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Kabuki

KABUKI, a classic Japanese theatrical form using common or comic themes, with fantastical costumes, stylized gestures, music, and dance, and with all-male casts, is still popular today. Initially, it was a showcase for female and boy prostitutes.

Boy love was a given in ancient Japan. The love of chigo (a boy aged ten to seventeen) by Buddhist priests was a tradition, as, in the mode of ancient Greece, was the love of wakashu (a youth aged thirteen to twenty) by samurai warriors. Shudo, the love of young men, became a staple feature of Kabuki literature.

By the early seventeenth century, at the end of a long civil war, the power of the samurai declined and a merchant class emerged. For the merchants' pleasure, dances and dramatic routines, often performed by female prostitutes, began to be performed in Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka. Samurai and court aristocrats were forbidden to attend, but they donned disguises to join the fervid audiences.

This illegal mingling of classes and the deadly violence caused by jealousy over prostitutes disturbed the peace. The response of the alarmed Tokugawa authorities was to ban women from the Kabuki stage in 1629.

This began the era of the Grand Kabuki, or wakashu kabuki, where adolescent boys played both the wakashugata(male roles) and onnagata (female roles).

The authorities inadvertently created an ideal vehicle for showcasing the physical charms of beautiful, sexually available youths. These pretty boys, gracefully bending to the dance in long-sleeved kimonos, evoked great enthusiasm. They became the highly sought trophies of their nouveaux riches admirers, who were thrilled by the idea that shudo, formerly reserved for the upper classes, was now within their reach.

Many of the merchants were so swept away with passion that they bankrupted themselves over the boys. Thus, the social problems created by the carnal nature of the Kabuki were not solved, but exacerbated, by the decree of 1629. And to the chagrin of the moralistic censors, the situation could be addressed no further, because Iemitsu, the Shogun, was himself a connoisseur of boys.

After the death of Iemitsu in 1651, boys were banned from the stage, but not for long. Kabuki was a large and profitable enterprise, and the owners negotiated to reopen their theaters. They agreed to certain conditions, including the reduction of the repertoire's erotic content.

Moreover, in an attempt to end prostitution, the boy actors were forced to shave their most distinguishing feature, their long forelocks, leaving only sidelocks, in the style of yaro (adult men), as men were disqualified from prostitution. This had, however, the effect of extending the age for prostitutes.

As a character in The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687) explains: "It used to be that no matter how splendid the boy, it was impossible for him to keep his forelocks and take patrons beyond the age of twenty. Now, since everyone wore the hairstyle of adult men, it was still possible at age thirty-four or thirty-five for youthful actors to get under a man's robe." The new theater form was called yaro kabuki.

From 1868 onward, the process of westernization in Japan meant the rapid decline of shudo. By 1910, homosexuality in any form had disappeared from social visibility. Although the all-male Kabuki theater survives, all the shudo plays are excised from its repertoire and long forgotten.

Today, Kabuki presents nonerotic, spectacular musical entertainment. In the mid-twentieth century, novelist Yukio Mishima wrote and directed several Kabuki plays. His involvement with Kabuki reflected his fascination with sadomasochism, but his plays had no lasting effect on the form.

The Actor Matsumoto Shigumaki as a Woman, by Torii Kiyumasu (ca. 1715).

A special fascination for contemporary audiences is to see a man expertly performing as a woman, assuming the onnagata role. Even geisha, women trained to please men, attend Kabuki performances to learn from these actors the essence of femininity.

A famous contemporary onnagata, the wildly popular Bando Tamasaburo, has also played such western characters as Ophelia and Camille. Also popular in Japan today are the "male stars" of the all-girl Takarazuka operettas.

As Shakespeare knew, audiences love gender confusion, and in such confusion many gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people have found refuge.

—Douglas Blair Turnbaugh

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gunji, Masakatsu. Kabuki. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969.

McLelland, Mark J. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 2000.

Saikaku, Ihara. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Paul Gordon Schalow, trans. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Watanabe, Tsuneo, and Jun'ichi Iwata. The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality. London: GMP Publishers, 1989.

