When Grant Smeaton was
working as a Saturday boy in Listen records in Glasgow in the early
1980s, he had access to music by artists he might not ordinarily have
heard. One of these was Klaus Nomi, a shock-haired singer with a
piercingly high voice, who fused post-punk performance art with
operatic arias.
Thirty years on,
Smeaton, in collaboration with choreographer Alan Greig, has created
Do You Nomi?, a dance theatre homage to Nomi, who died of
AIDS-related illnesses in 1983 aged thirty-nine. As Smeaton explains,
Nomi was a fascinating character, whose own performances were hugely
theatrical.
“He just seemed to be
part of this very different scene. It was a very fertile time, and
you could be more avant-garde and experimental, which Reaganism and
Thatcherism kind of knocked out. While it went on, Klaus was a
fascinating, enigmatic character who was very much part of that.”
The idea for the show
came from Smeaton's creative relationship with Greig. Smeaton had
been drafted in as an actor to one of Greig's shows, while Greig had
previously choreographed theatre shows which Smeaton had appeared in.
Out of this, the pair decreed to work on a new piece that integrated
both acting and dance disciplines. It was other shared experiences
between the pair that influenced what the show would be about.
“We both grew up
through the punk era, and then the new wave era,” Smeaton says.
“That was our formative musical years, and we both loved Klaus
Nomi. Even a lot of people from that time haven't heard of Klaus
Nomi, but he was a gay man as well, and was one of the first people
I'd ever heard of who contracted and died of AIDS. That was quite
shocking at the time, when the plague label was becoming really
powerful. Klaus died at a point when he was really starting to reach
some kind of fame in his life, and it was a really fascinating story,
but, because Klaus was so kind of abstract, that the abstraction of
dance would fit really well with it. I don't think you could tell
everybody's story through dance.”
Klaus Nomi was born in
Bavaria in 1944, and in the 1960s worked as an usher at the Deutsch
Opera in West Berlin as well as singing arias at gay discos. In 1972
Nomi moved to New York, where he became involved in the fecund East
Village art scene, appearing onstage in a camp satire of Wagner's Das
Rheingold.
In 1978, Nomi appeared
in New Wave Vaudeville, a four-night event at which he sang an aria
from Saint-Saens 1877 opera, Samson et Dalila while wearing a
skin-tight space-suit with transparent plastic cape. The performance
ended in a riot of smoke bombs and strobe lights, and led to dates in
other clubs. At the suggestion of No Wave icon James Chance's
manager, Nomi formed a band, which, in later incarnations featured
artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in its ranks.
In 1979, Nomi appeared
as backing singer for David Bowie on Saturday Night Live, performing
Boys Keep Swinging and The Man Who Sold The World while dragging
around the studio a prop pink poodle with a television set in its
mouth. Despite releasing two albums, the nearest Nomi came to the
mass consciousness in the UK was via an appearance in Urgh! A Music
War, a documentary compendium of left-field acts of the era playing
live. Nomi performed Total Eclipse in a sequence which was shown in
full several times in highbrow rock show, The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Nomi's image and sense
of self-invention pre-dated the likes of Boy George and performance
artist Leigh Bowery, while also following in the footsteps of the
grandest of dames, Quentin Crisp.
“The whole thing
about Nomi's image was an escape from the threat of nuclear war,”
Smeaton says, “and using fifties sci-fi imagery in the eighties. He
was really like nothing on earth, but he was just this shy guy who
happened to have this amazing voice.”
Do You Nomi? is
Smeaton's latest exploration of pop culture icons. Whereas in
Bette/Cavett and Whatever Happened To Benny Hill?, Smeaton played the
title roles of Bette Davis and Benny Hill himself, here he and Greig
have drafted in a full cast, with Smeaton directing.
“I'm too old to play
Klaus,” Smeaton jokes, “so we've hot two actors dancing, and two
dancers acting, with one playing Klaus. With all of these stories,
I'm not just looking at a person. I'm looking at a whole period of
history. With Bette, it was all about that whole interview set-up at
the time, while Benny Hill was I suppose more autobiographical, but I
think telling a person's story can tell a lot about the period they
lived through, and how their lives changed. They're all people who
fascinate me. I used to go about with eye-liner on, and I suppose try
to be like Klaus, but he pushed things further than anyone.”
Do You Nomi?, Tron
Theatre, Glasgow, February 20-21, then tours
The Herald, February 19th 2013
ends
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