Lindsay Kemp -Official Site

There are more photo's being added that are in different picture albums please click on pics to see more of The Lindsay Kemp Company.........Salieri filmed at The Peacock Theatre Feb 2002 as part of Dream Dances.For over the last 40 years Lindsay Kemp and the company he formed established themselves as one of Europe's most unusual and successful 'experimental'theatrical companies.One uses the term 'experimental' for lack of a better term to denote a kind of performance that lies outside any of the ready classifications, or perhaps combines them:the public's preconceptions are generally confounded by it's mixture of dance, theatre, mime, music-hall and ritual, by its combination of the erotic, the comic, the religious and the grotesque, and by it's blurring of the divisions between the avant-garde and the archaic, between frivolity and seriousnes, passion and parody. If one had to describe this company's performances in a few words perhaps one would do best to indicate a theatre of the senses,of heightened sensations, with an emphasis therefore on physical technique, emotional intensity,visual and musical spectacularity,stylisation of gesture and appearance,and the projection with maximum impact of plastic poetic images. Lindsay Kemp, director, designer, principal performer and dominant presence in this closely-knit group,studied at Art college in his native north of England (Born Birkenhead 1938). Before running away to London in the early 50's to study classical and modern dance (principally with Marie Rambert and Sigurd Leeder;later he would study extensively with Marcel Marceau). There he survived as best he could in small dance and theatre companies, but found himself ever unable to fit for long into the restrictions of other people's ideas, techniques, or disciplines... or else they found themselves unable to put up with him! Gradually, therefore, he began to work on his own, in mime shows, music-hall, cabert,directing and choreographing strip-shows or opera,and to gather around himself a succession of small companies with which he could begin to synthesise his diverse range of experiances and influences, and be his own master. The 60's saw him experimenting with such 'contempory developments' as improvisation and the happening,and making use of the freedom offered by non-professional actors and situations.These new approaches were then gradually combined with his previously acquired techniques, a new interest in oriental theatre, and his own innate professionalism and showmanship, until by the early 70's he arrived at a style that reflected in its harnessing together of freedom and control his own balance of anarchy and discipline, and in its blend of heterogenous influences the harlequinade of his own personality........DAVID HAUGHTON.Clips from Elizabeth, song by CARLOS MIRANDA as sung by Francois Testory.