SEE ALSO

Dance; Takarazuka (Japanese All-Female Revues); Kemp, Lindsay; Sondheim, Stephen

Kander, John, and Fred Ebb John Kander (b. 1927) and Fred Ebb (1932?-2004)

COMPOSER JOHN KANDER AND LYRICIST FRED EBB ARE the musical poets of the polymorphous perverse. The stage (and, in two cases, subsequent film) versions of their commercially successful and critically lauded Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman glorify the creativity inherent in sexual ambivalence and celebrate the social renewal fostered by unorthodox forms of political action.

Surprisingly for many gay fans, however, neither man is willing publicly to discuss his own homosexuality. "I thought they made a spectacle of themselves, frankly," Ebb complained to interviewer Randy Shulman following the nationally broadcast kiss shared by songwriting team and lifelong partners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman while accepting a 2003 Tony Award for Hairspray. "Your bedroom is not the screen. And it is also not the stage." Instead, Ebb asserts, any statement that he and Kander wish to make about homosexuality has been made through their songs.

Life and Career

Kander was born on March 18, 1927, into a music-loving family in Kansas City, Missouri. After studying music composition at Oberlin College and Columbia University, he settled in New York City, where he worked as an arranger, accompanist, and conductor.

Ebb, a native New Yorker, was probably born on April 8, 1932. Having attended New York University and taken a graduate degree in English from Columbia University, he wrote for nightclub acts, revues, and television (That Was the Week That Was) before being introduced to Kander.

In 1965, Kander and Ebb joined forces with the emerging theater powerhouse Harold Prince and the legendary director George Abbott on Flora, The Red Menace, which both established their professional reputation as a songwriting team and made a star out of their close friend, nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli.

A string of huge successes, some near misses, and the occasional flop followed: Cabaret (1966), The Happy Time (1968), Zorba (1968), 70, Girls, 70 (1971), Chicago (1975), The Act (1977), Woman of the Year (1981), The Rink (1984), And the World Goes 'Round (1991), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), Steel Pier (1997), and The Visit (2001). They contributed as well to the film scores of Herb Ross's Funny Lady (1975) and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977).

In 2003, Kander (who has lived for twenty-six years with one man, a choreographer and teacher) implicitly addressed rumors concerning the nature of his nonprofessional relations with Ebb by describing the latter to interviewer Jeffrey Tallmer as "his 40-year partner in creativity but never in domesticity, much less romance." Ebb succumbed to a heart attack at his home in New York City on September 11, 2004.

Privileging Alternative Values

Kander and Ebb's songs make a powerful cumulative statement regarding the importance of alternative values, and are the more remarkable for making that statement in a theatrical form more easily given to escapism than to social comment.

"It's refreshing to meet someone odd for a change," Harry sings to Flora in Flora, The Red Menace, and Kander and Ebb's musical protagonists include such deviants from the social norm as a group of larcenous septuagenarian former vaudevillians surviving as best they can in a dilapidated residential hotel (70, Girls); an indifferently talented cabaret singer whose decadent sexual persona is her most successful performance (Cabaret); an effeminate window dresser imprisoned for "corrupting" a male minor (Kiss of the Spider Woman); "Chicago's own killer-dillers, those two scintillating sinners," Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, and the six other "merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail" (Chicago); "the lovable prodigal," Jacques, whose return to his native French Canadian village quickens his family members' hearts with as much anxiety as love (Happy Time); and, of course, the title character of Zorba, who proclaims in dance and song his freedom from every conventional expectation.

Kander and Ebb write music for characters who, like Flora, have learned, or are in the process of learning, to resist any pressure to conform, particularly when the social system exerting that pressure is itself corrupt ("You Are You").

Kander and Ebb's interest in persons who are barely on the margins of respectability, or who have been left behind entirely by the American Dream, drives them repeatedly to skewer the hypocrisy of social orthodoxy. This is why so many of their plays are set in the Depression era, when, following the widespread collapse of American optimism, those individuals who survived proved themselves by keeping their hearts open and their imaginations alive. In Flora and Steel Pier, respectively, Kander and Ebb found in that period's breadlines and dance marathons apt metaphors for the indignities heaped upon individuals that shatter their conventional expectations but nonetheless offer them an opportunity to refashion themselves in a nontraditional manner; prison proves a similarly apt metaphor in Chicago and Kiss.

