ARTS FAIR

"Compare Clark Gable to Matt Dillon."

APRILE MILLO

Stepping on Toes

DANCE

'Everybody's been trying for ages to make dance such a highbrow art form; I think it's time that we rub it in the dirt again," says twenty-four-year-old choreographer Michael Clark, the latest enfant terrible of European dance to hit these shores for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. "It needs that kind of rawness and raucousness. It's time to get away from all that stuffiness."

With choreography that twists tours jetes into racy Highland jigs and bottom-baring dancers writhing to avant Brit bands such as the Fall, Clark seems the perfect candidate to propel ballet headlong into the swirling maelstrom of pop culture. The Scottish-born choreographer is not only a leading light of London's tawdry club scene (where he picked up the fashion extremism of ^Vivienne WestS wood, Leigh Bowgery, and Body o Map) but also a disciplined classical dancer whose formal training began at London's Royal Ballet School and was followed by a short stint with Ballet Rambert.

With Charles Atlas's fiction film based on Clark's life opening around the same time he makes his big BAM splash —and a Rose's limejuice ad, in which he's oddly coupled with hoofer Ann Miller—this young punk seems all too prepared to conwild side? front American audiences with his peculiar brand of raunch 'n' roll. "It's a sort of vulgar, crude sense of humor, quite wicked, and people find it shocking. But it's the kind of humor I enjoy." Brooklyn Academx of Music. New York. (10/21-26)

CRAIG BROMBERG