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over a dozen works for leading ballet companies including Paris Opéra Ballet. London Festival Ballet. The Scottish Ballet and Ballet Rambert, In the summer of 1984 he launched Michael Clark & Company, which has subsequently toured worldwide and presented four different full evening programmes of Michael Clark’s choreography. He has appeared in numerous films and videos including Charles Atlas's Hail the New Puritan (Channel 4/WGBH TV), Michael Clark's No Fire Escape in Hell (BBC TV) and Comrades directed by Bill Douglas. In 1986 he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his personal contribution to dance. □

With the première of his ballet at Sadler’s Wells, Michael Clark puts one foot firmly into the establishment Dancer and choreographer Michael Clark is 24. This week, his ballet, Swamp, is to be premiered by the Ballet Rambert at Sadler’s Wells. In September, his own troupe, Michael Clark and Company, is due to appear on that stage for the first time. As a leading icon of 1980 s youth culture, Michael Clark is in the process of being embraced by the Establishment. Less like a breath of fresh air than like a rush of amyl nitrate in the acceptable face or dance, Clark takes traditional forms and explodes them into new patterns, shallenges our frames of reference to provide broader boundaries. He employs a mixture of punk, electronic and rock music; commissions costumes which have included bottomless leotards, black leather jock-straps and boys in tutus; and, as a choreographer, demands that his dancers contort their bodies into postures that are less than swanlike. As is often the case with successful innovators, this flouting of convention is rooted in an expert command of the basics. As a dan-