Protesting Corruption; Seeing Things Differently

The corruption of power is lampooned in such songs as "A Powerful Thing" (Steel Pier) and "When You're Good to Mama" (Chicago); and the ruthless manipulation of the American legal system by its supposed protectors is satirized in "Razzle Dazzle" (Chicago). Social respectability is simply a matter of controlling the spread of gossip, Kander and Ebb chide in "Don't Tell Mama" (Cabaret), or of controlling the media ("Jailhouse Rag," Chicago).

The exploitation of buzzwords by self-aggrandizing political activists is illustrated in "Sign Here" (Flora), where the professed aims of the Communist Party figure also as the American values that Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee claimed to be defending through their 1950s witch hunt for suspected communists: "democracy," "the rights of man," "everlasting peace," "milk and cookies for the kids," "a job for everyone," "do away with slums," and "save America." In Kander and Ebb's satire, anyone who sees a big-hearted eccentric like Flora as a "red menace" is as disturbed as the agitator Comrade Ada's much-vaunted acts of disruption are senseless and petty.

Little wonder, then, that when political institutions, the legal profession, the news media, and correction facilities are under the control of self-interested parties, Kander and Ebb's hero is the person who, because of his or her generosity, is relegated to the margins of respectability, if not persecuted outright.

A number of the pair's best songs dramatize different ways of "Seeing Things" (as photographer Jacques sings in Happy Time), including several that directly challenge the audience's unthinking acceptance of social stereotypes. "If you want to see old folks / You're in the wrong home tonight," a chorus of rowdy septuagenarians unexpectedly razzes the audience of 70, Girls. They break into raucous vaudeville routines after first enumerating (and pretending to subscribe to) younger people's stereotypical expectations regarding the aged. And, waltzing genteelly with a tutu-wearing gorilla, the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club in 1930s Berlin (Cabaret) complains comically of society's inability to accept his unorthodox love relationship, only to turn to the Nazis scattered among the audience at the song's end and taunt them that "If you could see her through my eyes, / She wouldn't look Jewish at all."

Addressing the Darker Aspects of Social Experience

It is their willingness to address directly the darker aspects of social experience that distinguishes Kander and Ebb's music from that of their contemporaries. Jerry Herman's bright optimism easily wears thin, while Stephen Sondheim's wry irony often has the unanticipated effect of making his characters seem cold and distant. The darkness that colors Kander and Ebb's world, however, is tempered by their characters' willingness to make whatever accommodations are necessary for survival without growing bitter in the process.

No other Broadway score confronts the reality of aging and dying with such starkness as 70, Girls ("The Elephant Song"). Likewise, the chorus's opening song in Zorba—"Life is what you do / While you're waiting to die"—proved so troubling to audiences reared on Rodgers and Hammerstein's "cockeyed optimism" that the original production of that show failed. (A successful 1983 revival starring Anthony Quinn carefully altered the line to "Life is what you do / Until the day you die.")

Kander and Ebb parody American audiences' expectation of "Happy Endings" in an extended number by that name that, though filmed, was finally cut from New York, New York. More trenchantly, Molina's partnering Aurora with the same casual elegance as Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers ironically figures his death in the aptly titled final number of Kiss,"Only in the Movies."

Significantly, Kander and Ebb recognize the appeal of escaping life's difficulties through "too much pills and liquor" (as, for example, in the title song from Cabaret or in "The Morphine Tango" from Kiss). But ultimately, they insist, immuring oneself from possible adversity only means that one is not living fully. As the protagonist, Ida, instructs her friends in the concluding number of 70, Girls:

There's lots of chaff, but there's lots of wheat:
Say "yes"!
You might get mugged as you walk the street,
But on the other hand you might meet That handsome stranger that you'd love to greet:
Say "yes"!

Life must be accepted in all of its weltering ambiguity if any of its possibilities are to be realized.

