Introvert: to turn inwards; to turn in upon itself; a person interested mainly in his or her own inner states and processes rather than the outside world.

Extrovert: to turn outward; to make manifest; a person mainly interested in the world external to him/herself; a sociable, outgoing lively person.

The psychological categories of 'introversion' and 'extroversion' serve as useful markers of two extremes in the character of performed dance. The work of avant-garde dancers and choreographers following Merce Cunningham would fall into the first category. Their work is characterised by a meditative and solipsistic quality. The averted gaze of the dancer and the sense that movement derives from an internal compulsion gives the appearance that the work does not actively seek to connect - though can happily co-exist - with its environment, musical accompaniment or the presence of an audience in close proximity. In its early conceptions, this 'introverted' quality was often seen as negative. Describing work by the new wave of American postmodern choreographers, such as Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer, an article by critic George Jackson in Dance Magazine from April 1964 complains: 'Why do these people want to be themselves so badly that they practice doing it in public?' Another reviewer criticised a contemporaneous performance by Rainer, commenting that the dancer was so self-enclosed she seemed not to care whether anyone was watching or not.

The psychological attitude of ballet is quite the opposite, with its emphasis on 'turnout' (a stance derived from the act of opening the body out from the hip socket down to splayed foot) and the linear shapes and gestures of dancers directed towards the frontal plane of a conventional theatrical setting. If the 'introverted' and meditative attitude I have described above gives the viewer the impression that the dancer is somehow privately 'feeling their way' through movement (chance methods and improvisation were an important source for the generation of this work), conventional ballet describes bodies performing variations of a pre-existing language. Nineteenth-century romantic ballets, such as Giselle or La Sylphide, were structured through narratives that were communicated directly to the audience in a mixture of 'pantomime' language and enchantingly danced 'divertissement'. Modern choreographers of ballet, such as George Balanchine or William Forsythe, distort and exaggerate the classical lines of traditional ballet, but their movement is nevertheless directed to maximise the audience's visual apprehension of the bodies in stage view.

The introverted style prioritises individual agency to the extent that the elements of the performance context (performer, musician, lighting design, audience) are autonomous and equal, almost as though they are divided from each other by invisible screens. The extroverted style, on the other hand, rests upon a contradictory hierarchy around the performance's explicitly engaging visibility: the dancers are there to perform for an audience (in this sense subservient) but, at the same time, they are highly skilled and spectacular (in this sense masterful).

The dance and choreography of Michael Clark forge paths of co-existence between these oppositional states. Clark brings the sense that he is thinking his way through his body - testing out each muscle inch by inch, marking each possible position - together with the display of his virtuoso skills. He sets these two states in dynamic tension. The vocabulary of movement that Clark has invented bears this out: the sense of freedom and 'release' emanating from interior exploration of movement ripples through his body so that it appears charged with a sense of radical subjective potential and yet is ultimately controlled. In a section of Would Should Can Did (2003) set to Erik Satie's Four Ogives, Clark appears unspectacularly in a muted costume as he traverses the stage. But instead of walking plainly in Cunningham-inspired 'ordinary' fashion, or tripping lightly as a 'dancer', he makes his way in a manner that resembles something between Charlie Chaplin miming a tightrope walk and Michael Jackson moon-walking, via the ronde de jambe sweep of ballet-trained feet. Testing the verticality of his body against the horizontal surface of the floor, Clark simultaneously entertains us with a surprising variation on our own method of getting from A to B, and invents a new and energised dance movement that is both highly skilled and controlled.

Throughout this piece, Clark appears onstage as a kind of occasional eruption of a psychological investigation, anchoring the rest of the movement that we see to his own personal exploration. Clark's short solo is followed by the appearance of his four company dancers who perform a slow and quirky variation on gymnastic exercises, posing in what look like early modernist sculptural shapes. Coming together in line, the dancers form a 'can-can' style train, merging into a curious, lolloping caterpillar-like creature whose straight-legged kicks happen heavily out of synch. Breaking up this formation the dancers stand apart, facing the front of the stage in a breathtaking moment of choreographic unison. Elevated by the light they dance springing movements of ballet, ascending into the air with pointed toes, legs quivering like ethereal butterflies. As the curtain closes on the performance, a spotlight shines on a gigantic Cerith Wyn Evans glitterball in the auditorium. Fragments of silver light scatter around the auditorium, magic-dusting the crowd and connecting the audience to a shared space.

