Nudity, provocation, simulated sex - Michael Clark was always more interested in pushing the boundaries of dance than in becoming a great ballet star, he tells Christine Maddenahead of bringing his new show to Belfast

BALLET IS SO genteel. All that fluffy, pristine white of snowflakes and swans. Noble, virginal dancers so graceful and elegant in frilly tutus in pastel colours. It's so uplifting and noble.

Except it isn't. The popular misconception of classical ballet reflects its origins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as an art form slathered over with confection and sentimentality to disguise the dirty urges we like to pretend aren't there. Anyone who harbours any lingering doubts about this need only attend a performance of dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, whose piece, Mmm . . ., is at the Belfast Arts Festival.

"I've always acknowledged the sexual aspect of dance," Clark confesses over the phone after rehearsal. "I don't mean that we're all sexually aroused when we're dancing together. It's just that there is that aspect of dance that has often been denied, in classical ballet in particular."

Generally seen as a wunderkind (and enfant terrible) in the 1980s, when he first burst upon the dance scene, Clark was born in Aberdeen and brought up in the countryside outside of town. His talent became apparent early on.

"I started when I was four, and it was a lot of repetition, quite boring, holding on to a chair doing very basic stuff," he recalls. "But over a number of years, I realised it was the main passion in my life. Being the only boy, I got a lot of encouragement."

In echoes of Billy Elliot, Clark got the opportunity to go to the Royal Ballet School in London.

"It was a totally different ball game when I started," he says. "It was pretty intensive, every day doing class, very rigorous and very disciplined - which may account for my behaviour later on."

Down the phone line, his voice betrays the hint of a smirk.

Although he loved "the exacting nature" of ballet training, to "understand physically what it was to be correct", after a few years of order and discipline, he slammed into teenage rebellion.

"Fortunately for me," he says, "it coincided with the punk movement in London. So I was kind of leading a Jekyll and Hyde existence, doing ballet by day and seeing punk bands in the evening. I had a fictitious auntie who used to write letters to the school asking if I could get out for the weekend. She was actually a stripper who had been to dance school herself."

Unfortunately for the school, however, Clark had at this point already shown his extraordinary ability, and he was the lead in the school show, "so they couldn't kick me out". But he was unable to board any longer, and they sent him to live with one of the teachers in Notting Hill Gate. Not an overwhelming hardship for him, really - it was "much more exciting, to be honest".

THE SEARCH FOR excitement continued to fuel Clark, and he turned away from the Royal Ballet - to its great dismay, as he showed every sign of becoming one of the great classical dancers. He joined the Ballet Rambert at the age of 18 in 1979, went freelance after a couple of years, then spent time working in New York before moving back to London and the Riverside Studios. By 1984, with 16 original choreographed pieces, he has started his own company.

The continued tension between hard-edged traditional discipline and drugged-up punk abandon gave Clark's work a reputation for radicalism and sensationalism.

"It is at the core of my work," he declares. "That idea of control and losing control. I do love those moments physically when dancers push themselves to the point where they lose control."

He pushed himself and his work to breathless excess. "I've damaged myself to a great extent physically by pushing myself too far," he says. "There was a time when it would feel interesting when I injured myself, and then I'd be in a lot of pain. Fortunately, I don't have to do those things any longer, and I certainly wouldn't expect any of my dancers to."

But Clark's extremism created a scandalous persona that sometimes overshadowed his work. For example, he presented one of his most outrageous moments in Bed Piece, a production together with his lover of the time, choreographer Stephen Petronio, held in a London gallery in 1989, in which they very convincingly mimed having sex for their audience.

"Yeah, well, that was pretty extreme," Clark concedes. "I was looking at different ways of performing, making myself do things I wasn't comfortable doing, but I knew that that element of the piece was going to be provocative. And I wouldn't dream of doing it again, it was a ridiculous thing to do.

"But it wasn't choreography." Clark laughs. "To some people, it was. Some people told me afterwards it was a decent piece of choreography, and I'm, like, what are you talking about?"

CLARK DIDN'T JUST push the boundaries with his choreography. He retired from work twice, once briefly in 1988 because of drug addiction, and again from 1993 to 1998 due to depression.

"In hindsight," he says, "I was working incredibly hard for a very long time, and it's very hard to sustain that. I just needed to take stock and remind myself how lucky I am to be doing what I love doing."

Working steadily with his company since the late 1990s, Clark has been creating and touring extensively, bringing Before and After: The Fallto the inaugural International Dance Festival Ireland in 2002.

Mmm . . ., the piece he brings to the Belfast Arts Festival, is part two of his Stravinsky project and had its original incarnation in 1992 as his version of The Rite of Spring, with costumes by designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery.

"He really wanted to push things and would constantly be challenging me and the dancers to do things we hadn't done before," Clark says. "It was very exciting, but also kind of scary as well."

Before Stravinsky's Rite, however, there's also "the dance that we do naked to Send in the Clowns", Clark adds. "Nudity is still so provocative, and if you think about it, taking off all your clothes and dancing, it's not something that everyone would want to do or be comfortable doing in front of a bunch of strangers."

He laughs. "But I love the fact that my dancers are willing to do that."

Despite his former wildness, Clark says he's finding ways to marry his punkishness and classicism more harmoniously.

"I used to be a sort of monster, and some of the things I would do during a performances, there's a time and a place, but one has to grow up at some point," he says. "But I want to go the whole way really. I mean, why hold back?"

The Michael Clark Company presents Mmm . . . at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, on Thur, Oct 30