Similarly, in Cabaret, Fraulein Schneider, raised in luxury but reduced during the Depression to renting rooms and emptying chamber pots, sings of the need to lower one's expectations and "learn how to settle for what you get" ("So What?"). Kander and Ebb reject outright the carpe diem insistence that one enjoy life's pleasures now because they will end all too soon. Rather, the pair insists, enjoyment of the available light is heightened by one's awareness of shadow.

Thus, while Jerry Herman's Depression-era characters are told to "Tap Your Troubles Away" (Mack and Mabel), Kander and Ebb use the 1930s dance marathon as a metaphor for finding joy in the sheer act of survival, no matter how demeaning the circumstances (Steel Pier). Herman asks his audience, in the best tradition of the Busby Berkeley musical, to accept that life's problems can be forgotten when one is tap-dancing; Kander and Ebb, on the other hand, show the grimace behind the forced smiles of the marathon dancers.

This may be why audiences rejected Herman's Mack and Mabel for failing to deliver a happy ending, but have less difficulty accepting the tragedy in Kander and Ebb's plays: Mme. Hortense dies and the Widow is killed in Zorba; Kiss is set in a repressive South American regime's prison for political dissidents and sexual deviants, and concludes with the death of the protagonist; the Nazis gradually take control of Berlin in Cabaret.

It is, finally, this insistence that one's full humanity can only be found in the acceptance simultaneously of disappointment and success, in the ambivalent mixture of comedy and tragedy, that makes Kander and Ebb the premier musical poets of sexual ambiguity and of nonnormative human relationships.

Sexual Ambiguities

Contrary to musical theater convention, the boy rarely gets the girl in a Kander and Ebb show. Cliff abandons Berlin and Sally Bowles in Cabaret; Flora discovers herself only after being dismissed by her boyfriend, Harry; Roxie learns that "I am my own best friend" in Chicago; a men-less Angel and Anna reconcile in The Rink; Rita falls in love with Bill in Steel Pier, only to discover that she has been romanced by a ghost and finally must make it on her own; and while three generations of male voices may join in on "A Certain Girl," Jacques and Laurie part over "Seeing Things" in Happy Time.

Ironically, Molina's succumbing to the heterosexual allure of the Spider Woman figures death in Kiss. And, in Steel Pier, Precious McGuire is permitted to perform professionally "Two Little Words," a paean to heterosexual wedded bliss, as payment for betraying her husband sexually with the marathon emcee. Woman of the Year, the only one of their plays to deliver a traditional heterosexual romance, is also Kander and Ebb's least distinguished score.

In contrast, Kander and Ebb's scores admit the possibility of homosocial affection, the delights of gender confusion, and (in Kiss, at least) the self-sacrificing power of homosexual love.

"I never loved a man as much as I love you," Zorba tells Niko at the conclusion of that play's final number. Likewise, in a poignant moment in Happy Time, the first time teenaged Bibi sings that he loves someone, it is to his free-spirited Uncle Jacques. The Emcee includes "boys" among the sexual attractions to be found in Cabaret; in the more permissive 1998 revival, the number "Two Ladies," which enacts a ménage à trois onstage, is performed not by a male and two females, as in the original production, but by a female and two males.

Extolling to a group of female prisoners the advantages of cooperating with her, Matron Mama Morton sings a song laden with lesbian sexual double entendres in Chicago: "Let's all stroke together, / Like a Princeton crew; / When you're stroking Mama, / She'll get hot for you."

In Kiss, Molina sings movingly of his love for Valentín in "Anything for Him." Significantly, Kander and Ebb give to a woman the only song in which homosexuality is accepted without reservation or qualification. In "You Could Never Shame Me," Molina's mother assures her imprisoned son, "I know that you're different, / I don't really care. / I would never change a hair."

Sexual Exuberance

This refusal to feel shame in sexual matters extends throughout Kander and Ebb's canon, making them the most sexually exuberant songwriters for the musical theater since Cole Porter. Their music deals frankly with such physiological dynamics of sexual attraction as body odor ("I sniff at a woman," Zorba exults) and crotch watching ("Nowadays you look at bulging trousers, / Some boy with bulging trousers, / And it isn't what you think, / He's got a gun," laments a group of neighbors in a declining neighborhood in The Rink).

