Michael Clark was still only in his mid‐twenties when he danced solo on Italian television to Marc Bolan’s 1971 song that gives this epic exhibition its title. In the footage, Clark moves slowly, swathed in a swishy yellow dress and black lipstick as Bolan sings over elegiac strings of how he danced himself ‘right out of the womb’. Broadcast in 1986, with Thatcher’s Britain in full pomp, Clark was already feted as a taboo‐busting enfant terrible of contemporary dance. Thirty‐six years on, and with Clark now in his 60th year, his performance looks as vulnerable and as heroic a show of strength as it ever did.

It is the perfect curtain‐raiser to what might be regarded as a sort‐of prodigal’s return to Scotland for the Aberdeen‐born polymath following the show’s London run at the Barbican, who initiated and curated the show. The first of 14 rooms is occupied by A Prune Twin (2020), Charles Atlas’ multiscreen mash‐ up of two films he made with Clark in the 1980s; the quasi‐biographical Hail the New Puritan (1986), and the even more impressionistic Because We Must (1989).

Atlas’ realigned footage captures Clark and his gang of lost boys and girls at work, rest and play, children of the revolution taking steps towards building their own brave new world. Pulsed by a narcotic mix of outrageousness and naughty fun as it is, beyond the bare bums, the up‐all‐night hedonism, the why‐the‐hell‐notness and the sheer bloody two‐fingered cheek of it all, there is serious artistry at play.

Michael Clark & Company with The Fall in I Am Curious, Orange, 1988. Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. © Richard Haughton

Each room charts Clark’s creative connections, be it through Elizabeth Peyton’s understated portraits or extravagant costumes by performance artist Leigh Bowery, BodyMap and Stevie Stewart. There is the Proustian thrill of standing on the chessboard floor and giant Big Mac set of I Am Curious, Orange (1988), Clark’s ballet that put Mark E Smith and The Fall onstage for a week at the King’s Theatre during the Edinburgh International Festival.

A visceral bombast resonates from Sophie Fiennes’s film of current/SEE (1998), set to a live score by Susan Stenger’s all‐bass band, Big Bottom. Presented as an installation, the coruscating metal soundtrack evokes the black‐box primitivism of a dive bar rock club, while the dancers on screen map out even more ancient rituals.

Posters and programmes of Clark’s back‐catalogue style him as the ultimate poster‐boy pin‐up. There are more TV interviews and performances, videos by Derek Jarman and footage of Clark as Caliban in Prospero’s Books (1991), Peter Greenaway’s arthouse reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

There are constructions made by Clark with Sarah Lucas, and a room of photographs of Clark by Wolfgang Tillmans. Edinburgh‐born artist Peter Doig’s Portrait (Corbusier) (2009), originally made for Clark’s production, come, been and gone (2009), is set against home movie footage of Clark’s dancers taking a walk across the rooftop of Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s brutalist apartment block in Marseille.

Michael Clark Company in Duncan Campbell, It For Others, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Rodeo, London/Piraeus

Above all, Cosmic Dancer reveals Clark as a collaborator and a catalyst. The array of designers, dancers, filmmakers, photographers, composers and pop groups on show are effectively duetting with Clark as part of his extended ensemble. MC by initials, and master of ceremonies in everything that follows, Clark remains at its inspirational centre.

Cosmic Dancer isn’t so much a retrospective, then, as a (self) portrait writ large; part living sculpture, part design for life, part choreographed chorus line of Total Art, formed from the explosion of ideas bursting forth from Clark’s personal and artistic evolution. This is what happens if you dance yourself right out of the womb. Check out the guy’s track record.

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer is at V&A Dundee until September 4th.