Balanchine's Apollo has become such a sacred text that few choreographers have dared re-write it. When Michael Clark first made the attempt with O, it seemed a streak of inspired boldness from an enfant terrible. Today, however, his re-statement of that 1994 piece displays the courage of a mature choreographer.
As a dancer Clark was gifted with a flawless instinct for line; it still carries his choreography. This Apollo is articulated through a language of chiselled shape and hieratical gesture, distilling movement, music and emotion in a series of scintillating visual haikus. Kate Coyne (now, arguably, the finest exponent of Clark's style) reveals how rich this approach can be, especially as the mother figure Leto, where she communicates a grave knowledge of beauty and suffering simply through the averted profile of her head and the extreme torque of her limbs.
Just as eloquent is Clark's conceit of having Apollo (Ashley Chen) born from a mirrored cube of glass, a wonderful double image of a god imprisoned and released by his own beauty. But the quality of sculpted simplicity for which Clark aims is lent most astonishing resonance by conductor Robin Ticciati, giving Stravinsky's score a particular transcendent uplift, and it's on the music's light-rippled momentum that Clark sets his choreography striving towards a centre of purged, pure stasis.
There are losses in this interpretation. Both the Terpsichore-Apollo duet and the Apotheosis feel underwritten, especially as some of the dancers flounder under the most sustained technical challenges. The masterful gain, however, is that O never once deviates from being Clark's own vision, and never once feels like a poor man's Balanchine. It also makes perfect sense in the light of its preceding piece OO, a kind of parallel, electrified Apollo. Here seven dancers wheel through a blast of fierce cutting dance, lashed on by the music of Iggy Pop and Wire, and puckishly regarded by Clark himself, who dances among them like an ageing rock-god minding his Muses. The choreography (and its staging) are wilful and exhilarating - and they set up the evening to be the most creative dialogue ever between Clark's classical and criminal alter-egos.
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