"Everybody's Girl," which is Shelby's announcement of her sexual availability in Steel Pier, contains some of the most risqué lyrics written for the Broadway stage. The lines,"And so to reaffirm my status, / It's absolutely gratis / To use my apparatus," might have been spoken by Chaucer's Wife of Bath, while the asides that she makes during the song ("I could never be a cowhand's girl...I just can't keep my calves together" or "Men and me are like pianos. When they get upright, I feel grand!") are worthy of Mae West or Bette Midler.

Likewise, in "Wet" (also from Steel Pier) Rita coaxes Bill to strip to his Skivvies to join her in a late-night swim by cajoling him to "Show your nerve and show your shorts," one of the few times the nude male body has been put on display in the American musical. In 70, Girls, a pair of physically affectionate septuagenarians musically taunts the audience for its unspoken curiosity: "Do we? / That's what you want to know."

"Nothing need be spoken, / All taboos are broken," Rita promises the sexually reluctant Bill in Steel Pier. This holds true for every one of Kander and Ebb's scores. Ultimately in their music, relationships come down to a life-sustaining intimacy.

You and I, love, you and I,
Take each minute for what's in it As it's spinning by.
Win or lose, love, laugh or cry,
We can weather life together,
You and I. (70, Girls)

It is precisely because life is something to be "weathered"—because the world is a prison, a breadline, or a frenetic dance marathon—that every relationship is valuable, whatever the gender(s) of the persons involved. "Love, give me love, only love," Mme. Hortense sings in Zorba; "How good it is to feel, to touch, to care." It is risky to challenge the gender expectations of Broadway musical audiences, which are often composed of socially conservative people, but for Kander and Ebb, as Ida sings at the close of 70, Girls, one must always say "Yes" to whatever opportunity presents itself, especially "Yes, I'll touch."

Conclusion

Kander and Ebb occupy a curious place in American musical theater. Kander is as great a master of musical idioms as Sondheim, recreating the Kurt Weill-like sound of Depression-era Berlin for Cabaret, the 1920s burlesque or vaudeville stage for Chicago, an impoverished but lively Greek village for Zorba, and 1930s popular dance music for Steel Pier. His "The Happy Time" is as perfect a waltz as Richard Rodgers's title theme from Carousel or any of the numbers in 3/4 time that Sondheim fashioned for A Little Night Music.

Likewise, Ebb can be as tartly sardonic ("Nobody even says oops / When they're passing their gas. / Whatever happened to class?") as he can be lushly romantic ("Walking among my yesterdays"); his line "The hope of summer belies the frost" ("Yes," 70, Girls) is worthy of the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe.

Yet neither "The Happy Time" nor "Yes" has entered the popular musical lexicon, and the pair remains best known to the public ear for "Theme from New York, New York," a song that proved far bigger than the film it was created to serve, and for "Cabaret," which, ironically, is a character song during which a woman decides that she will have an abortion, not the hymn to unfettered sensual experience that its numerous popular renditions have mistaken it to be.

Gay theatergoers, however, hold Kander and Ebb in particularly high regard. This is, in part, because the pair has given such divas as Liza Minnelli, Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Lotte Lenya, and Lauren Bacall some of their best stage moments—and the relation of gay audiences to the musical theater depends largely on gay identification with the diva, as John M. Clum observes. More importantly, whatever their restrictions concerning the details of their personal lives, Kander and Ebb have lived their careers in collaboration with other major gay theater talents like A. J. Antoon, Rob Marshall, and Terrence McNally, and have helped realize onstage works by Christopher Isherwood and Manuel Puig that have defined gay sensibility.

But perhaps most important, their songs emphasize the imperative of refusing to accept only those relationships allowed by society, the need to take risks to connect with others, and the value of finding the strength to somehow go on even in the face of rejection ("Maybe This Time," "Somebody Older"). Theirs is a poetry of "You and I" that erases the boundaries of gender and age.

—Raymond-Jean Frontain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clum, John M. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture.New York: St. Martin's 1999.

