The title of Michael Clark's new show, Before And After: The Fall, presents an obvious theological pun to anyone who knows or cares about his life. Divided between old and new material, the programme straddles the period in which Clark dropped out of sight to battle the chemical demons that nearly killed him. It traces the career of an angelically talented dancer who went to hell and back.
The pun also makes reference to the show's music, played by Clark's favourite band, The Fall. And by the end of the show you cannot miss the carnal subtext to the title's rise and fall - since most of the second half is about masturbation.
Sex, especially penises, have always figured large in Clark's work. And if the shock tactics he paraded were sometimes gratuitous, they also lent a deviant glitter and trashy beauty to his work.
The show's first half, essentially a string of pure dance hits from his early repertory, reworked for five women, give us an exhilarating reminder of those qualities. Traces of the old campy extravagance might linger in the foot fetishism and cut away nudity of Trojan and Leigh Bowery's revived designs. But the mix of slutty eroticism, fierce linearity and nervy invention that is unique to Clark's choreography, sings with wonderful assurance in its newly uncluttered context. Clark may hardly be dancing now, but we remember why we used to go to all his shows.
In the second half, his vision fuses much more closely with his collaborator, Sarah Lucas. Her hand is evident in the elegant props that focus segments of the choreography, and blatant in the giant arm that cranks up and down in a mechanical mime of masturbation during the final dance.
We have no doubt this is what it is doing because we have already watched a three minute home video of Clark masturbating (his back discreetly turned) and a dance in which the women perform with prosthetic, onanistic hands of their own.
Some of the choreography verges on the flip, and sometimes it feels too subservient to Lucas's designs. But I do not think Clark is telling us that his art is just a giant wank. He tries for interesting formal contrasts between the dancers' blithe energy and the introvert rhythms of masturbation. He risks simplicity. And Lucas's costumes for the women - baggy Y-front dresses with hairy-legged tights - are as loopily gender bendering as anything in which Clark's work has ever appeared. The new work may not reach the highs of the old, but it is still provocative fun.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
