Credit: Jimmy KingWe’ve all had a nutty professor or two, but Will Brooker may be the first teacher to transform himself into David Bowie.
NME reports that Brooker — a professor of cultural studies at England’s Kingston University and author of books about Star Wars and Batman — will dress up like Bowie for a year, adopting personas such as The Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust in the process. The professor is calling his research project Forever Stardust. “The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s headspace at [various] points in his life and career, to understand his work from an original angle,” he explains.
Brooker is taking things one step further, though. Like the best method actors, he is not limiting his immersion in Bowie-dom to clothing alone; he also plans to take on the singer’s sleep and dietary habits, including the diet of red peppers and milk Bowie reportedly lived on for a time in the ’70s. There are limits to how far even Brooker will go, however. “I’m unlikely to have a fling with Mick Jagger,” he says, referring to Bowie’s ex-wife’s claim of having caught the pair in bed. “However, it is possible to engage with and get a feel for [Bowie’s] experiences without immersing oneself to a dangerous extent.”
Booker has already posted several images of himself in Bowie garb to Twitter.
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.