Let's dance

Iconoclast dance legend Michael Clark is heading to Galway with a new show inspired by the music and machinations of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. LOUISE EASTcaught up with him in London to find out how the boy from rural Scotland made it to the Royal Ballet and went on to unleash his explosive punk sensibilities on the world of contemporary dance

MEETING choreographer and dancer Michael Clark is a little uncanny. The previous night, YouTube had thrown up some old footage of an undated collaboration between Clark and post-punk band The Fall. Clark wore silver platform boots and bright red tights under a blue leotard with a perfect oval cut out to display his naked buttocks. The lighting wasn’t exactly illuminating, so his perfect white bottom seemed to float and bounce around the stage like a ball punted aloft by the crashing chords of Mark E Smith.

In the 20-odd years since that early performance, Clark has cut an unusual arc through the world of contemporary dance. Nobody has ever known quite where to place him. Classically trained at the Royal Ballet School, with a natural beauty to his technique, the pieces he choreographs for himself and his company are mouthy little numbers featuring strap-on dildos, Hitler moustaches and even a turn as a dancing toilet.

Yet just when it seemed safe to pop him in the box marked "iconoclast", Clark shifted his focus to the classical world, culminating in 2007's epic, critically adored three-part work, The Stravinsky Project.

Now he’s staging a return to the music of his youth, with a new piece that he’s bringing to the Galway Arts Festival next week, only the third outing for the piece since the world premiere in Venice two weeks ago.

Lounging on a sofa in east London, Clark (navy sweats, white trainers, nappy pin in one pierced ear) confides that he’s still fiddling with the work, hoping to add something special for Galway. “Nothing’s ever finished. If it was finished it would be dead. Kind of,” he adds. “I don’t know if that’s really what I think, but I do want it to be alive.”

For this new work, Clark leaves behind the swirling discord of Stravinsky and turns to three firebirds of a different kind; David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

“There’s a theatricality to all those characters,” he muses. “I guess they were all very extreme and that’s always interested me.

In the past, I certainly thought it was an artist’s responsibility to take things to extremes and then to report back to everybody else what it was like. It’s not the way I approach things now, but I certainly used to.”

David Bowie is the acknowledged centre of the piece, the presiding spirit blasting out Jean Genie, singing about Heroes to a generation to whom he is one. “Bowie’s tracks just seem perfect for a theatrical setting. I think he said himself that they weren’t complete until there was a performance.”

Always attracted to trios, trinitys and trilogys ("Look at my last work, Balanchine, Nijinsky, Nijinska"), Clark has woven this piece from the skeins of friendship, rivalry and production credits connecting Bowie and Lou Reed ("You can hear Waiting for My Man in Heroes, you really can. The more you listen, the more you realise, oh, there's a parallel there") and between former flatmates Bowie and Pop.

“Although, frankly, Iggy Pop has been a bit more of a challenge since he did that commercial for insurance,” says Clark delicately. “But I still think his dancing is unbeatable.” Listen to Clark talk about Bowie, and it’s clear that the singer is also a plumb line dropped between Clark the renowned choreographer and Clark the 12-year-old. Growing up in rural Aberdeen, he’d listen to the album Diamond Dogs and wonder at lines like “We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band and jump in the river, holding hands”.

"That imagery was quite fascinating to me," Clark says dreamily. "That sense of abandon was one that I longed for because where I came from was quite repressed, to put it mildly." He laughs. "I still go back there and it's bizarre; a bit like The League of Gentlemen."

Certainly a farm in rural Scotland was not a place entirely designed for a ballet prodigy with questions about his sexual orientation. The first time he ever saw a man put his arm around another was when Bowie grabbed Mick Ronson onstage at Top of the Pops. "That moment was definitely one of 'Oh, maybe there are other people like me me out there. Maybe there's another way of doing things and I don't have to be a farmer'."

Agriculture’s loss was ballet’s gain. At 12, after years of first Scottish dancing, then ballet classes in Aberdeen (“the girls taught me to shoplift, I loved it”) Clark won a place at the Royal Ballet School and left home for London.

“All the way down on the train, I was dreading the whole thing. I was really attached to my family, but within a week I realised I had a lot to learn. I mean, forget the dancing, just the etiquette – I remember being laughed at because I had my Y-fronts on under my tights. I didn’t know what a jockstrap was.”

Those years at the Royal Ballet School shaped Clark, although the discipline and routine provoked as many questions as it did answers.

Letters from a fictitious aunt (in fact, a friend who was a stripper) enabled his escape from the serene Royal College campus in Richmond Park to the thud and pulse of late 1970s London.

“I’d go and see punk bands. I couldn’t tell anybody in that environment that I was at the Royal Ballet School. It was a survival thing; they were quite extreme characters, Nazis and skinheads . . . Making my own work was a way of bringing those two worlds together, reality and fantasy.”

That early collision of classical ballet and punk does much to explain the bare-buttocked ballets that came later. After leaving the Royal Ballet, Clark did a short stint at the Ballet Rambert but left to form his own company at the tender age of 22. His collaborators were punks and iconoclasts; Wire, Leigh Bowery, Peter Greenaway (Clark played Caliban in Prospero's Books) and the work he made was startling.

“I try and bring reality to my work. Some artists make work as they would like the world to be; ordered. Well, it’s not like that.”

What critics were quick to spot was that Clark was not using crazy costumes and the crash of percussion to hide a lack of ability; instead, he was taking his classical training out clubbing.

“I think I quite quickly grasped that [my training] was there, it was in my body and I might as well use it. It wasn’t hindering me. Before I started choreographing myself, other choreographers – Richard Alston at the Ballet Rambert, Karole Armitage – made me aware that it was something positive.”

Nevertheless, Clark determined to reinvent what he had learnt, even if it meant whipping ballet towards places it theoretically should not go.

“If something feels natural, I’ll do the opposite,” he observes (adding that he is now trying to “get better at not doing that”).

“I’d take the hard things in classical ballet and make them harder. I’d take a phrase that happens on the floor and make it all happen in the air. Right now I’m interested in doing things backwards, so I’m looking at a lot of my work backwards and then using that material.”

Another tactic, used in rehearsal, is what Clark calls, somewhat mischievously, his “interpolations”: “I make things to other things and then I put them to something else. At the moment, Jean Genie is what will be White Light/White Heat. Sometimes, something is absolutely clear and you know exactly what you want to that music, but sometimes you want to hear it differently. It’s working right now, beautifully, so I’m not going to interfere with it until it’s time.”

What that means for his dancers is a constant process of change and augmentation, with Clark pushing the piece as far as he can, right through to curtain up.

“It’s something I learnt from Mark E Smith, although I’m not nearly as extreme as he is. Nobody knew what The Fall’s setlist was until five minutes before. I’m not quite that bad, although I don’t know if the dancers would agree.”

For Clark, the extreme dexterity and capability of his dancers must be somewhat bittersweet. At 47, he is still lean and fit, but he is dancing less and less. (He performs a short solo in the new piece).

“I couldn’t do what I ask them to do. That’s just reality. I’ve made that mistake of going in and thinking I’ll just show them and it cripples me. But even the little I do keeps me in touch with what they’re putting themselves through every day. If I’m not in it at all, I lose that connection.

“Doing what I do is what keeps me mentally sane. It can shift things in a way that thinking or talking about them doesn’t. Sometimes there are things that are best expressed in another way.”

Michael Clark Company play the Black Box Theatre, Galway on July 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 25th as part of the Galway Arts Festival