Interview: Michael Clark - Bowie of the ballet

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 13:58

TEATRO ALLE TESE, VENICE. THE hipper than thou sell-out crowd at the Venice Biennale Danza are waiting, noisily for – well, what? No one really knows. The programme was printed before this show was even made. But they're waiting anyway, waiting for a name: Michael Clark.

The man in question is all but invisible, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the feet of the front row, watching his eight dancers resolve a tricky piece of choreography to music from Wire. "People were standing in such a way as if they weren't sure they would stay," he tells me later. "I thought, that's interesting, they're not really committing themselves. But they stayed, which was good."

Of course they stayed. Clark's reputation goes before him: one of the most gifted dancers of his generation, a punk Nijinsky, a rebel angel, the bad boy of British ballet. Now 47, he dances little in public, but pours his ideas into his company, the standard-bearers for exacting, surprising, original dance.

A week later, in a cafe in London, Clark and I are comparing Venetian mosquito bites. "I got completely covered," he says. "We've got a photocall tomorrow and I've got bites all over! Even during the show I got bitten!" Dressed down in a tracksuit, clutching his iPhone, no one gives him a second look, yet he crosses the room with a kind of mercurial grace: one minute he's not there, then, suddenly he is.

He is quick to point out that the show I saw might look very different by the time it reaches the Edinburgh International Festival, where he returns this August after an absence of 21 years. Clark is a perfectionist who never stops revising. Thank U Ma'am, a sequence of work to David Bowie songs, will stay, in some form. The first piece, called Swan Lack ("The name changes every week, by the way") might not.

Swan Lack, or Swamp as it was called the previous week, is a remake of one of the first pieces Clark made when he founded his own company in 1984. He was 22, a blistering talent who burned through the Royal Ballet School only to reject the place they offered him in the company and strike out on his own. "I started recreating it because it's the (25th] anniversary of the company. I wanted to have that in my dancers' bodies. I wanted to have it available because we are going to celebrate the anniversary in some way."

It has also made him think back to the man he was when he first made it. "I'm thinking, 'That's interesting, that was me, I was the man who everyone was coming towards in an attacking way, like space invaders, trying to knock me off the stage.' I wondered what was going on in my head then. There was a lot of media attention on the launch of the company, which served its purpose but it was quite... I was very young."

Professing to dislike interviews, Clark is warmly confiding. Relationships are important to him. Much of his work has been shaped by friendships, from artists Leigh Bowery and Cerith Wyn Evans to designers BodyMap and Charles Atlas (his collaborators on this show). He makes friends and keeps them. He has had the same dance teacher for 20 years. When Clark talks about the new work, the pared down nature of the staging and costumes, he talks about focusing on the things that really matter: the people and the dance.

It's a very different show from his last at the Festival, 1988's I Am Curious, Orange, a loud, ambitious co-production with the Film Festival with outrageous costumes and The Fall playing live. "It was a huge spectacle. It was a time when I would say 'I want this', 'I want that'. I find it outrageous now when I think about it, that I was in a position to do that and nobody stopped me. I never thought of myself as being anything to do with the Eighties. There was so much work going on that was against Thatcher and it irritated me that people gave her that much time and thought. But the excess of that piece in terms of production …"

Is he more restrained now? He chews the word over, spits it out. "It's reflective of the time we're in. And the things that I value, ultimately. I hope it's not more restrained, I hope it's more implicit in the movement, and I hope I'm doing a better job by making the bodies speak."

Clark's work pits the precision and rigour of classical dance against the anarchic energy of rock, in this case in creating a tribute to the triumvirate of the 1970s: David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. He was a student at the Royal Ballet School at the time, playing truant to see punk bands in London. Somehow, in the clash of these opposing forces, he found his own alchemical creativity.

