Michael Clark @ Tramway
Like so much in my life, my obsession with defining categories of dance can appear unnecessarily esoteric: collating lists of supposedly contemporary dance choreographers who are creating ballets feels like a Sunday afternoon entertainment, an aesthetics 101 for critics lacking engagement with real life. Yet performance, in particular dance, is at the centre of my life, frequently enthusing me, providing meaning and purpose. That it remains an obscure and almost cultic fascination frustrates me: not only does the marginalisation of dance rob the mainstream of a powerful and moving art, it undermines my own connection to wider society. My criticism is an attempt to be heard, to be understood, and share the wonder of the shows I have seen.
Redefining certain contemporary companies as ballet is more than a pedantic ramble: it is an unsystematic attempt to abandon traditional ways of understanding dance – especially through destroying the category of “contemporary”, which has become meaningless. It rarely identifies a particular style – Janis Claxton’s experiments with primate gesture have little common ground with Natasha Gilmore’s witty deconstructions of gender identity. And it has become synonymous with a pretentious, abstract shambling, which is neither common nor accessible. Contemporary dance, as a label, may have become the greatest barrier to growing audiences beyond the cognoscenti.
In this context, Michael Clark becomes a case study. A slightly cool and detached critique of Clark’s Been, Come and Gone is not entirely inappropriate, since his choreography is consciously intellectual and removed. The dancers do not address the audience – plenty of scenes see them moving sideways across the stage or turning their backs to the crowd – and he deliberately avoids making his points explicit, except in the very occasional flashes of film footage. And just like a good ballet master, Clark begins with the music: BCG is an illustrative triple bill of Bowie, Lou Reed and Wire.
If ballet is defined by tutus and romantic stories, the graphic novel can only be about superheroes. Mistaking content for form, writers and dancers flee from the assumption that anything that refuses the stereotypes can be ballet. Yet structurally, this triple bill shares more with the triple bills of Scottish or the Royal Ballet than with Les Ballets C de la B’s freeform meditations. The dancers leap and extend their feet, don point shoes and use precise geometry: they subsume their individual personalities to the overall pattern and reveal their years of professional ballet skill. When Clark does use a recognisable contemporary technique, like rolling on the floor, the company are obviously less comfortable. And the constant defiance of gravity, through lifts and jumps, echoes the grand tradition of classical ballet. Even the multi-media collaborations with film maker Charles Atlas and costumiers BodyMap recall the synthesis of art forms that was the hallmark of Les Ballets Russes. Clark is not a neo-classical contemporary choreographer. He is ballet.
His choice of rock music over classical merely continues the trend for choreographers to work with the most current composers: Balanchine sought Stravinsky, Page seeks Moran. Clark also shares something with ballet that is crucial to his process: a large audience. He sold out Tramway, and this public support is reflected in the time he has taken to evolve CBG: an earlier version at the EIF, far inferior, has been allowed time to develop because of the loyal and interested audience he attracts.
It is Clark’s dryness – a very classical trait – that makes his work emotionally engaging. Without hysteria, he evokes otherness, communication and counter-cultural values through adapting ballet’s basics to rock music. What he does share with the contemporary choreographer is the need to introduce his movement vocabulary in the early stages. Pretty quickly, it is clear that the vocabulary is ballet, with a side-order of Cunningham technique. Having done this, he descends to another world of relationships, defined by their internal logic and unconventional attachments.