Naked Much
Lately I've been seeing so much work with nudity. It's like I woke up from a nap and suddenly everyone has been stripped bare. All four shows I saw last week had nudity - Miguel Guttierrez, Pascal Rambert, Roseanne Spradlin, and even a tiny bit in Sasha Waltz. Why does everyone want to take their clothes off? I mean I get it but it just seems like the shock value is gone if everyone does it. Are we getting desensitized to it? I wonder if it's what most people walk away with when they see these pieces? I know it definitely leaves an impression on me and I have to work harder to get to the heart of the piece. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes I just don't get it. Maybe I'm not cool enough. Perhaps the thought of performing naked scares me. Would anyone like to elaborate on how it feels to be naked on stage? - the preparation, the feeling of dancing naked and do people look at you differently like "Oh, he's not a nudity virgin anymore..." hmmm...
posted by Gerald at 5:39 AM
3 Comments:
Spot on Gerald. I have definitely noticed the increase in the naked dancing and I find that it is rarely successful. I was actually apprehensive about going to Miguel's show at DTW because I thought there was going to be naked dancing. And yes there was naked dancing, but I thought the piece was incredibly successful and very moving. Hands down, it's the best thing I've seen this year. So why did the nudity work in his piece (for me at least) and not in so many of the other naked pieces I've seen? It didn't feel like an afterthought, or a ploy, or a gimmick - which is so often the sense that I get when I see naked dancing - it felt like a part of the piece and not like a costume choice. And to answer your other question - no, I have not danced naked. Would I? I suppose, but I would have to feel like it was for a compelling reason and not because the choroegrapher thought it would be 'shocking' or 'making a statement.' Because nudity isn't shocking anymore, naked people are everywhere, in every form of media. And if used half-hazardly, it does distract from the "heart of the piece."
The only times I've really seen it work is in Butoh (is being covered in rice flour or body paint truely naked?) and the beginning of DV8's film 'Never Again', but then the focus there is on the body's surface rather than as a whole. I've seen some pretty awful 'I lay myself bare for you' self-indulgent pieces. An artist is intimate with the audience by sharing their world not exposing themselves.
Hi, Gerald!
You must be reading my mind. I've been wondering about this, too, and considering asking someone to talk about this for my dance podcast, Body and Soul. (See http://infinitebody.blogspot.com.)
The most recent examples for me come from Yanira Castro's "Center of Sleep" at DTW, Isabel Lewis's "Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist)" at Dixon Place and, just last night, Jye-Hwei Lin dancing topless in a pair of tight jeans in "Geisha," a piece by Lee Sher and Saar Harari in the 92nd St. Y's Harkness Dance Festival. ("Oh, I'm liking this already," gushed a man to his date, sitting at my left.)
Here's one big positive about the nudity trend: a stripping away (no pun, folks!) of any lingering notions about how a dancing body must look. And I mean weight, shape, tone, posture, skin color and physical ability. Since we literally see it all these days, can an audience hold onto any lingering aesthetic illusions about who a dancer must be and what a dancer must do?
Since nudity is no biggie in visual art, it definitely has a place in dance, an art that--still!--is the realm of the living, physical body. Why shouldn't the body want to speak without obstruction? It is actually kind of odd to find that nudity does not happen in dance more often than it does!
And of course it will not always work well, just as other aspects of a dance are not always successful.
All the best,
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
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