Hughes 1 Hannah Hughes Dr. Jessica Zeller Dance Theory 20 November 2013 Nude vs.

Naked: Depictions of the Human Body in Art, Exotic Dancing, and Concert Dance In increasing numbers since the 1970s, choreographers have been utilizing nudity in their works as a choreographic tool and costume choice. Whether to highlight issues of sexuality or make a statement about human vulnerability or simply to display the essence of human nature, choreographers use nudity as a way to speak about the movement vocabulary of the work itself. However, as nudity, particularly in the United States, has been categorized as taboo since after the World War II, even in pieces of high art, how is a nude body perceived live on stage? How then does a dancers body function when on stage, and what does this mean when multiple nude bodies are on stage together? Is that body being objectified, and if so how? Through the theory of John Berger, the first components of the answer reveal themselves. In combination with other art history critics, first hand accounts from exotic dancers, and the examination of concert dance works, it becomes apparent that nudity in dance can transform to human nakedness and challenge the traditional patriarchal power dynamic. In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, John Berger analyzes methods of viewing art. In the third chapter of this work, Berger focuses on the nude female form in classical paintings. Berger states, A mans presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies...The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexualA mans presence suggests that he is capable of doing to you or for you (45-

Hughes 2 46). This statement is particularly true of the male form in paintings; however, a similar situation exists in classical dance formsWestern concert dance traditions. Though male dancers are being surveyed, much like a man in a painting or photograph, the audience member is, at least traditionally, reassured of his masculinity by the movements and strength that the dancer displays. The male dancer jumps and leaps and lifts small women into the air, reinforcing his physical and social power. By contrast, Berger notes, a womans presence expresses her own attitude to herselfFrom earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually (46). This idea is particularly poignant for those who grew up in the world of dance, even more so for those who studied ballet. Standing before a mirror every day in a leotard and pink tightsa fitted outfit that is modeled after a full piece swimsuit and thin hose girls who study dance are trained to look at themselves objectively, to view themselves as objects that can be corrected and bettered. In choreography, this manifests itself in how women are classically portrayed. It is only since the postmodern movement in dance that women have been allowed to break through and survey the audience as they have been continually surveyed. Berger notes that because of the duality of being observed and simultaneously observing themselves, women view their identities as both the surveyor and the surveyed. He states, She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life (46). This notion exists most vividly in the classical story ballets. For example, Cinderella, in the classical ballet based on the traditional tale, escapes the cruelty of her stepmother and sisters only because she captured the attention of a prince at a ball, a prince who later

Hughes 3 completely forgot her face and had to try her shoe on every woman in the kingdom. It is important to note here that many of these story ballets are derived from classical folk tales, which themselves are descended from and perpetuate a patriarchal society. The choreography of these ballets operates as a method of furthering the storyline, and, therefore, the two are inextricably linked. Perhaps most important to Bergers discussion of female identity is the prominence of female nudity in art. Berger states, To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become nude (54). For dance, the idea of being nude, but not naked, runs into the problem of objectivity. To be viewed by an audience member in dance is to become objectified. So then, how does this affect nudity in dance performance, particularly for female dancers? For both male and female dancers alike, is it possible to be viewed while naked and not be objectified and classified as nude? Berger would argue that for men, nudity becomes another form of power to hold over an audience member. His physicality becomes even more real. For women, however, the issue of being surveyed becomes magnified. Can the naked female performer exist without objectification? If so, how does she overcome the gaze of the spectator-owner as Berger states it (56)? One possible method of breaking objectivity is viewing the audience as a performer. However, in classic paintings Berger notes the womans attention is very rarely directed towards him [the lover]. Often she look away from him or she looks out of the picture toward the one who considers himself her true loverthe spectator-owner (56). By looking back at the audience, does the female performer break this gaze or reinforce it?

Hughes 4 To analyze this interaction between dance artist and audience more fully, I analyzed several chapters in Bergers book that contained only pictures. Without the bias of written text, the pictures served as the message themselves. I examined these paintings in the hopes that viewing a painting without an authors written perspective would be similar to viewing a dance, where there isat least generallynot a single interpretation presented. The first image that struck me in the second chapter of Bergers book was a picture of a young, nude woman. Physically, she represents the female idealat least for the current time period. She is physically fit; her arms and legs are clearly defined and her stomach is flat. To further push this stereotype of female perfection, the young woman has fairly large breasts, which she displays for the surveyor by arching her back. Her body position seems to denote an air of wild sexuality. Not only is her back arched but her head is also tossed back, exposing her neck. If her body position did not clearly define her sexuality, the fact that the young woman is naked and wet certainly seals the spectators view of her sexual nature. She so clearly and poignantly operates as a sex object. Her body assumes the position of a woman entrenched in sensual and sexual desires, and the addition of water to her body only highlights even more clearly the male fantasy of what it means to be a woman. She appears to be displaying her body for the spectators pleasure while seemingly partaking in her own sexual fulfillment. Notably the woman in the first photograph does not appear to have pubic hairthe positioning of her body does not allow for this information to be revealed. However in a second painting, the female sex organ is clearly on display; in fact, it is the paintings subject. In the painting La Source Du Monde, a womans body from ribcage to thigh is displayed. In contrast to the previous photograph, this womans vagina is covered in pubic

