With long, lithe, limber legs, impossibly arching feet, and enviable turn-out, Michael Clark's physique resembles that of a ballerina. He has even pushed that comparison himself by donning a tutu. On the other hand, he's also danced around in an "I...
[more]With long, lithe, limber legs, impossibly arching feet, and enviable turn-out, Michael Clark's physique resembles that of a ballerina. He has even pushed that comparison himself by donning a tutu. On the other hand, he's also danced around in an "I Hate NY" T-shirt and his birthday suit.
Clark exploits his rigorous ballet background to the hilt. In fact, exploitation, wedded with a giddy anarchy, pervades his work. In fits and starts since the mid-'80s, Clark has made raucous Postmodern bricolage out of ballet, Scottish dance, and his own gay-punk sensibility. His grand, entertaining dances take the piss out of tradition and admire it all at once.
"Clark's impudent, charismatic blending of formal proficiency with a jokey, nose-thumbing, do-your-own-thing attitude branded him the decade's number one rising star and enfant terrible," says critic Donald Hutera. The fact that he lived out the '80s like a rock star rather than a ballerina, drugging, debauching, and cavorting about with outlandish club kid Leigh Bowery both locked him into stardom and ensured that that stardom would be brief. The end of the '80s saw the beginning of a heroin habit that took Clark years to kick.
After a period of rest, rehabilitation, and reevaluation, Clark was back on track in 1999 with "Current/SEE." "Current/SEE" was his first work since 1994 and is a tribute to Bowery (who died that same year). The work is more pared down than his early, no-holds-barred extravaganzas, but it does feature a tiny orange handbag -- this campy addition was a gift from his late friend and collaborator.
Clark always danced like an angel. Never before or since has a male dancer appeared at once so fluid, so bouncy, and so sylphlike. His former lover Stephen Petronio comes close, but retains a typically male rigidity. Whether in his "Mmm..." (set to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"), in early music videos for the Fall or Scritti Politti, or -- a perverse turn of casting -- as the monster Caliban in Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books," Clark has always been simultaneously sharp and sinuous. His attack gives way to release; risking a fall, he always lands on a dime.
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