come, been and gone Michael Clark Company written by Philip Szporer The notoriety that for years surrounded Michael Clark has rippled to our shores from across the “big pond.” Clark is today an iconic figure in the U.K.’s dance world, and yet his irreverent work has rarely been presented in the United States. Known for the last 35 years as a dancer and choreographer with a punk sensibility and a classical line, he’s strapped dildos to his dancers’ bodies, and splashed London streets with pop art vagina posters to advertise a show,
Michael Clark
which enraged local city councilors ordered removed. Plenty of ink has been spilled about his provocative cod-piece cowboys and shimmering mermaids, chainsaw, teapot and toilet costumes, and having his real-life mother on stage, bare-breasted, giving birth to him. With his abiding interest in punk and alt-pop culture, Clark would commonly sandwich Stravinsky with music by Public Image Ltd., T. Rex, Stephen Sondheim and The Sex Pistols. (Clark has always been at the forefront of contemporary art, forming close collaborations with artists such as Sarah Lucas, performance artist and designer Leigh Bowery, filmmaker and lighting designer Charles Atlas, and bands like The Fall.) Today, the Clarkian imprint of “respectability, be damned” still has impact. His greatest virtues as a choreographer are his versatility and unpredictability, his ability to shock and delight. Clark’s desire to sensationalize served him well in the past, and he cultivated the swirl of hype that preceded him. Now in his early fifties, and recently awarded a CBE for his services to dance by Queen Elizabeth, Clark might arguably be eager to sidestep that kind of controversy during his company’s premiere tour of the U.S., one of the few places where he’s not well-known, to allow audiences the chance to view his work without preconceived notions. He’s no doubt relieved to drop the boring “bad boy”, enfant terrible, baggage he’s carried with him ever since he broke onto the dance scene back in the 1970s. Far from staid and retiring, he’s still bringing a jagged-edged punk attitude in creating new forms of contemporary ballet. The dance world was in thrall from the start. As a star pupil at the Royal Ballet School, Clark split upon graduation. Punk was at its prime, and reportedly, playing princes and carting around ballerinas didn’t cut it with him. A stint at the Ballet Rambert followed. Merce Cunningham was an early influence, from Clark’s Rambert days and certainly through his dancing with Karole Armitage’s troupe in New York. Then, in 1984, at the age of 22, he returned home to form his own company.
The common thread throughout these years, apart from the dance, was drink and drugs, which nearly did him in. Clark is an entertainer at heart, and he loves the spotlight. Ever since his childhood days in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, he’s been putting on shows. From a grade school production where he played both Hansel and Gretel, did the costumes, and directed, to a take in the 1980s on John and Yoko’s ‘bed in’, Bed Peace, performed for nine days in a London gallery with his then-lover, American dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio, he has always been, in his own words, “outrageous and provocative.” Along the way, Clark had become the kind of personality Fleet Street loves best. As he made his anti-estab-
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lishment mark in the 80s, the reviewers hailed his amazing, unique dancing ability, and all managed to include a mention of his naked posterior, an oft-referred-to ‘national treasure’. Even today, some journalists continue to swoon over his beauty, the angle of his head or a slow extension of a leg. While the gossip sheets were in love with him simply for his sexual escapades and substance predilections, and the overall outrage of his shows, the British dance world, says The Guardian, “has looked after him as its underdog genius, loved almost as much for his lapses as for his talent.” Clark expedites the image hype in the duality he plays out with people. He seems, alternately, the agent of hype, a victim of his own celebrity, or his own worst enemy. “I was British dance,” Clark exclaimed to Hour, back in the day, dead serious when explaining the woeful state of British dance scene in the 80s. “There was only me.” Clark’s idea was to sacrifice himself through his work ”abusing myself, using myself,” he recalled in the 1990’s. “One of my great excuses as an artist is to report back from the limits, with my adventures in sex and drugs. A career? No, it’s a job to explore the limitations of mind and body. Everybody’s work is about themselves. Some of it’s just more personal.” And then Clark slipped away from public view into a self-imposed exile back in Scotland, where he kicked his years of much-publicized, self-destructive heroin and methadone addiction. Clark made a stop-start return to the dance world at the end of the ‘90s. He’s been busy ever since, sober, mature and focused, creating dances that are not only “inventive, but astonishingly demanding,” critics say, referring to Clark’s keen sense of phrasing that matches the physical and artistic risk that drives him so intently. As his former ballet teacher and longtime supporter Richard Glasstone has indicated, Clark’s technical dancing hasn’t to do with virtuosity but flow of movement and musicality, and “it’s the movement between the [positions] that’s important to him.” Clark is always mining his rich classical background and the rigorous physical understanding it provides. He’s said recently, for instance, that he’s interested in his dancers mastering Frederick Ashton’s épaulement – the use of the shoulders, use of the back – “because it’s becoming extinct and I really want that to be passed on.” For this U.S. premiere, Clark and IRVINE BARCLAY THEATRE
All photos by Jake Walters
his company are presenting his 2009 work, come, been and gone, an homage to the explosive rock soundtrack of his teens, with David Bowie front and center, as well as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. The Independent states, “The joy comes from the aesthetic collision of music and movement.” In the U.K., even the show program booklet was designed to look like a 7-inch record sleeve. Clark, here, is working with hints of a new subtlety, but also builds up his dance, as The Guardian says, with an “unbearable restraint” that he ultimately “detonates.” These days, Clark no longer dances in his work, except for the rare cameo appearance, but his life as a choreographer is center-stage. Often outrageous, always fielding the extreme, Clark finds no waste in dance, he told Hour. “There’s no object to sell. It sounds terribly hippy, but the audiences are collaborators. They complete the work, by bringing themselves to share in the work. It’s the most pure art form. There’s no corruption. It’s not like a painting that has an increasing value.” Finally, Michael Clark is still testing limits, ever ready to confound audience expectations with his pure movement, his handling of space and time, and his flirtatious spice of life.
U.S premiere
Michael Clark Company
come, been and gone October 11-12, 2014 Concert Sponsor
with additional support by the
British Council
Series Sponsor Cheng Family Foundation
and an anonymous fund of the
Orange County Community Foundation Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based lecturer, writer and filmmaker. WWW.THEBARCLAY.ORG