Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies - The First Elegy -the first lines, from Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works - II - Poetry; translated by J.B.Leishman, The Hogarth Press, London, 1967.
There follows a poor and shabby attempt to describe falling in with Lindsay Kemp and his truly blessed sphere. I shall dare to do better..., perhaps later today. Perhaps. It was a long time ago but I still remember the relief of finding them, and being somewhere safe at last for a while in particular friendships that were my lifeblood and refuge in those days. Tall ships and wrecks passing in the night as it were, some of them splendidly lit.
In 1973 I was in the first year (and only year for me) of a degree course in film and photography at the Polytechnic of Central London in Upper Regent Street, a few yards north of Oxford Circus. Right in the middle of town, wellnigh next to the BBC. What a surprise.
After 8 years in a convent I'd just spent another 4 years enduring school by the cooling towers of Didcot power station and almost gone completely mad. Sanity was provided by visits to Wallingford cemetery, where my friend lived, the sculptor and gentleman John Buckley. So I was not surprised when I found that Artaud recommended theatre be seen in the graveyard. It is a fine place in which to approach the idea of proportion in life, in pursuit of the sense of it, and a fine place for solace and solitude as everybody knows and why mention it for goodness sake. Ah, it is relevant you know, if ever I could get to telling you, but I don't know whether I should. (It was the graveyard. In 'Flowers', Lindsay's beautiful act of theatre, or whatever sorcery it was, nuns with umbrellas at a funeral in a fierce storm, Mozart cracking your heart open at full volume amid the wind and thunder. It was intensely tragic and impossible and ridiculous.)
In London I was finding the impenetrable veneer of modern life grimly unattractive, particularly after being involuntarily homeless from early February till May. It was quite a jolt, another rude awakening, cast out into the night in one of those sudden waves of viciousness that weak people succumb to from time to time. There was a rude 3rd year student who would pounce on me in the college darkroom and push up my sleeves to look for needle marks, which were never there. He would say "Where are they, where are they?" I didn't take drugs of that sort but was naturally spaced out with what I think of as the Celtic inheritance, subject to visions. Those who do not understand consider it madness.
One day this very modern boy asked me a favour. He'd organised a session in a studio upstairs and two of the people couldn't come, the wife and child of David Bowie, because the baby had fallen ill. So he wanted me to persuade the mother I'd been photographing to let him borrow her baby for the afternoon. He said he thought I'd find these people interesting, why didn't I come and watch. You may think me a philistine, but I've never found Bowie's voice simpatico, so I thought his associates were likely to be hard, and more hammers in the brain. I didn't expect to find such a treasure, open to all the elements, just sitting on a chair like the most gorgeous cat you ever met.
The baby was a perfect foil. Two men, one handsome Bruce White in fifties gangster gear with a smart hat. The other was not so much a man as a creature who's gaze gave space, gravity, humour. Lindsay Kemp was dressed rather like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, all legs, black stockings and captivating eyes. And he seemed to be living at a leisurely speed, as though in a more gracious universe, from which he blew me kisses and beckoned me to follow him.
Into the depths, a secret way out of the room, through the little door that led down the dark stairs. It was a long way down. The ghostly chords of an organ grew louder. Then a narrow corridor, a bead curtain gently clattering as Lindsay passed through it.
Beyond - a vast space, and Lindsay Kemp leaping high through the air, round and round the stage, leaping and whirling as though he'd been set free.
That bead curtain was the entrance to the set of Flowers, Lindsay Kemp's soul-searing interpretation of Jean Genet's book "Our Lady of the Flowers". The organ had accompanied silent films in the early days of this former cinema, the handsome Scot in the sharp suit was playing it, and waved cheerfully at me.
I was home.
That was the beginning of much time with the finest company. Lindsay Kemp is a splendid teacher of life-long devotion and surrender to the Muse, transcending everything in the service of inspiration. Going all the way through to beyond, and farther sail, even if there be no more sea.
Sad for me their tours abroad brought them to such greater welcomes and warmth that eventually they stayed away altogether from the charmless cold and icy gaze of judgement, that is England for many of us. Now Italy has them.
I know that over the course of the years Lindsay and his company took in quite a few waifs and strays such as myself, many of them becoming performers and travelling on with them to diverse realms. In their company I felt safer than anywhere else, there was so much more acknowledgement of the interior world, in general actions and relationships than is common in any times. This ever modulating group of people, were living life deeply and creating subtle works of entrancement.
Lindsay Kemp steps nimbly between layers of perception and inner experience like a bird in a tall tree, flitting from branch to branch. As with all good teaching, the lessons grow and develop over the years, within the psyche of the student, long after they are first given and received. For me as a painter today his lessons of surrender to love, to the dance, to all the unfurling agonies, despairs and exultations of humanness in the act of creating work, these underpin the working day. Sometimes it's a living torment, sometimes not.
David Haughton wrote about the company: "The effect of their performances, with their exaggerated stylisation of makeup and gesture and emotion, is to bring to life for the public another order of existence, another world, that seems as far away as it could be from their own. In order to transport them inside this world, and make them accept its reality, Kemp takes every trick in the book to its limit, seducing them, charming them, hypnotising them, battering them, shocking them, disorienting them. This is theatre largely outside the realm of words, and words are anyone's first defence of their own normality and identity. Deprived of this defence, subjected to waves of music and percussion, surrounded by smoke and incense, dazzled by spectacular lighting effects, hypnotised by a slow motion that dislocates the sense of time, drawn into a dreamlike trance where anything seems possible, the spectators gradually allow the stream of poetic images ... violent, erotic, lyrical, comic and grotesque by turns ... to take them over and possess them."
"For those that resist, of course, the result is monstrous - over-indulgent, decadent, pretentious - and they congratulate themselves on not having been taken in by such superficial trickery ... as no doubt the lame child of Hamelin later congratulated himself on his lameness: only he never knew what terrible marvels the Pied Piper had shown his companions."
(Lindsay Kemp and Company, Photographs by Anno Wilms, preface by Derek Jarman, introduced by David Haughton, GMP Publishers, London, 1987.)
In that book there is a beautiful photograph of Lindsay Kemp and David Haughton that is so evocative of those days I had thought to make a painting of them. But I hear from none of them now, and it would make me sad. Besides which the call of the times is so loud in my ear I must do whatever deeds demand be done when I raise my brush in the air and the music begins.
Ciao ciao.