Fourteen years ago when Michael Clark created Mmm..., it was a shocking departure for him to work with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
This was a choreographer who'd made his name accessorising dancers with dildos, and whose music of choice had always been bands like The Fall. Yet even though elements of the old Clark outrage were still scattered, flamboyantly, around the work, there was another rigorously focused Clark fighting for ascendance. And in this reworked version of Mmm... (Stravinksy Project Part 2) it is the classicist who effortlessly dominates.
The stage itself has been redesigned to a luminous, abstract space, and with the number of dancers expanded from five to 12, the choreographic logic now carries the work. Even in the opening half, which is set, as it originally was, to a medley of punkish rock, what stands out is Clark's paradoxical talent for capturing raw energy in pure form. As the music of Wire and Public Image snarls around the dancers, they seem physically to contain the sound within their own perfectly controlled limbs.
But Clark's talent has always been about paradox, the chaste classical lines of his choreography inflected with a blatant sexual frisson, the angelic grace of his manoeuvres, dancers hobbled with a deviant hesitancy. No one else could put dancers naked on stage except, wickedly, for fake fur muffs, and create movement of such sweet aching seriousness as Clark manages in the middle of this prologue.
When the Stravinsky comes, in the second half, it is the double piano version; but Clark's imagination has obviously been fired by the original Nijinsky ballet, given his fleeting references to the fiercely angled poses, and helpless, knock-kneed intensity of the 1913 choreography. A couple of references back to the staging of his own original version of Mmm... are less welcome - the very pregnant mother earth figure, first played by Leigh Bowery, is an insider joke too far; fine if you saw it back in 1992, but surely incomprehensible if you did not.
Yet still Clark manages to control the accumulating strangeness of this piece, so that we remain gripped to the end by its secret logic. And the final solo for the Chosen One, danced with intrepid grace by Amy Hollingsworth, is beautifully paced. With its intent, archaic quality of possession, and its dark imploding energy, this is not so much a dance to the death but a process of transcendence.
When Clark originally made Mmm... it felt as he was embarking on personal rite of passage, trying to put the punk rebel behind him. This final version feels like the work of a mature artist.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
