Pas de Punk

Julie Kavanagh

Say the name Michael Clark in Britain and a collection of bizarre images automatically flash into the mind of anyone who knows his work. Take your pick: there's Clark swallowing a "goldfish," scratching a bared buttock, performing in platform heels or a tutu, or bourree-ing to the entrance music from Act Two of Giselle with a massive dildo strapped to his loins (presumably a punning allusion to the Wilis).

Clark, twenty-three, has become a cult figure in English dance and has started to conquer the international circuit as well. Last year he formed his own small ensemble, whose function is rather like that of a backup group to a rock star, and this month Michael Clark & Company makes its U.S. debut with three performances sponsored by the Walker Art Center at the Ordway Studio Theatre in St. Paul.

Even the crustiest of British dance critics have been captivated by Clark. They are willing to overlook his iconoclastic gimmicks in view of his outstanding talent as a dancer—and, they are beginning to concede, as a choreographer. They allow him to be subversive because he knows the rules. He was trained as a classical dancer at the Royal Ballet School, danced professionally with Ballet Rambert, and has worked in close association with several leading modem choreographers, including Karole Armitage and Richard Alston. This has equipped him with an astonishing range of movement.

Clark possesses a compelling quality—call it style or what you will—that derives from his serenely beautiful, androgynous face and from the stately grace, control, and inventiveness of his dancing. However anarchic his movements become, they always have reference to the classical: an arm jeeringly raised in a Nazi salute is still a port de bras. His influences are detectable in his work—his tilts and use of torso are acquired from Merce Cunningham via Richard Alston; his theatricality, irreverent wit, and sudden braking of impetus, from Karole Armitage. But all this has been absorbed and transmuted into a rich, lyrical vocabulary of his own. Clark's idiosyncratic line is defined as much in the transitions between movements as in the positions themselves. Charles Atlas, who recently completed a film on Clark, told him: "Your line is so beautiful that I can't bear to cut it.''

The film, "a fantasy documentary" commissioned by WGBH in Boston and Britain's Channel 4 television, is due to be shown in the U.S. early next year. Atlas's idea was to construct a narrative rather than a pure dance piece by showing Michael Clark's world both in and outside dance. The protagonists of this world include new London fashion designers Leigh Bowery and Body Map, and Mark E. Smith of the punk group The Fall, who are friends as well as collaborators. Clark's choreography is a kind of punk Gesamtkunstwerk, fusing new music, fashion, and dance. It is not a forced or opportunistic collaboration—' 'We socialize together and share the same ideas," he says. The secondskin fit and cutouts of Body Map's clothes display the dancer's physique and pure line to advantage, just as the tiger stripes echo the pronounced circles that recur in Clark's port de bras. Leigh Bowery's flamboyant, ambisexual creations seem made for the stage ("Leigh gets a lot of abuse in the street"), while The Fall's lyrics inspire not just the titles but much of the content of Clark's work. "I like playing around with the words—sometimes following them blatantly, sometimes not. It's a useful way of dealing with words without the dancers' having to say them."

The program he is bringing to the United States will be a development of pieces he has done already plus "something of a Hollywood nature." Will he tone his work down for American audiences? "No. I'd only tone things down to annoy people," says Clark, in true contrary form.