Dancing Drawings

I put on the music and the dancing starts… passion joy pain love desire: everything flows into a single black line that leaps like an arrow or an angel from my hidden heart and out through my hand onto the white shine of waiting paper. And before he has time to be dazzled by the bright lights on the stage, a newborn dancer dances his one and only dancing instant, a black flash flourished on the empty sheet of memory, and then is gone…

… leaving behind a line remembering his gesture, weightless as a shadow on sand or the red print of a kiss on skin: the only footprint left by his existence. I don’t decide that dance or its sign: only the moment and its music can do that. Followed suddenly by another impulse leaping into the unknown.

The instant I abandon myself to the music like a leaf dancing with the breeze, I close my eyes and fly. My hand has no more fear, its energy channeled and freed by the thoughtless mantra of its countlessly repeated and renewed motifs. The pen dances like a fan in my hand. The paper is my stage. It fills with costumed characters and friends. My solitude becomes a teeming port – Cadiz, Livorno, Marseilles – where sailors dance the Java, angels share a cigarette with toreros and their laughing girls, Harlequins and Geishas lean out of their dream and take me by the hand…

Inside the dancing drawing I dance with all my timeless lovers and symbols, hand in hand with the music and reaching out our arms to you…

Lindsay Kemp