Lindsay Kemp, a boundary-pushing British dancer, choreographer and mime who taught David Bowie and Kate Bush how to move, died on Friday at his home in Livorno, Italy. He was 80.

The cause was heart and lung failure, David Haughton, a friend and longtime collaborator, said.

Ms. Bush, in a statement posted on her website, said: “To call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist. He was very brave, very funny and, above all, astonishingly inspirational.”

Mr. Kemp may have been an inspiration to two of the most important musicians of the 1970s, as well as to countless dancers, but his work — often filled with sex and blood, and with clear nods to its inspirations — was received less favorably by some critics.

“The Broadway theater has not previously seen such realistic simulations of masturbation and sodomy, and the reader is hereby either warned or informed,” Clive Barnes wrote in a New York Times review in 1974 of “Flowers,” Mr. Kemp’s most renowned work. It was based on Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of the Flowers,” a sexually explicit novel narrated by a prisoner telling tales to help him masturbate.