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Michael Clark review – from the syringe solo to the bum-revealing jeté

It’s one of time’s more backhanded jokes that Michael Clark, the naughty fairy of British dance, is in his sixth decade and the subject of a major exhibition. How can he have become so respectable? But never fear: to enter the Barbican art gallery is to step through a looking-glass into a body of work that seems as edgy and provocative as it ever did, for all that much of it only survives through flickering archive footage.

Here he is, camping it up in a dressing-room with living sculpture Leigh Bowery; doing airbound splits in a bottomless leotard, and pirouetting in clumpy platform shoes in a Parliament Square dominated by a giant hamburger. His soundtrack is David Bowie, Eric Satie, Stravinsky, Marc Bolan, and above all, the Fall, whose late leader Mark E Smith is also one of the sober-suited talking heads.

Related: 'He came out of the womb dancing!' Stars relive their wild times with Michael Clark

In order to recreate the buzz of Clark’s work, the exhibition uses a video technology that didn’t exist when most of it was originally made. The layout crosses a bunker nightclub with a two-storey hall of mirrors, in which voices and images compete and clash. The entrance opens on a new installation by Clark’s longtime collaborator Charles Atlas, which remixes two earlier archive film collages into a loop, different stages of which play on nine screens. The result is a chronological and stylistic scramble, which jumps from burlesque, to chat, to severe geometric dance sequences and back again.

At first it’s all a bit of a cacophony, but gradually a shape begins to emerge from a sofa-chat in which a cherubic-looking Clark gives his origin story. Aged four, he took up Scottish dancing in his home city of Aberdeen and at 13 he embarked on four years at the Royal Ballet School, leaving it for a brief stint with Ballet Rambert, before striking out on his own aged just 22.

As the exhibition progresses, other takes on his story emerge: he’s the self-destructive genius who very nearly wafted off on a heroin cloud, or the precociously self-aware gay child who made an art out of not fitting in (he illustrates this point during a walk around a misty Scottish loch with interviewer Muriel Gray by whipping out a silk Chanel scarf to protect his shaved head from the Scottish weather). The point is that all versions are true. He owes his technique to training and his imagination to his ability to own and mine his own experience. He has literally imported his biography into his work by including his mother, Bessie, in it – notably in his 1994 ballet, O, in which she appeared, bare-breasted, in a re-enactment of his own birth.

On the second floor, things calm down, with a series of rooms featuring the work of friends and collaborators, who are also his mythologisers. A poignant feature of any dance exhibition is that such an ephemeral art form is always destined to be remembered largely through its accoutrements: among them are the outrageous costumes designed by Bowery and his collaborator Trojan (Bowery’s nipple-pinching red onesie from 1984’s New Puritans hangs in a small costume section like a discarded condom). A collection of Sarah Lucas pieces includes a miniature of the masturbating arm from 2001’s Before and After: The Fall, and Cnut, a concrete cast of Clark’s torso, enthroned on a toilet, holding a cigarette, atop a giant sandwich.

Clark, whose company is based at the Barbican, has been an active collaborator and if a dreary wall of portraits by Elizabeth Peyton smells a bit of cronyism, it’s more than made up for by the pages of choreography torn from his notebooks. You don’t have to be a dance aficionado to wonder how on earth any of this wild and wonderful stuff is written down.

In fact, you don’t have to be an aficionado to appreciate anything about Michael Clark (he himself said “I try to make dance that isn’t about dance”). He has worked in so many different arenas that even hardcore fans couldn’t possibly have seen everything: among the gems is a stunning film from 2008 which looks like an Edward Hopper pastel, the dancers merging with stripes of sunlight on the roof of Le Courbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille.

When it all gets too much, you can plug yourself into screens showing archive footage. Take your own earphones and pace yourself: one of his rarest and most controversial pieces – the 1989 gallery commission, Heterospective, which includes his infamous solo with a heroin syringe – is parked right next to the exit. It’s on a 50-minute loop with four other dances, and it took me two hours to get there.

  • Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer is at the Barbican, London, from 7 October to 3 January.