Hirsch, Foster. Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Kander, John, and Fred Ebb, with Greg Lawrence. Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003.

Mordden, Ethan. Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

____. One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Shulman, Randy. "Ebb's Tide." Washington (D.C.) Metro Weekly, June 19, 2003: www.metroweekly.com/arts_entertainment/stage.php?ak=521

Tallmer, Jerry. "Sally Bowles' Muses." Gay City News, Oct. 30, 2003: www.gaycitynews.com/gcn_244/sallybowlesmuses.html

SEE ALSO

Musical Theater and Film; Divas; Herman, Jerry; Porter, Cole; Shaiman, Marc, and Scott Wittman; Sondheim, Stephen

Kemp, Lindsay (b. 1940?)

MIME ARTIST, RENEGADE, AND MAGNETIC STAGE PERFORMER,

Lindsay Kemp has long had a cult status in alternative theater. With its eclectic mix of elements— the commedia dell'arte, burlesque, music hall, ballet, the circus, improvisation, Japanese Kabuki and Noh theater, travesty, pantomime, and cabaret—his style is difficult to characterize.

In productions that are similar to musical revues—neither complete plays nor ballets, but something in between—Kemp and his company have astonished audiences with intense, erotically suggestive theatrical experiences that blur the line between high and low culture.

Once seen, Kemp's work is rarely forgotten. At its best, it achieves a wordless, resonant fusion of idiosyncratic physical, visual, and aural mime elements that vigorously assert the importance of his homosexuality to his performance ethic.

Stylistic Development

Kemp was born sometime around 1940 in South Shields in the North of England to a mother who encouraged his dramatic interests. His father died at sea when Kemp was three years old. While living in Bradford, he befriended the young artist David Hockney.

Kemp applied for admission to the Royal Ballet, but was rejected. He later studied with Dame Marie Rambert and Marcel Marceau in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1968, Kemp formed a company of his own. His goal, he declared, was to be a Pied Piper, to lure, seduce, and intoxicate an audience with ravishing but emotionally intense gestures and sensations, to fool them into believing that the dream visions and gender illusions he attempts are real.

Kemp's first great success was a celebrated production of Flowers—a work that captured the essence of Jean Genet's novel Our Lady of the Flowers and eventually had a triumphant run of six months at the Roundhouse, London, in 1974.

Kemp then produced an all-male reinterpretation of Wilde's Salome (1976) in which Kemp himself played the young protagonist and performed a seven-veil dance that conjured the ecstasy of a whirling dervish.

Also in the 1970s, he starred as the great Russian dancer in the title role of Nijinsky, a work the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton described as the most thrilling piece of theater he had ever witnessed. Such performances secured Kemp an adoring following, especially in Spain, Italy, and Japan.

Kemp was also invited to work with choreographer Christopher Bruce of the Ballet Rambert in a production called Cruel Garden (1977), based on the life of gay icon Federico García Lorca. He cast a bullfight scene as a dramatic struggle between freedom and the forces of restriction. This work achieved huge popularity and was revived in 1998.

In these productions, Kemp mixed the beautiful and explicitly erotic with utterly grotesque elements of parody and satire. He pushed the boundaries not only of gender but of what was possible in the theater. In doing so, he emulated Antonin Artaud in attempting to achieve an improvised "total theater" that very often perplexed and repelled dance critics who found what they perceived as bathos and lack of discipline distasteful.

Kemp's uniquely mannered, phantasmagoric style has little use for words. His approach is to grab the senses at their most vulnerable, using stark colors and dissonant lighting contrasts. Fragments of poetry or dialogue occur, but the impact derives from gestures and vibrant tableaux. The effect is richly imaginative, layered, evocative, and, ultimately, enchanting.

Kemp's presence as leader and instigator of his own homogeneous and constantly changing company is crucial. He gathers around him loyal performers and musicians dedicated to promoting the Kemp universe. He encourages his actors to live their roles offstage. In Kemp's world, each mimed gesture emerges from within the body, based on a sure belief that the actor is a king, a harlot, Garbo, a fairy, a beast, Pavlova, a pimp, Isadora Duncan, or a Pierrot.