This passage of choreography is one example that points out the manner in which Clark makes manifest the psychological continuum between the individual and the social group. Clark draws a line joining the experience of his own moving body to ours as we sit in our seats. Individuality is presented in relation to collectivity at two levels: through the onstage gestural interaction of the group of dancers and because Clark forces an awareness of the component parts of the theatrical situation and our position as the audience within it. This reflexiveness seems to be as much a part of the 'necessity' of dancing for him as his own desire, for he has had the role of the 'messiah of British contemporary dance' thrust upon him.¹

The Group as Bearer of Ideas

In the 1998 documentary 'The Late Michael Clark', Clark is recorded speaking to a journalist about his new work, Current:SEE. He does not want to pin meaning on it, he says, because he himself is trying 'to find out what dance is. I have no idea.'

Dance, as Clark makes it, appears to be rooted in a continual return to the consideration of the first principles of physical being (body weight, gravity, sexual drive and motion). From this base position, he is engaged in a process of trying to discover or reconcile connections between the contradictory states of the body's potentialities: interior feeling versus external expression; and the natural impulses and drives of the body versus the repressed abstraction of formal training. His work bears out a fundamental recognition that this discovery can only come about in praxis. More than any other art form, perhaps, dance is an inextricably social activity - from the dynamic of performing and being seen to the running of a dance company - and so Clark's exploration of it has, in many different ways, involved testing the boundaries of individuality against the collective.

It is in Clark's choreography, of which his own performance has always been a central part, that this question of relations is acutely posed. A 1930s essay by Siegfried Kracauer, 'The Group as Bearer of Ideas', serves as a useful analogy for the relationship between dancer and choreographer if we imagine what is presented onstage as a microcosmic societal group.² Kracauer describes the contradictory way in which the complexity of an idea - in this case political ideology - is unavoidably decreased and made more rigid when it is 'borne' by a group, yet at the same time the group is the necessary 'bearer' if any political idea is to be realised. 'The group,' he writes, 'is thus the mediator between individuals and ideas that pervade the social world ... the idea does not transcend the individuals, as is claimed by the authoritative doctrine, but instead works itself out in and through them.'³

Kracauer, who also wrote on the mass-spectacle choreographies of the Tiller Girls at this time, expressed prescient concern that though the group is the necessary 'bearer' of political ideology, ideology will necessarily be reduced and simplified because 'that subject [the group member] no longer displays the endless manifold of traits proper to it as a single individual'.⁴ Clark's strategies for addressing his apparent recognition of the choreographer's problem - of reducing individuality in manifesting 'group bearing' - have ranged from the insertion of non-dancers and erotic content into work grounded in ballet, and the use of collective unison pitted against asymmetry and asynchrony, to the treatment of music as a guiding 'idea' which the dancers work both with and against.

It was soon after leaving the Royal Ballet School that Clark began choreographing his own works, apparently driven to forge meaningful connection between his experience of lived life and what he had learned in the dance academy. At this time Clark was involved in the underground London club scene of which the late Leigh Bowery and his nightclub, Taboo, were celebrated features. Clark's invitation to the large and fantastically dressed Bowery to perform in his work was criticised by some of the dance press as an immature 'shock tactic' and wilful rebellion. But Clark appears to have been fascinated not just by Bowery's unconventional costume and physique that contrasted with his dancers' bodies, but by the artist's own extreme extroversion and desire to perform. In a work such as No Fire Escape in Hell (1986) Clark explored the ways in which Bowery's transformation into excessive image-surface could charge the on-stage situation. Similarly Clark invited his mother, Bessy Clark, to perform in a number of performances. In 1992 she appeared topless in the role of the Sage in Mmm...Where experimental choreographers of the 1960s often invited non-dancers to participate onstage for their neutral attitude to 'ordinary' movement, Clark goes further and explores the human tendency to want to perform, considering the boundary between this impulse and the way in which it becomes fashioned into trained dance.

