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have met him surmise that he has ą Judy Garland-like death wish. Onstage, he seems in every way to subvert the return to Victorian morality proposed by Margaret Thatcher. Since 1984, Clark has developed an unusually high media profile for a British dance figure. Several onlookers are convinced he can’t keep up so stellar a place for much longer. They insist that the bubble's about to burst. Not bloody likely. This is the third year in which Clark's own company has performed, and, in these three years, he also has choreographed for LFB2 (London Festival Ballet’s smaller ensemble), for the Scottish Ballet, Ballet Rambert, and the Paris Opéra Ballet's experimental Groupe de Recherce Chorégraphie de l’Opéra de Paris (GRCOP). Before the age of twenty-three, he had choreographed for several of Britain's small modern dance companies. Michael Clark and Company has been a smash hit in Europe and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where it had its American debutrin 1985. Clark’s a star, yes, but sundry opponents will insist that his work is frivolous or unoriginal or vicious or repulsive. What goes on in an evening with Michael Clark and Company? As this is being written, he is preparing his 1986—87 show. It probably will include loud rock music, some mime and nondance material, props galore, a wardrobe of oddball costumes, jokes, maybe some dialogue-and dancing, just as it has done for the past two seasons. Dance has been too far down that list, his detractors say. But these objections can seem misplaced purism. If you take seriously the processions and mime and acting that are part of a traditional ballet (Clark probably doesn't), you should see that the nondance parts of Michael Clark’s show aren’t so much camp irrelevance as part of his fabric. A Clark show has plenty of dance content, and a startling level of sophistication. The nondance parts of a Clark work are often the most talked about. For example, in New Puritans (1984), in which he and his dancers performed with circular holes revealing bare backsides, two lengths of tape stretched from his mouth to the mouths of two female dancers. As the trio began to gobble up the several feet of blue and red tape, they inched toward each other until all three met, mouths full, in a hun-

gry kiss-while another dancer pulled/twisted red-and-blue twine from Clark’s backside. Later in the same work. Clark extracted a goldfish from a bowl and swallowed it. In our caca phoney H. our caca phoney H. (1985), Clark wore a maid’s frilly apron with a giant prop phallus visible underneath-until a fellow dancer castrated him. Shock tactics? Clark is interested in naughtiness, but obviously doesn’t consider all this seriously shocking. You wince, then you’re inoculated. Yet he likes to keep the naughtiness fresh. When New Puritans returned to London three months after its premiere, he had added one episode in which he simulated a solo sexual act and another in which, after throwing sliced bread to the audience, he wedged three slices between his legs and, then, in platform boots, bourréed off into the wings. Scenes of transvestism, frissons of bad boy behavior, borders of supposed pornography-Clark relishes these areas, just as he enjoys all the paraphernalia of way-out fashion. (Dressing up is about having fun.) Clark and his company have appeared in drag, in perversions of fascist uniforms, in allover tights with flared Renaissance sleeves, in caveman skins. He is called punk, in the subversive sense of the term; he turns the unfashionable and unsavory into new vogue. His material includes the most distasteful element of all-out-of-date trends: built-up platform shoes, dinky sixties caps, ludicrous bell-bottoms. Clark's regular designers, Leigh Bowery and Body Map, have included all the most disparate Carnaby Street trappings of parades gone by and made them part of his radical chic. (The sixties live on -our caca phoney H. éven included songs from Hair, the trend-setting Broadway musical from the late 19605.) Clark is not declaring the old stripped-down, pure-dance look of modern dance to be out of date, but his work insists that dance is a part, not the whole. Therefore, he offends oldtime purists, whose suspicion that he is a con man is confirmed by his choice of music, generally a loud, pounding collage featuring rock by The Fall. But a Clark show is not just an entertaining hodgepodge of post-punk pop elements. The end products vary, of course, but I find that the structure of most Clark works resembles that of Twyla

