Michael Clark Company – Double Bill
When Michael Clark burst onto the dance scene in the early 1980s, he was the best thing to happen to it for years. A gorgeous dancer and genuine innovator, his combination of balletic grace, modern dance, and punk irreverence both ruffled feathers and blew away cobwebs with considerable charisma.
With that also came his well documented personal demons as well as divided opinion. On one hand was continued supported for a trouble artist with undoubted talent, and on the other was disappointment that he wasn’t using it to create a more significant body of work for the umpteen dance companies short of good ballets.
Clark is now nudging 50, a time when most top artists have both consolidated their youthful achievements and are also looking forward. It’s difficult to see this mid-career maturity in Clark’s latest programme at the Barbican, where his contract as Artistic Associate has just been extended for another three years.
First on the double bill is his iconic 1986 work Swamp. This deserves its place in British dance history, even if his generally excellent dancers who performed it on opening night looked under prepared. In fairness to Clark, his company is essentially a pick-up troupe, with the dancers hired for specific projects rather than training together and performing together every day, year-in, year-out. This inevitably means the quality and focus of the dancing compares unfavorably to companies that have permanent dancers on long-term employment.
That said, it’s not an explanation you can use for the second piece which looked more like a nostalgia fest for Clark’s own past than a new work. Come, Been, Gone is set to tracks by Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Lou Reed, three singer-songwriters Clark admired in his youth. They’ve penned hip and powerful tunes, but their oceanic status overwhelms Clark’s often routine choreography which also struggles with its designs.
Clark has an extremely stylish eye, and has long used clever designers, both for the costumes, the lighting and programmes. However, for Come, Been, Gone, they are so striking that large chunks of the dancing simply fade out as you marvel at the slick Lycra and almost hallucinogenic colours and patterns.
The red tights, striped jackets and “glitterball” unitard are just three of the awesome costumes created by Stevie Stewart and Clark himself. You also find yourself glued to the show programme, cleverly inspired by a 7”-single cover, complete with a 1970s photo of their Majesties Reed, Bowie and Pop.
It’s as if Clark is paying too much homage to his youthful rock enthusiasms and not enough to his own talent, nor to ballet itself, which is a robust art form with flex and give well able to withstand Clark knocking it about. Leaving a Clark show leaves you wondering how things would have been if his mature work had built on the energy of his youth.
