Macrobert, Stirling, 23 May 2012, and touring

THE young Aberdeen-born Michael Clark was cutting a swathe through the British dance scene when Swamp was first performed in 1986.

HIS works were set to ear-piercing club sounds and the outrageous costumes featured bare buttocks, prosthetic penises and other shockabilia. However underneath the attention-grabbing, tabloid-baiting superficialities, his choreography was, and is, rigorously grounded in his training in classical ballet.

Michael Clarke Company

In many ways, Swamp resembles fragments collaged from the dance studio, random sections of practice class, rehearsal and choreographic experimentation cut up and pasted together. There’s no discernible narrative, no sweetening layer of emotion, no interaction other than an occasional hold for extra balance or a dance master’s push.  Their often awkward, geometrically angled lines make the bodies look like artists’ wooden mannikins. It’s a deconstruction of the process of making dance.

Appropriately, since this tour is part of the Olympics 2012 programme, the dancers’ costumes are a cross between rehearsal clothes and sportswear. After the first interval, as a complete contrast, Been, set to the music of The Velvet Underground, sees the dancers clad in skin-tight silver lamé leggings which stop abruptly at the hip bone. How do Simon Williams and Benjamin Warbis keep them up? No time to ponder, what with gawping at the silver-sequinned gimp suit, the mirrored nipple caps, and the delightfully dotty lighting.

Oxana Panchenko is immured in a flesh-toned suit studded with hypodermic syringes which wobble and distract, annoyingly, from the quality of her dancing. More successful are the unisex high-necked satin leotards, very 80s’ Calvin Klein.

come follows after a proper interval, which gives the hard-pressed dancers a much-needed break. One of Clark’s signature moves is a row of dancers walking very slowly across the stage in perfect unison – something which doesn’t sound too difficult and which indeed his dancers make look entirely natural. Try it sometime – then marvel.

Michael Clarke Company

Clark’s choreography is piled high with moments of great beauty and purity of line which are gone almost before the mind has had time to register them. Though it’s been three years since come been and gone was seen at the Edinburgh International Festival, it’s been touring since with much the same cast, with the addition of the athletically beautiful Harry Alexander who gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘chair-dancing’. The length of this performance as a company shows in a fine polish which we, alas, see too rarely in Scotland.

Though he’s turning 50 this year and time is ruthless to dancers, when Clark himself moves across the stage in front of the word ‘intermission’ the energy sparks and crackles off the stage. Having opened the door to emotion, it cannot be shut – as the stage is saturated in light the colour of ripe mangos, irrepressible grins flash across the dancers’ erstwhile poker faces because, yes, this is a triumph.

Michael Clarke Company bring this programme to His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, on 5 June, and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 8 June.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

Links

• Michael Clark Company
• Jennie Macfie