Angel in ‘Cinderella’ Gives Wings to Dancer

At 11 a.m. on a recent morning at the Music Center, Will Kemp appears to be shaking off the last vestiges of sleep, clutching a Styrofoam vessel of caffeine. He’s teen-idol cute in baggy green utility pants, a loose-fitting sweater and running shoes, his dark hair slicked this way and that, green eyes clear as lake water, skin lightly tanned from a beach getaway with his aspiring singer-songwriter girlfriend Gaby Jamieson, who has accompanied him from London to L.A.

Four nights a week, Kemp dons a white wig, glittery face powder and a pearl-silver three-piece suit for his role as the Angel in Matthew Bourne’s “Cinderella” at the Ahmanson Theatre. Bourne’s vision of the fairy godmother is a ghostly guardian angel who guides Cinderella through the perils of London during the Blitz of 1941.

The role has focused attention on the 21-year-old dancer, last seen in L.A. in Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures version of “Swan Lake.” In that ballet, Kemp was in the second cast, dancing the gender-bending Swan, a part created for and made famous by AMP’s Adam Cooper.

While Cooper’s star turn in “Swan Lake” and his current leading role as the Pilot/Prince in “Cinderella” boosted him into wider fame, Cooper was already an established dancer, a former principal in London’s Royal Ballet. But Kemp is the first Bourne protege to be hatched wholly from AMP.

“I fell in love with the way Will dances from the first audition,” says Bourne, who discovered Kemp when he was a 17-year-old student at the Royal Ballet Upper School. The professionally unproven Kemp joined AMP the next year.

“I knew from the start that there was something special about Will and he has proven it,” says Bourne, who claims he “stuck his neck out” by prominently featuring Kemp in a company of experienced dancers.

When Kemp danced in “Swan Lake,” critics noted that his younger, smaller, more vulnerable Swan had a boyish, delicate appeal that was a viable alternative to the muscular, manly Cooper. Kemp developed his own following in the West End, Los Angeles and on Broadway. It was the young dancer’s ability to make the role his own that impressed Bourne: “He found his own way through it and wasn’t a copy at all.”

Kemp began tap-dancing at age 9, in Hertfordshire, England. Two years later, encouraged by his teacher and his mother, a former model and cabaret performer, he switched to classical dance, entering the highly competitive Royal Ballet school at 16. There, Kemp was told his feet were all wrong and was often reduced to tears by instructors who said he didn’t fit the mold of a classical dancer.

“They had the correct bone structure, they had supple hips, they had [the] beautiful arches of their feet,” a soft-spoken Kemp says of his former classmates, “whereas I was so sort of in my head--determination, blood, sweat, tears, emotion, intensity. Without that, I don’t think I ever would have got through it.”

Bourne’s emphasis on theater as well as ballet provided an ideal arena for Kemp, who happily made the transition from “a place where it’s really difficult to let rip, to release frustration, your emotions,” he says, “to a place where from those very things you can create your best work.”

Bourne choreographed the “Cinderella” role especially for Kemp, basing it on the guardian angels in Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” and adding flashes of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. “I didn’t want a fairy godmother in a big dress,” Bourne says. “Will has a spiritual quality. He’s a sensitive guy. There’s an elegance to his movement, a fluidity and a grace.”

Which only helped Bourne and his company formulate an otherworldly creature who moves differently than everyone else in the ballet. “The Angel needs to give the impression of weightlessness, being able to glide, float, to fly,” Kemp explains, “almost as if he was walking against the wind, half blown through time in a kind of slow-motion.

“There were people around who wanted to make the Angel a kind of a leprechauny character,” he remembers. “I wanted him to be somehow more powerful than that, not more dramatic but calmer. I didn’t like the idea of a little nymphy character who pops up all over the place. I needed him to be more of a ghost.”

Kemp says he enjoyed the challenge of creating a role from scratch. “It’s a lot easier to learn a part that someone else initially has created. Having something you can change is a lot easier than having to make the first step. I was a lot more cautious, because I knew whatever I did was like splashing paint over an empty page. There has to be one person who makes that first splash; the minute that you do that you’re able to play around with everything.”

The Angel, as conceived, is the only “Cinderella” character that communicates directly with the audience. “Will is a clever performer,” Bourne says. “He knows how to work that connection. I’m never sure whether it’s instinctive or studied, but it doesn’t matter, it works.”

As his mentor, Bourne finds it necessary to help Kemp balance the extracurricular demands of being a sought-after young artist with the rigors of performance. “There are still things he needs to learn in terms of consistency,” Bourne says. “You have to be able to deliver--you can’t let that drop. He is ambitious and he understands what it is to be a star performer not just onstage but off. He meets the right people, he gets around; he’s got a good grasp on what he could be possibly doing in the future.”

Those plans include a keen desire to move into acting. Kemp says that the cinematic nature of Bourne’s work has already given him some basic training. “I already think like an actor in creating all the parts that I do, so I think it is the next natural progression.” He has been talking to various studios about a possible role in an updated film version of “Fame.”

While he doesn’t want to get pigeonholed, Kemp envisions dancing on screen as possibly his best shot at breaking in. “I’m an unknown quantity, there’s no proof that I can act. It will take a person who can understand me and who’s willing to trust and take the chance with me.”

In the meantime, Kemp says he is looking forward to subbing for Cooper in the role of the Pilot for three performances during the run, beginning with Sunday’s matinee. “Playing a human is like a novelty,” he says. “Wow, it’s a real person with real emotions, aggression and love and loss and yearning. Wow, great.”

* “Cinderella,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays and May 6, 13, 20, 2 p.m. $22.50-$65. (213) 628-2772. Through May 23.