FEATURE:
Playing Canasta in a Cold Room
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in London in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush and the Muse of the Dance
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GOING back to the earliest…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and Lindsay Kemp whilst filming the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Gudio Harari
days of Kate Bush’s career, I was thinking about how important dance was. One thinks of Kate Bush and her incredible music. How she is a wonderful writer and singer. I think that dance and the freedom that it offered her influenced how she wrote and created. Not only was dance important to her videos and live music. She was also very physical in the studio. I know a lot of other artists learned dance and brought that into their repertoire heavily., However, I think Bush was a dancer before she was an artist. I am going to source from a couple of different books. One is Rob Jovanovic’s Kate Bush: The Biography and another is Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. I am fascinated by Kate Bush’s love of dance. Going to classes in Covent Garden. What attracted her to that discipline. Maybe artists like David Bowie. Her love of film and the sort of artistic stimulus that was introduced into her world as a child. I feel there was this energy and passion within that needed to come out. Sure, performing and creating music could help with that. However, Bush had bigger ambitions and wider horizons. Always connecting dance directly with her music. Evident when you see the videos for Wuthering Heights. Kate Bush definitely coming across as a dancer more than a conventional artist. If Bush could self-teach the piano and also got some assistance from her father, she needed to go to classes and find tutors when it came to dance. I know she would have carved out some space at her East Wickham Farm bedroom at the family home. Her den where she listen to music no doubt saw a young Bush pirouetting, moving and leaping along to music of the day. Some boogeying to T.Rex or David Bowie. Some cool moves worked out to accompany a song from Elton John or Roxy Music. As someone without dance or ballet training and background, it was not easy for Bush to get a tutor or enrol in a class. A blank C.V., she had to start at the bottom – or the back. When Bush attended St. Joseph's Convent Grammar School, she did not get along with her dance teacher. A such, maybe she did not keep up with her studies. It meant she had some catching up to do!
I am on a slight detour, though I will publish a feature of ‘Kate Bush’s London’. The houses she lived in. The areas she frequented and lived in. Building this map of how Bush covered the capital. I know about Covent Garden and dance classes there. I was not aware of her association with Elephant and Castle. She attended mime class there. During 1976, she attended Adam Darius’s classes once a week. I am not sure whether she was driven there or would hop the bus from East Wickham Farm in Welling. It would have been quite a trek! Adam Darius has evolved his work into a fusion of dance and mine, as Rob Jovanovic writes. Having worked with the likes of Kate Beckinsale and Placido Domingo, Darius recalls how keen and attentive Kate Bush was. An expressive face and a love of mime, he noted Bush’s sensitive and intelligence. Even if she was a once-a-week student, her passion and dedication was impressive! Bush would hang back after class and ask questions. No doubt absorbing this so she could practice and hone her craft back at home. Possibly in her record nook where she would have some privacy to maybe mime and move to music. Mime was very important when it came to her music videos and photoshoots. Someone who could express a range of emotions, rather than being a stilted or conventional Pop artist. Bush was always curious and asked questions in the studio. Wanting to learn a discipline so that she could master it and build up her skillset. It was also not a case of Bush being from this comfortable family and being able to afford these luxuries. Not many people in the middle-classes would be interested in mime. It was passion and authenticity from Bush rather than wealth-flexing and something expected of her. In 1976, Bush also saw an advert for Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers. He would become her mentor and the two enjoyed a long friendship. Kemp would briefly feature in Bush’s 1993 film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, and she dedicated Moving to him – the first song from her debut album, The Kick Inside (1978).
Kemp’s classes tantalised the promise of ‘living fabulously through your senses’. Despite being controversial, Kemp had a strong background and reputation. He had hooked up with David Bowie. I am not sure whether Bush knew this before enrolling in the classes. Considering her admiration for David Bowie. Wanting to be like him in some ways. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character (which emerged in 1972). Kate Bush was at the final Ziggy Stardust concert in 1973. Maybe this pilgrimage to retrace the footsteps of David Bowie and the origins of Ziggy Stardust. Also, Lindsay Kemp would play David Bowie albums in his class. For Kate Bush, this must have been a heaven! Bush knew that, once she saw Flowers, that she had to do something like this herself. If a single person could produce the music and the performance and create this new form of art that was contemporary and classic, then that opened her eyes and ambitions. The lure of the physicality that could be expressed. Being able to say so much without singing or speaking. The implications, suggestions, movements and flow that was its own language. Lindsay Kemp sadly died in 2018. Bush attended his classes over at The Dance Centre in Covent Garden in 1976. I think initially it was a Fulham church/school hall where he and Bush met and worked together. Again, the young Kate Bush covering quite a lot of London to fulfil her passion and get the training and tutoring that she was looking for! Kemp’s classes cost 50p a time. Bush could learn expressive arm movements and facial expressions. I can picture her, maybe shyly at the back of the class, being coxed forward to the front by Kemp. Bush did admire conventional mime yet that was too staid. She wanted to have the sort of flexibility and freedom that Lindsay Kemp offered. Kemp taught Bush that you can express with your body. And, as Rob Jovanovic also observed, she knew that when your body was alive and alert then so was your mind. There would be exercising and routines. Like the class imagining they were all sailors and they were drowning!