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane

Film director Derek Jarman used Kemp and his company for the delirious Roman orgy scene that begins his groundbreaking film Sebastiane (1976). Kemp appears in the scene nearly naked, splattered in glitter and sperm. According to Jarman, Kemp is "one of the key gay figures of the sixties and seventies."

Actors from Kemp's company, such as David Haughton and The Incredible Orlando, aka blind actor Jack Birkett, have worked closely with Kemp to enhance the company's style. Birkett also appears in other Jarman films, including The Tempest (1979) and Caravaggio(1989).

A Midsummer Night's Dream

In 1984, Kemp and Celestino Coronado joined forces to make a film of Kemp's idiosyncratic stage production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which had premiered at London's Sadlers Wells theater a year earlier. Kemp played Puck-a perfect role for him, part Eros, part clown, part satyr-who is seen hovering in the air above the crossed lovers.

Visually eccentric and memorable, this film exemplifies Kemp's ability to reinvent Shakespeare, unearthing the play's haunting, darkly erotic, subconscious allusions.

Fittingly, Kemp even claims to be descended from William Kemp, Shakespeare's clown.

In the film, the changeling boy (François Testory) comes to the fore as a resonant image of the hermaphrodite, lusted after with relish by Oberon (Michael Matou). Thus, the crossed lovers in an enchanted wood are no longer heterosexual, but homosexual. A Midsummer Night's Dream may be Kemp's most fully realized work, though it dispensed with much of Shakespeare's text and established its own parameters.

Kemp as Gender Illusionist

In 1991, Kemp performed a rare solo work in a production called The Onnagata (Japanese gender illusionists). The title refers to Japanese artists who devote themselves to being perceived as female. Long an admirer of these gender illusionists, Kemp studied the elaborate language of gestures in Japan and devised a "fantasy in kimonos" in which he revisited many of his earlier roles.

Kemp's Influence

Kemp has had a major influence on popular culture even though he has never himself achieved wide fame. For example, Kemp made a decisive mark on David Bowie, who was Kemp's student in the late 1960s. They toured together in a small show called Pierrot in Turquoise.

The visual imagery of Bowie's experimental stage persona Ziggy Stardust was given a boost by Kemp, who directed Bowie in his Rainbow Theatre rock concert in 1972. This show incorporated mime and dance in a way not attempted before in rock and roll, but it has since been widely imitated.

The young singer and composer Kate Bush also fell under Kemp's spell. The influence of his gestures and dance style are apparent in her stage and video work. Kemp appeared in her 1994 film The Line, the Cross, the Curve.

Elements of Kemp's influence can also be detected in the work of such disparate artists as the British drag theater troupe Bloolips, dancer Michael Clark, and even club and performance artist Leigh Bowery.

Contemporary Kemp

Kemp and Company's most recent show, Dreamdances, features Kemp and two of his longtime dancer-collaborators, Nuria Moreno and Marco Berriel. A kind of "greatest hits" reconfigured for a company of three, Dreamdancespresents highlights from some of Kemp's most definitive works, including Flowers, Salome, Nijinsky, and The Onnagata.

Kemp now lives in Rome, teaching mime and directing operas. He remains the quintessentially outrageous and openly homosexual man of the theater.

—Kieron Devlin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burnside, Fiona. "Words Versus Gestures." Dance Journal 5.3b (Summer 1987): 16-17.

Kemp, Lindsay. "The Onnagata." Sunday Telegraph, April 14, 1991.

Smith, Rupert. "Lindsay Kemp." Guardian, January 30, 2002: www.guardian.co.uk/arts/story/0,3604,641424,00.html

Wilms, Anno. Lindsay Kemp and Company. Derek Jarman, preface; David Haughton, intro. London: Gay Men's Press, 1987.

SEE ALSO

Dance; Kabuki; Ashton, Sir Frederick; Bowie, David; Duncan, Isadora; Nijinsky, Vaslav

Kirstein, Lincoln (1907-1996)

BEST KNOWN AS THE LEADING IMPRESARIO OF THE American ballet world, Lincoln Edward Kirstein contributed immensely to the fields of dance, visual arts, and literature. He was a significant influence in the development of twentieth-century American culture.