A notorious aspect of Clark's early treatment of group choreography was his use of explicitly fascistic imagery. In New Puritans (1984) Clark cast dancers goose- stepping in pseudo-militaristic fashion. In No Fire Escape in Hell he worked with the Slovenian band Laibach, who were well known for staging Nazi salutes onstage and claiming that 'all art is subject to political manipulation except that which speaks the language of the same manipulation'.⁵ Despite dance writer Judith Mackrell's description of Clark's use of this imagery as 'apparently uncritical', as a choreographer Clark appears to be absolutely aware of and resistant to dance's tendency to repress its individual chorus members into totalitarian sameness for the sake of aesthetics.⁶ And yet he also recognises its appeal. His use of this imagery implies a knowing and sinister joke that is played on his audience too: it is as though he is testing our expectations, giving us some balletic unison which morphs into fascist display while asking, 'is this what you came here to see?' But it also seems to be a joke on him - as both star dancer and star choreographer, the temptation to clone multiple selves must be immense. At the same time, though, Clark plays up a subversive idea of sameness, breaking down conventional divisions of gender on stage. In New Puritans, for example, both his male and female dancers were dressed in the same Bowery-designed costumes: painted faces, military caps, platform shoes and, instead of tights and tutus, coloured leotards with holes cut in the back to show bare buttocks.

Clark's work in recent years has examined the subtler intricacies of group performance. The way he treats music as the 'idea' binding a group points to a more oblique conception of group multiplicity. Clark has collaborated with and used music by popular bands playing recognisable music including The Fall, PJ Harvey and Susan Stenger. Whilst his dancers move to the musical beat in a way that touches on popular entertainment or MTV, they rarely fully soar and become synonymous with it. There is always a heaviness, a slight delay in synchrony which pulls the dance back from disappearance in the abstraction of space and time, and so the performance resists being subsumed by it. Although Clark appears to work with the music, he's always working a little bit against it.

Audience Participation

Kracauer concludes his essay about group ideology with the observation that 'whereas in the individual and in the dealings that people have with other people ideas encounter one another in their full scope (along all of their surfaces, so to speak), in the social world they touch each other only along one of their edges and otherwise have little contact with each other'.⁷ I have already described a number of ways in which Clark's choreography disrupts Kracauer's conception, but perhaps the most important 'surface' in Clark's work is the surface of encounter between the two social groups that constitute audience and performers: the visible 'screen' of the theatre stage.

Clark treats the architecture and convention of the theatre setting as a readymade participatory situation. While he has been linked with British artists - notably Cerith Wyn Evans with whom he has worked many times, and more recently Sarah Lucas - it is the network of relationships that Clark has with his collaborators that is more revealing of the spirit of his work than any similarities in content. Clark's exploration of spectator dynamics connects obliquely with the concerns of international artists from the 1990s whose work has been characterised by Nicholas Bourriaud in terms of 'relational aesthetics'. Though often billed as 'participatory' the works of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Santiago Sierra or Thomas Hirschhorn, for example, emphasise the theatricality of their created situation in terms of the framing of the viewer. These works often extend an ambiguous invitation for interaction, resembling games whose rules are known only to their makers. Clark's model of relational practice is more generous. In pointing us out as the audience, he simultaneously acknowledges his role as performer. Entertainer, even. At the most basic level, his work often invites physical identification between performer and audience through his choice of strongly rhythmic, vibrational, often very loud music. In the opening sequence for Current:SEE at the Roundhouse (1998) Susan Stenger's band Big Bottom stood around the stage, each member against a speaker stack which made the set look like a Neolithic stone circle. Each of the five members played the lowest possible note on their bass guitar. Describing the effect, participant Cerith Wyn Evans said 'it was a very physical thing, it hits you right in the chest or in the stomach. You could feel your body vibrating.'⁸ The band proceeded to play, morphing the primal sound into familiar chords by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, etc. Clark performed a slow, exploratory dance in the centre; the audience sitting around in circular formation completing the effect that this might be a gladiatorial spectacle in which we play the social chorus.

In Would, Should, Can, Did (2003) Clark played a recording of the electronic interval 'gong' from the Royal Festival Hall at the Barbican. As audience members filed into their seats the displaced sound of the gong continued, and before the house lights went down, four dancers appeared onstage, walking back and forth in time to the intermittent beep. The beep continued as the house lights dimmed and the performance began, bleeding the real-time physical experience of the arriving audience into the performance unfolding onstage, thereby driving a continuum between our pedestrian activity and the way in which the dancers transform the same movement into choreographed performance. During the performance's interval images of the German rock band Can and their cheering fans were projected onto the stage, perhaps as a non-identical mirror to our own more passive position in the theatre.⁹ Partway through the interval the word 'CAN' flashed boldly on the screen, ambiguous as to whether it served as a reminder about the opportunity for a toilet break or as a positive intimation that we, too, were able. Either way, the position of audience spectator is one that is actively constituted and acknowledged by Clark as necessary in the social dynamic of being a performer. His work manifests a genuine concern that his audience is able to relate to what is seen on stage.

