Contemporary dance - Nadine Meisner waited so long for Michael Clark to give her an interview that in the end she just went ahead on her own

Michael Clark, the man who made ballet cool, was playing hard to get prior to his appearance at the Barbican, where he and eight dancers are staging the first part of a three-year project of dance works composed by Stravinsky. Yet one night, when I was at home watching Newsnight - weary, eyelids drooping - Jeremy dissolved and Michael Clark walked in.

"Tired?" he asked. He was in shape, tall and lean, signature safety pin in his ear. He reached into a box of chocolates on the table - a cocoa-high might seem sedate, but let's celebrate his rehab from the heroin and methadone that nearly crushed his brilliant career.

"So," he said, sitting down, "ask me a question." I'll admit I was surprised."OK," I said, "I've been writing enthusiastically about you since 1979, when you graduated from the Royal Ballet School and decided not to join the Royal Ballet. It was immediately clear you had talent, first as a dancer - you had such pure symmetries - then as a choreographer. You were 20 when you made your first piece, Of a feather, flock, which seemed to pull apart ballets such as Swan Lake. You had this precocity and determination to be different."

"Yeah, you know, my teacher Richard Glasstone made a piece on me at the Royal Ballet School called Odd One In . . ." "Well, you were different from the start. You were never going to want to join an institution like the Royal Ballet, although you have since choreographed for many leading companies. You were always the compulsive rebel. Yet what was so impressive was that behind all that was this gift for making lovely phrases, ballet steps with a modern twist and the lilt of Scottish dancing. [He won trophies as a child in Aberdeenshire]. You were both classicist and an iconoclast. You had rigour, but also an impulse to go to the edge, as with the infamous bad- taste duet, Heterospective, with Stephen Petronio in 1989." Michael seemed to tense at the mention of his ex-lover, so I moved on. "But I also liked the way you combined club culture. You chose music by the Fall, collaborated with radical fashion designers and visual artists." Michael looked pleased. "I've always liked to include non-dancers," he said. "[The performance artist] Leigh Bowery, who designed some of my costumes, has appeared, as has my mother, Bessie."

"Yes, in 1992 she gave birth to you in Mmm . . ., a sideways salute to Nijinsky's Rite of Spring. You used the Sex Pistols as a prologue and the late Leigh Bowery, dressed to look like female pudenda, acted as your mother's midwife." The thought silenced us both for a few moments. What then? "I fell to pieces in 1994," he replied. "I was working on my first commission for the Royal Ballet and just couldn't get it together. So I went back to Scotland to detox. I stayed at my mother's home near Aberdeen for four years. It was dance that made me want to get back - and the support of people like Val Bourne [director of the annual Dance Umbrella]."

Back in London, he made his comeback with Current/SEE, its movement a return to sober, classical fundamentals. Three years later, in 2001, he created Before and After: the Fall, in which a giant suspended arm, sculpted by the artist Sarah Lucas, pumped up and down, while dancers, disguised as penises, darted about. "What would you say, Michael," I asked, "to the critics who called you a sad middle-aged man fixated on adolescent rebellion?" He shrugged. "As Sarah says, we're not responsible for what people think. The sex thing was just a starting point, something we both thought was a laugh."

This latest show is a rework of 1994's O, itself inspired by Balanchine's 1928 masterpiece Apollo, which marked the birth of modern ballet. O is Clark's most accomplished piece, even though at the time his drug habit was at its height, and soon after he was unable to complete his Royal Ballet commission. "How much of the original will you keep?" Michael grinned. "I can tell you Stravinsky's score will be conducted by 22-year-old Robin Ticciati." "You often seem to recycle work." "Yeah, it's to do with the fact that I'm never satisfied."

He is famous for perfectionism. "Even after I've premiered a piece, I'll keep changing it." "You will also be dancing less. Val Bourne told me when you were choreographing Rattle Your Jewellery for Mikhail Baryshnikov, you were struck by his gruelling physical routine." "I'd never want to put myself through that. I'll face the fact that at 43, my dancing is contracting." As if to contradict himself he jumped up. "It's hard to separate myself from dancing. It'll be good as a choreographer to have some distance." Then he was gone. I was on my own again, the TV still flickering. What a character, that Michael Clark! Suddenly appearing like that . . .

Michael Clark Company: O Stravinsky Project Part 1, Barbican, London EC2, 1-5 November. Box office 0845 120 7511

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