February 1, 2006
In 1994, modern dance iconoclast Michael Clarke created O, to general acclaim. Over ten years later, he returns, to create a totally new framework for O, based on Russian-American ballet master George Balanchine's seminal work Apollo, set to a lush Stravinsky score, and performed on a stark white stage, punctuated with mirrors that hypnotically chop, reassemble, distort and mutilate the dancers. Though easy to miss in the abstract and deliberately bewildering staging, Balanchine's ballet is a narrative, following Apollo from his birth (measuring an astonishing mirrored box with his limbs) through his encounters with muses (the female dancers, flirting with the funhouse scenery in pretty tunics and stylised schoolyard pleats) and eventual ascent to Mount Olympus. While scenery and lighting is stark and minimalist, a softness and sensitivity permeates the dance and the dancers, imbuing the measured irregularity of Clarke's choreography with shocking delicacy, but, though very beautiful, it is less immediately engaging than the opening piece, OO. Under a driving Iggy Pop riff, the dancers uneasily ease themselves onto the hospital white stage, their particolour Leigh Bowery-designed unitards a sleazy and surreal echo to the harsh black stripes that slice up the dance space. Rotating mirrored doors duplicate and triplicate waiting dancers rendered un-individual by dislocating face-paint and mime-like impassivity, as they disappear and reappear into black spaces and waiting mirrors, twisting and contorting. Finally Clarke himself enters, dressed in a linen lab-coat, twirling a perspex cane with dizzying speed to the unforgiving sound of Wire, every step a reminder of what hard work dance is; how it requires discipline, elegance and an understanding of how and why to draw a line. The dance shudders into its groove, the repetitions seethe with renewed tension, effort and achieve that explosive excitement which is the signature, the essence of Michael Clarke.