work should not be conflated. Their separate relationships with Kemp nevertheless demonstrate his unusual ability to connect experimental theatre and movement with performers working primarily in popular music.