Tag Archives: Michael Clark

MICHAEL CLARK — COSMIC DANCER

I never really had a plan, except to express myself as purely as possible… I still make work on my own body first, as I always have. I can only understand it from the inside. — Michael Clark

MICHAEL CLARK—COSMIC DANCER, recently at the Barbican, was the first comprehensive retrospective of the British dance artist. Interrupted by the pandemic shutdowns, the exhibition lives on in the catalog, edited by Florence Ostende.

Bringing together materials from his choreographic work and collaborations with artists—including Elizabeth Peyton, Silke Otto-Knapp, Sarah Lucas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Leigh Bowery, Peter Doig, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Duncan Campbell—the book is a beautiful complement to MICHAEL CLARK, a 2011 monograph edited by Suzanne Cotter and Robert Violette.

See link below for details.

MICHAEL CLARK—COSMIC DANCER

Edited by Florence Ostende.

Prestel Publishing

From top: Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (1986), Michael Clark, stills, 16mm film transferred to video, image courtesy and © Charles Atlas and Luhring Augustine; Michael Clark and Company, I Am Curious, Orange, 1988, photograph by Richard Haughton, image courtesy and © the artists and the photographer; Michael Clark, Before and After: The Fall, 2001, in Berlin, Lorena Randi and Victoria Insole, photograph by Andrea Stappert, image courtesy and © the artists and photographer; Clark during the filming of Hail the New Puritan, photograph by Alexander James, image courtesy and © the artists and the photographer; Wolfgang Tillmans, man with clouds, 1998, image courtesy and © the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Maureen Paley, and David Zwirner; Elizabeth Peyton, Michael Clark, 2009, image courtesy and © the artist and Sadie Coles HQ; Silke Otto-Knapp, Group (Formation), 2020, watercolor, image courtesy and © the artist, Galerie Buchholz, and Greengrassi; Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer (2020), edited by Florence Ostende, exhibition catalog cover image—Clark, Mmm, photograph by Hugo Glendinning—courtesy and © the artist, the photographer, the Barbican, and Prestel Publishing; Leigh Bowery and Rachel Auburn in Hail the New Puritan; Clark at the opening of Derek Jarman’s 1984 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, photograph by Steve Pyke; Hail the New Puritan, courtesy and © Atlas and Luhring Augustine; Ellen van Schuylenburch and Clark in Hail the New Puritan, photograph by Haughton. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographers, and the Barbican.

STARDUST — COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET

STARDUST, a new work by Complexions Contemporary Ballet celebrating the music of David Bowie, will be performed at the Music Center this weekend in its Los Angeles premiere.

For many years following the 1972 release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie had discussed staging alternative versions of his work beyond the concert stage:

Songs by Roxy Music replaced the Bowie material Todd Haynes had planned to use for his film Velvet Goldmine (1998) after Bowie made it clear he was still planning his own movie. But this never came to pass.

Similarly, talk of a Broadway show went nowhere until, at the end of his life, Bowie and Enda Walsh put together the off-Broadway musical Lazarus, directed by Ivo van Hove.

Bowie worked with Montréal’s La La La Human Steps for his Sound + Vision tour in 1990, and elsewhere in the dance world, Michael Clark is well known for his homages to Bowie. Come, Been and Gone utilized vintage numbers like “Jean Genie” and the title cut from Aladdin Sane, and after Bowie’s death in 2016, Clark reformated and retitled the work as To a Simple Rock ’n’ Roll… Song, which opened with “Blackstar” from Bowie’s final studio album.

Now, Complexions Contemporary Ballet’s founding choreographer Dwight Rhoden and his powerful company bring us STARDUST, which had its world premiere in Detroit in 2016. The show—which opens with “Lazarus”—brought down the house at the Joyce Theater last fall.

STARDUST will be preceded by the 30-minute piece BACH 25.

STARDUST—COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET

Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, at 7:30 pm.

Sunday, April 22, at 2 pm.

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Top and above: Photographs by Moira Geist.

Below: Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Stardust. Photograph by Breeann Birr.

MICHAEL CLARK: PERFORMANCE AND SCREENING OF HAIL THE NEW PURITAN

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Michael Clark 
Screening and performance at 356 Mission, Los Angeles
Sunday May 4

Please join us for a performance by Michael Clark at 356 S. Mission Road. Doors open at 6 PM with an informal screening of  Hail the New Puritan (1987, 85 min), performance begins at 7:30 PM sharp.  

This is a free event and everyone is welcome to attend. Please confirm your attendance by emailing RSVP@356mission.com

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