There's something poignant about the signs in the foyer of the Playhouse counselling us that Michael Clark's show contains very loud music and "partial nudity". They're an assurance that we're on familiar ground: that intersection of the lyrical and the ludicrous that Clark, now 47, has made his own. Swamp, created for Rambert in 1986, but recently revamped, is the piece to see if you want to understand what he's all about. Structurally, it has an almost 19th-century delicacy, with quasi-formal groupings crystallising and dissolving with the kaleidoscopic variety of a Romantic-era dream sequence. These shapes are in Clark's blood, as they are in the blood of any Royal Ballet-trained dancer. But in Clark's case, so is a profound mistrust of their refinement and, indeed, of any beauty quite so easily won.
So, like a child forcing a parent to the edge of unconditional love, he tortures the vocabulary, mutilating and spindling the geometry. Movement is ground down to slow motion: to despotically intent walks, balances and promenades. Backs are arched like those of Beau Brummel-era dandies, arms locked en couronne like the mandibles of stag beetles, knees stiffened and demi-pliés suppressed. The consequence, particularly in the series of duets at the piece's core, is a sinewy tension between the emotional and the robotic.
The eight dancers have been newly costumed in midnight blue by designer Charles Atlas, giving the piece an expressionist sheen reminiscent of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This is the most technically accomplished company Clark has ever assembled; newcomers include the steely Oxana Panchenko, late of the Ballet Boyz, and 21-year-old Benjamin Warbis, an articulate performer with, at fleeting moments, an eerie resemblance to the young Clark.
The world of Swamp is at once sensual and damaged – is it my imagination or can a swastika be read in the limbs of the last dancer on stage? – but a kind of nobility survives in its torn beauty. The piece was made before Clark's career went into freefall in the 1990s with his much-publicised drug addiction and it's tempting to repine for the lost years and what might have been. But the hard truth is that the self-destructive urge that led Clark into a decade of creative darkness is what gives his work its edge.
There's always been the screwdriver jammed in the works: the challenge to himself and his fellow performers to outdance the screeching wall of sound, the shattered narrative flow, the cartoonishly sexualised props and costumes. How far can I push this before it breaks? Clark wonders. How much punishment can the form take? Perhaps it's inevitable that, for a time at least, he should have gone down with the ship.
In the early 1970s, as a lonely, glamour-hungry boy growing up in an Aberdeenshire fishing village, Clark was thrilled by images of David Bowie on Top of the Pops, and the moment when Bowie casually slipped his arm around the waist of guitarist Mick Ronson was an epiphany. As a tribute, he has made Come, Been and Gone, set to a series of songs by Bowie and his circle. To the second of these, "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground, Clark greets his demons with something like jaunty familiarity, as long-term company member Kate Coyne takes the stage in a costume stuck with hypodermic syringes.
No dancer has ever been forced into weirder, more challenging costumes than Coyne and here, like a latterday St Sebastian, she dances the ecstatic highs and the grimly slumping lows. In "Mass Production" by Iggy Pop, Clark himself appears, wrapped around a part of an unplumbed basin – or is it a bidet? – underlining a career-long predilection for integrating sanitaryware into his ballets. Who could forget Clark as a dancing lavatory in Mmm, his take on Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring?
He makes reference to The Rite several times in the course of the evening; only Clark would have spotted that Bowie's "Heroes" has the same thudding, threat-laden backbeat as the Stravinsky, and responded with a demure trio of bare bums. The connection is most obvious in "Aladdin Sane", where Simon Williams twists and writhes like a pinned insect in a version of the Chosen One solo danced by Amy Hollingsworth in 2005 and Joanne Barrett in 1992. This reworking and repositioning of material is a compulsive element of Clark's work and for his fans a trainspotterish hunting-down and identification of quotes is very much part of the fun.
And this is more fun than Clark's allowed himself for years. "Aladdin Sane", in particular, is an outrageously gorgeous piece of modern dance, with the company costumed in bright vermilion, slippery as goldfish, against a radiant tangerine cyclorama. The number segues into "The Jean Genie", where the dancers reappear in sharp, stripy, matelot jackets, answering Bowie's pumping R&B riff with fast, disciplined port de bras. The highlight of the piece is an irresistibly sexy entrance by Panchenko and the equally excellent Clair Thomas. Arm-in-arm on pointe, willowy and knowing, they echo the sexually ambiguous "girls in grey" in Bronislava Nijinska's Les Biches (1924). Which leads us back, yet again, to The Rite, choreographed by Bronislava's brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, in 1913. There are all sorts of parallels between the careers of Clark and the brilliant, doomed Nijinsky, both as dancers and choreographers. But then ballet, as Clark would be the first to tell you, is nothing if not a continuum.
Vox pop
Bobby Seiler
36, radio producer
The bodies interacted with a real visceral energy, and that was complemented massively by the music. I'm a big Bowie and Iggy Pop fan and that's what took me to the show - that and Clark's reputation as a punk choreographer.
Catriona Luff
42, occupational therapist
It's quite slow and dour and the first part was a bit repetitive but I found it relaxing. The dancers became almost unhuman or robotic, they were so muscly and perfect and so controlled in all their movements.
Allan Wallace
54, manager
I don't go to many dance things but I thought it was excellent. There was a lot of classical ballet mixed in with something more modern and it was really absorbing.
Chris Wick
20, student
It was brilliant, definitely one of the best things I've seen this festival. The variety was amazing, some parts were acute and mesmerising, others were very energetic, almost frantic. The costumes were really good, too.
Phil Hall
40, play worker
I regretted not seeing Clark in Edinburgh 20 years ago and I'd go as far as saying that the last 15 minutes of this were my favourite 15 minutes of this year's festival: the combination of music, dance and costumes was astonishing. Interviews by Hermione Hoby
