Director: Cristiana Cerrini, Production: Cristiana Cerrini, Lucia Manganaro Morelli, Italy, 12′, 2020, Rights: World
‘Lindsay Kemp Claudio Barontini. Drawings and photographs’ was the last exhibition that Lindsay Kemp was part of before his death. The multi-talented British choreographer, actor, dancer, mime and director, who was also known as a mentor and collaborator of David Bowie. And as a dance teacher, Kemp taught Peter Gabriel, Mia Farrow and Kate Bush, he died aged 80 in August 2018. Lindsay Kemp designed the exhibition together with Claudio Barontini, one of the most important contemporary celebrity portrait photographers in Italy today. And this is a short documentary celebrating both their work.
The unique photos reveal the most intimate gestures of a Kemp unknown to most, were exhibited at the CAMEeC Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in La Spezia in 2018. Alongside a remarkable cycle of drawings made by Kemp himself, a not secondary activity encouraged in the 80s by Joan Mirò himself, who organized the first exhibition in its foundation.
Cristiana Cerrini films the dismantling of the exhibition to stage the twilight of the artist Kemp, showing at the same time the simplicity of the gestures of the photographer as he takes away his photos, which offers a peep into Claudio Barontini’s great sensitivity in composing his celebrity portraits.
Lindsay Kemp lived in Livorno, Tuscany at the end of his life, he had been living in different areas if Italy and Spain previously after leaving the UK in the 70s. In his Guardian obituary, Michael Coveney says Kemp “combined the subversive European strain of Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Federico García Lorca with the British punk and glam-rock strut of the mid-1970s”.