"Try this," says Michael Clark, and launches into a sequence which resolves itself into a crouching balance over one leg. The five female dancers of his company flicker doubtful glances at each other and attempt the sequence themselves. It doesn't look quite the same. Clark smiles patiently. "We're all a bit knackered," he murmurs.

The working title of the piece that The Michael Clark Company are rehearsing is Cream Wall, and its designs are by the artist Sarah Lucas. News of the collaboration between Clark and Lucas - both highly provocative performers - has caused a considerable buzz.

Previous Clark collaborations - like that with his lover David Holah of Body Map, who designed outlandish bare-bottom stage costumes, and with choreographer Stephen Petronio, with whom he enacted sex performances at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery - have thrown up showers of sparks and outraged headlines. Clark's most celebrated muse was the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who died in 1994. Few who attended No Fire Escape in Hell will forget the sight of Bowery staggering across the stage in 10in heels, wielding a chain saw.

At first sight, Cream Wall looks anodyne, with the dancers windmilling across the stage to the souvlakia-and-chips strains of Zorba's Dance. When Clark places the choreography in context, however, it becomes clear that we are in familiar territory. Inspiration, he explains, was provided by a Lucas representation of an arm "with the fist like this". The gesture is explicitly masturbatory, and Clark wanted to see it "on a huge scale, brought to life. We started with a 23ft arm going up and down, with a dancer standing where the penis might be, and with the Zorba music getting quicker and quicker ..."

It is clear that Clark has no intention of disappointing his public. The non-Lucas half of the show is a reworking of pieces that Clark created between 1984 and 1988 with yet another collaborator: Mark E Smith of The Fall. For all its atonality and anti-establishment weirdness there will be an elegiac quality to this part of the evening: two of those central to the project are now dead - Leigh Bowery from Aids and the set designer Trojan from a drug overdose.

Many would say that Clark himself is lucky to be alive, let alone still dancing, and although he insists that "ex-junkie is not part of my job description", drugs have always shadowed Clarke's career. As a precociously gifted 13-year-old he arrived at the Royal Ballet School from a seaside village in Aberdeenshire in 1975. His brilliance and his self-destructiveness swiftly became apparent. Within two years he had been caught glue-sniffing but was considered too valuable to expel: instead he was given the lead in the next school production.

In 1979, however, he desolated his classical teachers by joining the modernist Ballet Rambert, with whom he danced for two years. By 1982, aged 20, he was the resident choreographer at Riverside Studios.

His productions were earsplitting and punkish, with heavy reference to sex and drugs and bizarre effects overwhelming the dance content. When Clark himself appeared, however - half skinhead rent-boy, half quattrocento angel - all would be forgiven. For all that he tried to debase it, his dancing was mesmerisingly and classically beautiful. His rise was paralleled by that of nightclub culture. Surrounded by a tribe of adoring hangers-on, Clark gorged himself-on all that that world had to offer, and the discipline of his training began to fracture.

Quite deliberately, announcing that the most interesting people were those who had "come back from the brink", he began taking heroin. "I wanted to discover physical addiction for myself," he says. "I didn't realise it would last 10 years." By 1988, his dependency was so acute that he could no longer dance.

In 1989, at a point when, he says, "I saw no reason not to die," Clark fell in love with the choreographer Stephen Petronio. He began to dry out, but never fully extricated himself from heroin's grasp. In 1994, in chronic pain from a knee injury, he was forced to relinquish a commission from the Royal Ballet. His life imploding, he returned to Scotland. "I went home to Mum, to the one place I could go where no demands would be made of me. For six months I didn't even look out of the window. My memory's terrible now, but I think I was there for three years."

With his mother's help, he beat his addiction, rebuilt his wasted body and in 1998 returned to work. He met Lucas during a residency at Berlin's Hubbel Theatre. "I started helping her with her work, gluing cigarettes to Hoovers. I could see parallels. I wanted us to spend more time together." The result, Clark says, is a balanced collaboration. "I value her input as regards the dance, what's working and what's not.

Will he be dancing himself ? "It's up in the air, but it's likely." These days, he says, he no longer pushes himself over the edge. "Because of the things I was taking over the years I didn't feel the damage I was doing to myself."

Face-to-face, there is little evidence of such damage. Talent is a resilient thing and Clark's talent reminds me of those green shoots that force their way through concrete to the sunlight. He remains driven by the need to see his work performed. "The most beautiful thing is the live situation," he says. "It comes ..." his hands open in a silent starburst, "and it's gone."

? The Michael Clark Company is at Sadler's Wells 24-28 October. Box office: 020 7863 8000.