The Parades Gone By

First performed: 1975
Revived in: 2002
Choreographer: Lindsay Kemp
Composer: Carlos Miranda (commission for the ballet)
Set Designer: Lindsay Kemp
Costume Designer: Natasha Kornilof
Lighting Designer: David Hersey

Photo Rambert Archive © Alan Cunliffe, RDC/PD/01/256/001/002

Click below to watch Lindsay Kemp talk about the piece.

Lindsay Kemp grew up in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where he attended the Sunshine School of Dancing. He later claimed he was the only seven-year-old boy from South Shields ever to dance on the kitchen table in full make-up. He was sent to Bearwood, a boarding school for the sons of military personnel, and did military service with the RAF before attending the Ballet Rambert School. He also studied with the famous French mime artist Marcel Marceau and the Viennese expressionist dancer Hilde Holger.

He formed the Lindsay Kemp company in 1962, which was more favourably reviewed by theatre critics than dance critics. In an obituary in The Guardian, Michael Coveney wrote:

“The point at issue always with Kemp was whether or not he was a “proper” dancer or a facetiously camp hybrid of mime, performance art, operatic gesture and a sort of defiant, heroic sexuality. Because he fitted no category, was never averse to expressions of flagrant eroticism on stage and DJ’d Judy Garland with the Mozart requiem, he was variously described as a self-indulgent trash-monger, the “British bizarro” and an epicene purveyor of tripe.”

Lindsay Kemp was an acknowledged mentor to both David Bowie and Kate Bush. He staged David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust concerts in Finsbury Park, London, in 1972.