The Artistry of Kate Bush - a ‘De Efteling’ Special
- The Courtauldian
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
By Pipit Johnson
In February 1978, at just nineteen years old, Kate Bush released her debut album The Kick Inside and made history with its first single, Wuthering Heights, becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a fully self-written song. This set in motion her career as a fascinatingly unique artist, unafraid of experimentation and doing things differently. In recent years, Bush enjoyed renewed popularity when her song Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) featured prominently in Netflix’s Stranger Things, drawing in a new generation of listeners. In this sense, Bush has and will always be an incredibly inspirational artist, and her work is a clear example of how art and music are inherently intertwined.
Under the teaching of Lindsay Kemp, a British dancer, actor and choreographer (who famously also taught David Bowie), Bush studied mime. Performance consequently became a crucial element of her artistic identity, and throughout her career she has significantly incorporated her passion for theatre and dance. Surprisingly, however, Bush very rarely toured, with her only major one being in 1979, the six-week-long ‘Tour of Life’. Despite this, she is known for her unique performing style, consistently showing how core movement and dance is to her musical creative process. This can clearly be seen in the two eerily beautiful music videos for Wuthering Heights, and – intriguingly - a video performance known as De Efteling.
Recorded in 1978 for the Dutch TV broadcaster TROS, the twenty-minute-long feature showcases six songs from The Kick Inside. The performance is striking for several reasons, not least of all due to its visuals as directed by Rien van Wijk - they perfectly encapsulate the album’s otherworldly and evocative sound. However, most fascinating of all is the unique choice of filming location: Efteling, a theme park in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands. Each song takes place in a different, alluring area, and considerable attention is given to visually mirroring each song’s distinctive sound.
The performance opens in a haunting manner, with the first scene seeing leaves blow across a tombstone to reveal Bush’s own name engraved ominously upon it. This is followed by a striking shot of a figure with arms outstretched, standing precariously in a boat in the middle of a vast lake. These set the scene for the enchantingly beautiful gothic performance that unfolds over the next six songs.
The first to be performed is Moving. Against the backdrop of a cobbled courtyard outside Efteling’s Haunted Manor, Bush dances with elegance and fluidity. Dressed in white and red, her movements are mesmerising. Just as the song wavers and dances, so does Bush, matching her movements to the music as she sings ‘set your spirit dancing’ and ‘how I’m moved, how you move me’, so that the song becomes a tribute to both the aforementioned Lindsay Kemp and to Bush’s own love for dance.
Next is Wuthering Heights, arguably one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs in existence. Bush embodies the spirit of Cathy Earnshaw, the troubled protagonist of Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel. The filming of this version of Bush’s Wuthering Heights took place within Efteling’s newly opened haunted mansion, the perfect setting to evoke the spectral atmosphere of the song and its namesake novel.
Through fog and smoke, Bush emerges from within a glowing green tombstone. The camera pans out and reveals the setting to be a Gothic cemetery, complete with animated gravestones, a ruined balustrade in the foreground and shadowy vaulted architecture. Clothed in a flowing white Victoriana-inspired gown, Bush effortlessly dances around graves and skulls, embodying the ethereal and ghostly atmosphere. In one haunting scene, she appears in a window overlooking the graves below, her arms stretching out desperately as she sings ‘Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy… let me in your window’. At another moment Bush is silently followed by anonymous white hooded figures holding candelabras, this in particular being perhaps a perfect example of how the video overall blends the beautiful with the sinister.
As she sings ‘too long I roam in the night’, Bush dances with exaggerated movements, her arms swinging and spinning. A trick of the camera allows her to become translucent against the backdrop, further characterising her as the awakened ghost of Cathy. This specific sequence is striking in its artistic cohesiveness, with the combination of the ruined gothic setting with Bush’s elegant ghostly figure perfectly translating the song into a visual format.
Following this is an equally affecting scene, as Bush performs Them Heavy People from behind a convex glass mirror, a visual later echoed in Strange Phenomena. Both songs are accompanied by Bush’s distinctive dancing, and both have a playful element to them: in the former, Bush sings at one point accompanied by three goblin-like puppets, and in the latter, she is surrounded by supernatural and mystical imagery, situating her in a fairytale-like world. These both play into the idea of Bush embodying different characters and identities within De Efteling as a whole. In Strange Phenomena she flits between two characters, one in a red leotard with her face painted white, and the other in a glittering red tailcoat and top hat, playfully pulling scarves from her sleeve like a magician. This is a clear example of her incorporating her love of mime and theatre into the fantastical otherworld defined in her debut album.
However, a sense of duality underpins The Kick Inside, with the melancholic existing alongside the playful. Efteling’s fourth song The Man with the Child in His Eyes, a song Bush wrote at just thirteen years old, is a much more muted sequence compared to Them Heavy People and Strange Phenomena. Opening with a close-up of Bush’s face, the camera then zooms out, and we see her sat on a grassy verge. The rippling dark blue and green lake behind her mirrors the hazy, circular filter employed by the camera. A swirling sensation is created around Bush, instilling a sense of solemnity and foreshadowing the visuals of the final song to be performed.
Last is The Kick Inside, the album’s titular and closing track, and is arguably the entire feature’s most haunting segment. Bush is transformed physically, her dark hair becoming grey, and she is clothed all in black, appearing gaunt and sombre. Much of the video sees Bush lying within a coffin-shaped boat, completely surrounded by flowers. At the end, a black veil is draped over Bush’s face, and her boat sails out across Efteling’s lake. This visually parallels two paintings - John William Waterhouse’s 1888 The Lady of Shalott and John Everett Millais’ 1851 Ophelia. Here, Bush’s drawing together of symbolic portrayals of women destined to meet poetically sorrowful ends perfectly blends with the song’s narrative of mythic tragedy. All this serves to further demonstrate Bush’s exceptional way of telling stories through her music, and shows how character performance is integral to her artistry.
Overall, De Efteling is an incredibly beautiful and thoughtful introduction to Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. It not only perfectly embodies the album’s sonic atmosphere and lyrical storytelling, but illustrates the potential that can be explored in the relationship between visual art and music. Bush herself, clearly, is an artist committed to demonstrating the value of such visual aesthetics and performance art in music through her work. In De Efteling, Bush situated herself in a gothic, theatrical fantasy world, physically bringing to life her debut album and beautifully underlining the stories she always - no matter the medium - intended to tell.
コメント