Tharp’s Catherine Wheel. He assembles all the ingredients, brings them to the boil, and, in the process, shows himself to be (in a broad sense of the word) a classical choreographer. The aggressive naughtiness, the role-switching fancy dress are appropriate surfaces. The choreographic flesh of a Clark work may include women supporting men or other women, men doing petits battements serrés, either sex contracting in fully turned-out fourth positions. Those who claim that modern choreographers, must invent, invent, invent new devices and new forms aren't happy with Clark. But a Clark style has developed. His dancers are ballet trained; he is a post-modernist who likes virtuosity. Entrechat-quatre, fouetté turns, multiple pirouettes, coupés jetés are in. So are bumps, grinds, the Merce Cunningham technique, the twist, the hippy shake. Like Tharp or Karole Armitage, Clark will parody the frills of conventional ballet while respecting ballet itself. Punk kicks may lead into sharply attacked ballet allegro in his work, a sixties dance may melt into a Cecchetti adagio. He uses an eclectic vocabulary to puncture enclosed traditions and to keep his language lively. In New Puritans (for me, his most overwhelming work to date), as the dance pulse built and as the dance vocabularies fused, into new-molten lava, I felt that the goldfish and the dildo were no more irrèlevant than the blindman’s buff and Panorama in The Sleeping Beauty. The work transcended all its own shock tactics and became naturally transporting. Not all Clark’s works add up so well, but they are always as provocative. This rake’s ascent has been the more startling to those who recall his first public solo-in June 1977, when he danced a Scottish dance in the Royal Ballet School's annual performance. Amid the school's junior White Lodge contingent, the fifteen-year-old Clark was outstanding, a cool, nimble prodigy. The following year, he danced another Scottish solo, and we saw that his talent wasn't just a flash in the pan. They were appropriate dances for him: Clark is a Scottish boy from Aberdeen, whose childhood work with the Scottish Ballet led that company's director, Peter Darrell, to recommend him to the Royal Ballet School. There he was taught in particular by the Cecchetti specialist Richard Glasstone, whose

skills in instilling a highly coordinated, precise, and textured style in male Royal students can now be seen in a new generation of dancers in British ballet and modern dance companies. Glasstone, unusual in Royal Ballet circles for the passionate interest he has always shown in Merce Cunningham and other modern dance, was also the school's head of choreographic studies. He gave Clark his first created role, guided his first efforts at choreography, and, in 1985, was to be the regular teacher to Clark's company. In early 1980, Clark moved from the Royal Ballet to Ballet Rambert. His stay at Rambert-lasting just over a year-coincided with a crucial time both in Clark’s development and the evolution of that company. A modern dance company since 1966, Rambert was, until 1979, a home of strenuous, would-be expressionism' shaped by Glen Tetley and others. Clark arrived at the same time as the Rambert’s new resident choreographer Richard Alston. Clark became Alston's muse. These were high months, as Alston extended Clark’s adagio and allegro skills and introduced him to a dance style in which ballet was fused with Cunningham technique and a plunging, lyrical impetus of Alston’s own. Clark also developed his own choreographic work for the company’s workshop performances. I recall in the Rambert’s 1981 London season hating to miss a performance of Alston's Rainbow Ripples, in which the seventeen-year-old Clark took greater risks each evening. The news that he was then about to leave the company seemed absurd. However, Clark was sure that he had more of himself to discover. During his first three years as an independent soloist, he came in contact with Karole Armitage, dancing in several of her works. Armitage's mix of Cunningham, punk, and ballet gave him a clue toward his own later work. (He never fails to credit Glasstone, Alston, and Armitage as the three most crucial influences on his development.) He also met filmmaker and lighting designer Charles Atlas, with whom he later collaborated. During this period, he studied with Merce Cunningham and worked with Alston and other British choreographers. His own choreography at this time tended to be pure dance, already eclectic in material. One of the fashionable London cliques he knew then was that of