But this is not to say that Clark is apologetic for his on-stage position. Coming of age as a trained ballet dancer in the 1980s, the age of competition disco-dancing as depicted in Stayin' Alive and Saturday Night Fever, Clark acknowledges the social dynamic which is built upon the agreement that some perform and some watch. From the earliest days this is evident. In Charles Atlas's 1985 documentary about Clark, Hail the New Puritans, Clark dances in a nightclub with friends. Everyone is dancing together, Clark mingles in, but inevitably the weird and wonderfully dressed crowd clears a path for him. A temporary stage space is opened up which both allows and demands Clark to perform for the crowd. He obliges with a reeling succession of giddy, punk-inflected pirouettes.

There is an aspect to this relational situation that involves obligation. Clark's public recognition resulting from his prodigious talent has no doubt been something of a burden. He is aware of needing to keep those who want to watch him in check, and by acknowledging that both the audience and one's role as 'performer' have connotations of passivity, he plays with the notion of 'giving them what they want'. Recognising the danger of straightforward complicity with the 'performer' role, Clark has said: 'In the past one of the ways I could retain some freedom was by never living up to people's expectations, by challenging their idea of what I should be.'¹⁰

Visible Theatre

I began with the definitions of two psychological states that are measured against normative psychology. These states imply social attitudes, and one's everyday demeanour is expected to rest between the two. Two recent artworks serve as interesting comparisons in observing the extent to which the maintenance of social control depends on a manifestation of this balance.

In his film film with music, words and singing (2003) Wolfgang Tillmans includes a sequence he had filmed in a Madrid street. Some men with a barrel organ are busking, playing music, and a small crowd begins to gather around them. A couple who have been walking past begin to dance the polka together in the street. After a few moments two policemen appear in the left-hand corner of the screen and instruct the buskers to stop. As this interaction takes place, the dancing couple seamlessly fall out of their dance step and back into their pedestrian stride, then disappear. In the exhibition 'Ailleurs ici!' staged by the Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004), Berlin-based artist Tino Seghal made a piece which he conceived of as a 'sculpture' in which four actors played the part of the gallery security guards. When any visitor to the exhibition entered the room, the four guards suddenly broke off from their neutral positions watching over the space and circled around the visitor singing 'This is so contemporary!', and gesturing in 'show-biz' style. Tillmans's video snapshot captures an untypical moment of joyful dance in the midst of the pedestrian city street before the situation is returned to the conventional hierarchies of prescribed behaviour and control. Seghal's intervention in the contemplative and formal atmosphere of the art gallery reverses the expected dynamic of looking and being looked at bycasting the representatives of authoritative surveillance as performers themselves.

Michael Clark's work also suggests the possibility of rupture in the everyday, imagining our capacity for the invention of movement as a latent, subversive potential that can be carried invisibly until activated. His work points out the extent to which society functions through adherence to prescribed performer-spectator hierarchies, and how these might be disturbed. The programme notes for Oh My Goddess at Sadler's Wells (2003) read: '2004 will be the 20th anniversary of the Michael Clark Company and in order to mark this occasion he will embark on a work lasting 366 days, beginning 1st January and ending 31st December 2004: "it was 20 years ago today..."' Clark's explicit citation of coded channels of gestural interaction in everyday life make his work immediately grasp-able and assure an active dialogue with conceptual art practice. But Clark insistently opts to compact his hieroglyphic reinvention of human relations into a formal object. For all that his work resonates outside of the theatre context, Clark returns to an evident level of satisfaction with the concentrated performance situation: a situation which, in his possession, always teeters on the brink of excess rather than suggesting conservatism. Clark wrestles to resist his medium's intoxicating capacity to consume its performers and audience entirely. His work registers the desire for suspended abstractions and ambiguous pleasure and dysfunction. I confess that there are moments when I never want Michael Clark's dance to end.

- Catherine Wood