Born into a wealthy, close-knit Jewish family in Rochester, New York, Kirstein was raised alongside two siblings by his parents, Rose and Louis. His father was chief executive officer of Filene's Department Store in Boston and his mother the daughter of a clothing manufacturer in Rochester.

Kirstein showed artistic leanings from an early age and had his first taste of ballet at age twelve, when he was exposed to Anna Pavlova's performances in Boston.

An unexceptional student, Kirstein was nonetheless accepted to Harvard in 1926. There, in 1927, he founded the influential literary magazine Hound and Horn, which he edited until 1934 and for which he reviewed dance and theatrical performances. He also cofounded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art.

After earning a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1929, and a master's in 1930, Kirstein traveled to Europe, where he saw performances of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In London in 1933, he met the choreographer George Balanchine, whose work he admired immensely.

Kirstein persuaded Balanchine to return to the United States with him to establish an American form of classical ballet equal in quality to the Russian tradition. Drawing on his family fortune for funding, Kirstein opened the School of American Ballet in New York City in 1934, with himself as president, an office he would occupy until 1989.

Together, Kirstein and Balanchine founded a series of dance companies. The first troupe they established was the American Ballet Company, which, from 1935 to 1938, served as the Metropolitan Opera's resident ballet troupe. Then, Ballet Caravan was formed in 1936 as a touring company; American Ballet Caravan came next and successfully toured South America in 1941 before it disbanded.

During this period, Kirstein wrote a number of influential (and polemical) books about dance, including Dance(1935) and Blast at Ballet (1938), in which he articulated his ambitions for creating a grassroots classical dance tradition in America. He also wrote a number of libretti for ballets, including Billy the Kid (choreographed by Eugene Loring to music of Aaron Copland, 1938) and Filling Station (choreographed by Lew Christensen to music of Virgil Thomson, 1938).

In 1941, Kirstein married Fidelma Cadmus, the beautiful sister of the painter Paul Cadmus, a friend and artistic collaborator. While the marriage was by all accounts a happy one, it did not prevent Kirstein from having a number of homosexual affairs. He maintained liaisons with several male dancers while living with Fidelma, and some of his lovers even shared the couple's living space. In her later years, Fidelma was institutionalized for mental illness, and she died in 1991.

Kirstein joined the army and served as a private first class in Europe during World War II. With the Division of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives, he helped to recover stolen artwork from the Nazis and was honorably discharged in 1946.

With Balanchine, Kirstein then founded another dance company called Ballet Society, whose 1948 performance of Stravinsky's Orpheus is considered a landmark of modern dance. That year, the troupe, which would become known as the New York City Ballet, was invited to be the resident company of the City Center of Music and Drama.

Kirstein served as director of the New York City Ballet, America's most influential ballet company, from its founding until 1989. With the success of New York City Ballet, Kirstein fulfilled one of his early ambitions—to create a ballet company that could perpetuate a vital tradition of classic dance.

Kirstein was also a prolific writer. He authored many articles and books on various aspects of the arts; wrote criticism, novels, poetry, biographies, and historical works; and founded Dance Index magazine, which he edited from 1942 to 1948.

Kirstein received a number of prestigious awards, among them the Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, the Benjamin Franklin Medal of Britain's Royal Society of Arts, and (with George Balanchine) the National Gold Medal of Merit Award of the National Society of Arts and Letters.

Despite the visibility of his affairs with men, Kirstein did not come out publicly until 1982, when he published an article in Raritan about his early-1930s relationship with the writer and merchant seaman Carl Carlsen, a former lover of poet Hart Crane. The essay was republished in both of his memoirs, By, With, To and From(1991) and Mosaic (1994).

Kirstein died on January 5, 1996, at the age of 88.

—Teresa Theophano

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leddick, David. Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle. New York: St.Martin's Press, 2000.

www.nycballet.com

SEE ALSO

Dance; Ballet; Ballets Russes; Set and Costume Design; Barber, Samuel; Copland, Aaron; Diaghilev, Sergei; Thomson, Virgil