HERE COMES a big retrospective of the work of Leigh Bowery at London’s Tate Modern. His cleavage to the art of dance and performance will, I hope, manifest as a seam.

Back in 1984 Leigh Bowery had designed and made costumes for the launch season of Michael Clark Company, amid which I was one of the dancers. Michael persuaded Leigh to join a conga line with us to end a suite of dances which was set to music by the new-wave band The Fall. Visible to many, Leigh spent the preamble seated in the wings, episodically imbibing amyl nitrate and cheering us on. A final burst of unrehearsed magic took them across the forefront of our stage and was spot-on. To be incongruous, jaunty, and dead right was clearly already a thing, though his presence in the building was unwieldy.

An ambitious film by Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (1985) frames a day in the life of the choreographer/dancer Michael Clark. There we all are, enacting our specialist skills, and linking set-pieces with spoof urban activity. In an opening dream sequence and in a disco apotheosis Leigh is seen performing with fullness and exactitude. He also dominates an improvised scene that was shot in his Stepney Council flat. This Pinteresque vignette reveals the comedic potential of its combative protagonists, coaxed by the intuitively timed physical theatre of Bowery himself.

The Performing Clothes fashion showcase at London’s ICA and Manchester’s Hacienda Club attempted something a bit different. Leigh was given an episode at the end of this show, to air his Mincing Queens collection; a fevered assemblage of frilled and tasselled gingham that foamed joyously over its wearers. The abrupt event’s movement language was adroit, effete and violently addled.

Pure Pre-Scenes (1987) aired at the Brighton Festival. A bunch from our Kings Cross Squat did the awayday and hazarded a picnic, so that we could witness this new Michael Clark piece as his guests, in a grand old theatre. We knew that Leigh had practised for this by attending the dance company’s training sessions and keeping up with a rehearsal schedule. Hence he had become lucidly graceful, shifting gear with a precision equal to that of his peers onstage. 

Michael Clark’s Because We Must (1988) held a two-week Xmas season at London’s Sadlers Wells. I rejoined here and clocked how Leigh’s fascination with backstage disciplines had taken hold. He was there for all of us as dresser, makeup technician and adroit decision maker whilst also dancing, playing a baby grand (Chopin and show tunes), speaking uninhibited louche patter, and singing. 

Michael Clark’s I Am Curious Orange opened 1989’s Holland Festival. Conditioned by now to expect leaps forward with each new project, Leigh was not so much pushed here as required to be the icon of a given moment — a kind of human punchline. He was sensitive about this. I would spot him stealing away for his own dance, backstage or up in the gridiron, then nipping back just in time for his entrances.

In a solo installation at D’Offay Gallery Leigh was behind glass for entire afternoons. Each day brought a different look and persona whose reconfiguration was both improvised and strangely inevitable. Strange too that he was soon to sit for the gnarly monochrome canvases of Lucian Freud.

London’s Hippodrome had hosted flying ballets, water battles, and equine circus, later reinventing itself for floorshows. On a big gay disco night Leigh trapezed down from the house’s dome wearing a mere merkin. Suspensefully, he had filled his back-passage with water. On landing, he essayed a funky little dance before forcing the water upward from a supine split position. The copious fluid, gurgled out, thankfully clear. Afterward, he threw on a transparent wrap, to mingle with tongue-tied punters.

Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery, Session 7, Look 37, June 1994. Credit: (c) Fergus Greer

1992’s Frieze Art Fair (1993) hosted an outdoor gig by the band Minty, with Leigh as its inventor and lead singer. This time the belly of the beast held a living person. Leigh’s wife Nicola began suspended in foetal position under his generous garment so that the set’s first song could culminate in a graphic burlesque of labour and delivery.

There was birthing too in MMM, 1992’s Michael Clark piece based around Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Here the infant was Clark himself, slipping easily from under his mother Bessie, dragged by Leigh’s trenchant midwife figure, with consequent slap. As co-dancer I recall that little else emerged with ease in the gestation of MMM as Michael’s inventions were mostly eaten up by his obsessive edits. Leigh’s death’s-head haunts my memory. To be in your early 30s and know you will soon die could be a matter of profound shame in many ways. Who would you tell, and how?

Leigh may have been born to star in The Homosexual – or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself, penned by the Argentinian playwright known as Copi. Glasgow Citizens Theatre and the Its Queer Up North festival had hands in the mounting of this depraved Ionesco-like three-hander in which Leigh’s tenaciously accomplished performance featured a monologue in tandem with his playing of a chunk of Bach. The Homosexual flowered at a ghastly time for Leigh but bloom it did.

It’s significant that Leigh Bowery’s radical iconography is marbled with edgy live procedures. He had an insatiable appetite for self-taught skills and their subsequent rigour. Eclecticism as blessing or curse? Tate Modern’s vital overview may settle or vibrantly unsettle this question.

LEIGH BOWERY! runs February 27 to August 31; Admission £18/£17. For more information see: tate.org.uk