It did take a while for Kemp to notice Bush. When she was at his classes at the (Covent Garden) Dance Centre, that is when she made her impression. It took about a dozen or so classes before she was on his radar. As she was at the back of the class – like a child as he recalled; reminiscent in some ways of Wendy or Tinkerbell (from Peter Pan) -, it was a slow realisation. Such large classes, there was a shine and aura coming from Bush that attracted Kemp and alerted his senses! How Bush loved the drama of the classes. I did not know that Lindsay Kemp offered Bush a job in the wardrobe department for the presentation of Mr Punch at the Roundhouse Theatre in London. Kemp unaware that Bush was with EMI and they had designs for this budding star. Bush paid tribute to Kemp’s role. A teacher that filled you up. This empty glass being filled with champagne! Kemp left for Australia six months after Bush started to attend his classes. That said, Bush wanted to keep up with dance, so then joined Arlene Phillips’s class at The Dance Centre in Covent Garden. I wonder what Phillips thinks of Kate Bush’s success now. Phillips had choregraphed for Hot Gossip. They performed on The Kenny Everett Show. Bush loved how she could attend Arlene Phillip’s class because she (Bush) did not have qualifications. Bush was keen and did not need a background or experience. It was very freeing! I want to return to Lindsay Kemp’s class and something Tom Doyle notes in Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. Flowers was based on French writer Jean Genet’s autobiographical 1943 novel, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers). It is about one man’s trek through the demi-monde of Paris, frequented by outcasts and homosexuals. How revealing and provocative this would have been to a teenage Kate Bush!
The array of characters in Kemp’s troupe was varied and colourful. Sailors, criminals, whores, angels and cross-dressers among them. Set to a soundtrack of Billie Holiday, Mozart, Pink Floyd and Al Jolson, although this ‘journey to destruction’ did not always track and makes sense, it definitely made an impression on Kate Bush. Fun and sexy, she admired the combination of music and theatre. How dance was elevated and heightened by the power of music. Maybe she was more used to seeing artists on T.V. and thinking that this was what an artist was and all they could ever be. Her exposure to productions like Flowers influenced how her music would begin and continue to be. Would Kate Bush have been inspired to write about a ghostly Catherine Earnshaw trying to snatch Heathcliff in the night for Wuthering Heights were it not for Lindsay Kemp? Sure, Bush caught a 1967 T.V. adaptation of the novel, though I think it was her experiences with Lindsay Kemp and Flowers that helped give blossom and bloom to the eccentricity and original voice of that song (as Bush had not at that time read Wuthering Heights). Flowers took Bush’s breath away! From that revelation, she knew that music is what she wanted to do. It is that important! Many people do not talk of dance, Lindsay Kemp and that period when it comes to Kate Bush. It is hugely significant! Bush’s brother, John (Carder Bush) noted that a transformation had occurred after Bush returned from seeing Flowers. The young Cathy Bush had now become Kate. Almost like the girl has become a woman and adopted this new alter ego!
Going back to Bowie, I think he helped pique Bush’s interest. On the poster for Flowers was a quote from Bowie: “(of Kemp) This it the man that started it all”. It grabbed Bush’s attention. Bowie first met Kemp in 1967 and the two became creatively and sexually entangled. Maybe there was some guilt from Bowie. Whilst with Kemp, there was off-stage drama. The two appeared in a presentation of Pierrot in Turquoise. As the production moved, so too did the bond between. Bowie engaged in an affair with a mutual friend, Natasha Korniloff. Kemp (half-heartedly) tried to end his life. Kemp was taken to hospital, seen by a doctor and, after having a plaster applied to some minor scratches, was told not to be so daft! Bowie talked about Kemp in 1972 and noted how he lived off his emotions. He held admiration for him. Even if their romantic bond was broken, there still was a creative link. Kemp appeared as Starman alongside Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre in December '72. Bowie acknowledging what an important influence Kemp was to him. It was only a few years or so later when Kemp would make his mark on another artist. I love to imagine Kate Bush travelling to dance and mime classes. The excitement and anticipation. Her participating and, sure and soon enough, shining as the star of the class. The rush she gets heading back to East Wickham Farm! Crucially, how she brought those experiences and disciplines to the studio to record The Kick Inside. How she created her own version of Lindsay Kemp’s routines and aesthetics for The Tour of Life in 1979. Maybe even for Before the Dawn in 2014. Theatrics and beautiful set designs can be traced back to him. The way dance and music interlocked and awakened something in Bush. In Moving, the first tracking from The Kick Inside, the line “You crush the lily in my soul” is directed at Lindsay Kemp and how she brought the bravery and expression out of Kate Bush. What he did was turn this promising and eager seed and turned it…
INTO a beautiful flower.