To understand the importance of both, you have to put yourself in the dancing shoes of Clark aged 11, growing up on a farm in rural Aberdeenshire a long time before anyone thought of Billy Elliot, watching Bowie on Top of the Pops. "It was like 'Oh my god, maybe other people are a little bit like I feel, inside'. When he put his arm round Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops, it was like a moment of epiphany, it was something I didn't see men do where I came from. It wasn't even a homosexual thing, it was realising there were kindred spirits out there, I just had to find them."

He found them through dance, and, for all his rebellion, eagerly embraced his classical training. One teacher at the Royal Ballet School said he was the best student they'd ever taught. "I'm a funny mixture. I'm incredibly traditional, there are things I was taught which I know inside out physically, and love. So if I choose to break a rule, it's a choice, but it's never done in a way that I know better, because I was very well trained. I embrace a lot of tradition, but I also love the opposite, like Stravinsky, Nijinsky, everything inverted."

He has just spent three years choreographing Stravinsky in a residency at Barbican. In taking on Stravinsky, he knew he couldn't avoid pitting himself against the ballet greats with whom he is associated: Balanchine, Nijinsky, the ballerina Bronislava Nijinska. In fact, that's part of why he did it. "I knew everyone was going to compare mine, probably unfavourably, to the classic versions, but you have to keep challenging yourself. This is a similar trilogy for me, Lou Reed, Bowie and Iggy Pop. I guess Iggy Pop would be Nijinsky, Lou Reed might be Nijinska. Would Bowie be Balanchine? No, I think not. Anyway. It was, you know, that idea. I'm actually wholeheartedly enjoying working with this music, I'm thrilled that I've been given permission to." He adds that he hopes Bowie will see the show. "It's a dialogue with the music, it always is. Sometimes you fight things, sometimes you go with it."

Clark makes a brief appearance on stage in Thank U Ma'am. The moment worked well in rehearsals and covers a tricky costume change, he says, as if he needs to make excuses. He dances largely with his back to us, as if deliberately avoiding our gaze, daring us not to pay attention. But he's still riveting, fluid, dancing mercury.

These days, the costs of performing are high, Clark struggling with knee problems, and sometimes other parts complain as well. "Frankly, today I'm in quite a lot of pain, because I still go into the studio with the dancers. The easiest way to show somebody that it's possible and that it can work is just to get on the floor and show it. And stupidly I was doing some flip and my back … Do I miss it? Being part of it refreshes my memory about what it is that dancers put themselves through every night. It keeps me connected with the dancers, because it's a journey you go on. It's a very emotional, bonding sort of thing, you're kind of all in it together, you help each other."

This is a different Clark from the provocative bad boy of earlier years, who danced with dildos and toilet seats and chainsaws, who had sex with his then boyfriend on stage, and had his mother on to simulate giving birth to him. Even in 2001, after his famed five-year absence spent recovering from drugs and alcohol addictions, he was choreographing around a giant masturbating arm designed by the artist Sarah Lucas.

Is he less confrontational now? "What do you mean, because we're not going this?" He waves two sets of V-signs with a glint in his eye. "Definitely as a performer, I was trying on different personas, not to the extent that Bowie was, but I was behaving in ways that weren't really in my nature. When Leigh and I and (the artist] Trojan were together, we egged each other on to do the most provocative things we could think of, just to see how it felt. That kind of spilled on to the stage a bit. Leigh or Cerith would give me a costume I would try and outshine. That was a goal that Cerith gave me, you're dancing in a tutu, so you've got to make the tutu invisible by outdancing it, which was a challenge."

"Less confrontational? Yes. Yeah. I remember playing the Sex Pistols to my ballet teacher, he said: 'But it's so …' – what's the opposite of subtle – 'blatant'. And I remember saying, 'Yes, but it was meant to be direct'. I think my work's probably more subtle now."

More subtle, but not easier. Be warned. "Please tell your readers to make the most of it while they can because things are going to get a lot more difficult. I want the audience to work as hard as we will next time." And Clark works hard, very hard indeed.

&#149 Michael Clark: New Work is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, 28-31 August, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.