Annie Stainer obituary: dance and mime artist who performed with Bowie

Times

28-07-2025

'Well, Annie's pretty neat, she always eats her meat,' David Bowie sang in the opening line of his 1972 hit John, I'm Only Dancing. The song's lyric was characteristically opaque and it was rumoured that the 'John' in the song's title was John Lennon. What is more certain is that the inspiration for the carnivorous 'Annie' was in all likelihood the dancer and mime artist Annie Stainer, who appeared alongside Bowie in the video accompanying the song.
The film was shot by the photographer Mick Rock during rehearsals for a brace of Ziggy Stardust concerts at the Rainbow Theatre in London in August 1972. Stainer also appeared on stage with Bowie at the concerts, the posters for which advertised that Ziggy would be supported by the Spiders From Mars and a dance troupe called the Astronettes featuring Stainer. Exotically made up and dressed in a fishnet bodystocking, when Bowie sang Lady Stardust during the shows, Stainer and her fellow dancers donned Bowie masks.
Stainer met the singer through Lindsay Kemp, the choreographer with whom Bowie had studied mime in the 1960s, and her waif-like figure and long, feathery hair had already appeared with him in a 1970 television show titled Pierrot in Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders.
In the Kemp-devised drama, which was heavily improvised, Stainer played Columbine to the choreographer's Pierrot in costumes created by Natasha Korniloff, who would later create some of Bowie's Ziggy outfits. While they mimed, Bowie sang four songs as a character named Cloud, including a composition named Columbine.
After her brief role in the Ziggy Stardust extravaganza, Stainer went on to forge a startling career as a solo performer with three extraordinary thematically linked mime and dance pieces that became known as the 'Annie Stainer Trilogy'. Rooted in mythology and Jungian archetypes, the first work, The Legend of Lilith, was premiered in 1973, with Stainer as Adam's first wife who grew wings and flew away from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on the 19th-century fantasy novel Lilith by George MacDonald and the writings of William Blake, the work was performed around the world, including in the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York.
The second part, Moon, a celebration of love, lunar phases and the cycle of the seasons, won an award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1977. The third part, Changing Woman, was premiered in Glasgow in 1984, and was inspired by vaguely Druidic mysteries after Stainer had been photographed dramatically on the altar stone at Stonehenge during the summer solstice. She subsequently presented all three pieces together in a physically demanding performance in Perth, Western Australia, after her appointment as head of movement at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
Her husband, Reg Bolton, an actor and circus clown, predeceased her in 2006. They met in 1967 when they were students at Warwick University and married five years later. She is survived by their children, Joe Bolton and Sophie Bolton.
Ann Elisabeth Stainer was born in 1945 in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and grew up in the Wiltshire village of Mere, where her parents, Edna (née Grey) and Ron Stainer, ran the bakery. The night before she was born, her mother had an urge to dance in the garden under a full moon. 'That's where it all began,' said her daughter, Sophie, who went on to help her mother run the Total Theatre, staging multimedia shows and teaching a holistic brand of physical performance.
As a child she enjoyed dressing up for the village fête and learning to dance around the maypole. She also took ballet lessons and fondly remembered her first teacher reprimanding her for her 'broken arms', which she undulated as if they were wings and she was attempting to fly. It was a trait that was later to become a central motif in her one-woman shows.
Educated at Shaftesbury High School for Girls, she read French at university before enrolling in 1968 at the London School of Contemporary Dance. She subsequently studied mime with Kemp and with Étienne Decroux in Paris.
Alongside her solo shows she played the albatross in a 1977 production of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which won a Fringe First award at Edinburgh and was Madeleine Usher in Steven Berkoff's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, presented as a work of 'total theatre' combining acting, mime and dance. 'She creates a theatre that goes beyond the commonplace and takes us into far deeper areas,' Berkoff said of her performance.
With her husband she created the Long Green Children's Theatre Company whose shows included Suitcase Circus, which they took on tour around the world, including to Australia, where they settled in 1985.
Both Stainer and her husband were offered teaching posts at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her students recalled her 'infectious energy' and insistence that 'mischief and wonder' should be prioritised over theory and intellectualisation. The same approach characterised the Total Theatre, which she established in Perth in 2002 as both performing company and a school, where students could be riding a unicycle and juggling plates one day, learning Chinese dance the following day and reciting Shakespeare the next.
She spent her final weeks planning her next production — a time-travelling love letter to Shakespeare — from a hospital bed. Having always told her children she did not plan to get old until she was 80, she died four months before she reached the milestone. 'So she never grew old,' her daughter noted.
Annie Stainer, dancer, mime artist and teacher, was born on September 29, 1945. She died of pneumonia on May 31, 2025, aged 79