Hughes 5 hair. In Bram Dijkstras anthology Naked: The Nude in America, Dijkstra talks specifically about the absence of pubic hair, on any body, in early twentieth century art. He writes, Since, according to the survival of the fittest brigades, the most highly evolved Western women were supposed to echo the mental innocence of the child, it stood to reason that truly evolved women could not be shown sporting pubic hair, since that would indicated they had in fact passed through puberty and could therefore be suspected of harboring sexual feelings. To show a full-grown woman with fullgrown pubic hair would be tantamount to denying her the dignity of her nearsexless role as an overgrown child in the evolutionary order of things (221). At first glance, the second painting appears to hold to the same stereotypes presented in the first photograph that occurs early in the text. The woman in the painting does not have a face; the upper part of her body is cut from the frame of the picture, highlighting that all that appears to matter in this womans identity is her sexual organ and her ability to reproduce. This idea is furthered by the name of the work La Source du Monde, which in French means the source of the world. However with Dijkstras notions in mind, the painting does not operate solely to perpetuate the ideal that a womans sole role is birthing children. Rather, the presence of pubic hair denotes, at least culturally, the womans personal interest in sex and her own sexual desires; its mere presence highlights that she can be both sexual and evolved by rejecting the cultural idea of passive femininity. Later in his work, Berger talks about how painting, specifically oil painting, begot the idea of human beings as objects. He writes, Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. All reality was

Hughes 6 mechanically measured by its materiality (87). Berger argues that painting could never truly capture the essence of the person, thereby transforming them into objects, which could be possessed. By purchasing a painting of something or someone, one could in fact own that thing or person. To prove this point, Berger mentions several paintings of Mary Magdalene that focus on her sexuality as opposed to her dedication to Christ. He notes, The method of painting is incapable of making the renunciation she is meant to have made. She is painted as being, before she is anything else, a takeable and desirable woman. She is still the compliant object of the painting-methods seduction (92). The majority of Bergers argument lies in the medium of the art. Therefore, dance as a medium must be examined if we are to translate this perspective to dance. Unlike painting, dance cannot be owned or kept. It is important to note that the audience member does pay for the performance, but in buying a ticket he or she does not become the sole owner of the dancers. Rather the audience member becomes a joint-owner in the experience of attending the performance. If anything, the audience owns the performance, not the dancers themselves. Because of this, how do dancers operate in a setting where they owe the audience a showing but the audience does not own them? To analyze this relationship between audience and dancer more fully and form an answer to the above question, I first will delve into a realm of dance where nudity and dancing are integral to and inseparable from the form. This field is exotic dancing, more commonly known as stripping. In her book bare, journalist and former dancer Elisabeth Eaves details her own story as well as the stories of other dancers that she performed with at a peep show based in Seattle. Eaves opens her story by stating, I was naked.

Hughes 7 I looked at my reflection in the dressing room mirror And then there was me, Leila, five feet seven tall, in black knee-high stockings, my lips painted plum wine according to the label on the tube, my body pale, my blond hair shiny from multiple brushings. From a quick, sidelong glance at the mirror I could barely pick myself out of the group. I was just one of the naked women, and the anonymity was reassuring (3,4). What Eaves is describing here is Bergers theory about nakedness versus nudity. In the dressing room before the show, Eaves felt naked. She was dolled up and dressed in costume, but the realness of her humanity and her nakedness was visceral and palpable. However on stage, accompanied by women similarly costumed Eaves blended. The women on stage had assumed personas. They had transformed themselves from their everyday selves into objects to be visually consumed by the male spectators. In order for them to do this more fully, the women even assumed new identities, a requirement for employment. Elisabeth Eaves, the Canadian graduate student, became Leila, the exotic dancer and exhibitionist. In the Lusty Lady, the establishment where Eaves spent a year dancing, the dancer performed in a fishbowl type of stage. The stage, surrounded by mirrors, had windows that would open as customers in one-person booths inserted change. Dancers would then perform in front the window for a single customer. Eaves describes the stage like this, Half of the windows were two-ways, through which I could see the customer on the other side. The rest, the one-ways, reflected my own image. The one-ways were easy, like dancing in front of a mirror at home. The two-ways were harder to get used to. I watched the men behind them watch me, and sometimes one of them

Hughes 8 looked up at my face, even beyond my mouth, and made eye contact, and it was hard to say who was more disconcerted, him or me (5). What Eaves is describing here, the relationship between dancer and patron and the discomfort that arose from mutual looking, speaks to the nature of exotic dancing in Bergers terms of the viewed and the spectator-owner. Eaves was uncomfortable with viewing the man who viewed her for several reasons. The first, and probably most important, of these is that exotic dancers are viewed as objects. This comes as no surprise to any woman, or man for that matter, who has ever studied feminist theory. Women on an everyday basis are used to being viewed in this way, so of course a woman dancing nude would be viewed in this way. In art, the nude woman looks back at the spectator-owner as a way of simulating desire through an immobile medium. However when this relationship is translated into real life and time, both the spectator-owner and the viewed become hyper-aware of one another. Even viewed through a glass, the dancers move in real time; therefore when the dancer and the spectator catch eyes, awkwardness ensues. It is important to note here that this discomfort could be present for several reasons, one of which being the taboo nature of participating in the sex industry, but I present a notion that works subliminally and beneath the conscious mind of participants. As the customer looks at the dancer, he forces her into an objectified status. She is merely a tool, a means to an end, and a sexual end at that. However when she looks back, he becomes uncomfortable by her recognition of his presence. Her realization introduces subjectivity and humanness into the dancer, and the patron loses his position as the power holder. On the other hand, she becomes uncomfortable because her shield of nudity, the veneer of her naked costume, crumbles as a human connection occurs between herself and the patron. His intent is

Hughes 9 sexual; hers is financial. They both profit from the other in ways that are not deemed socially acceptable. Because of this, the customer needs his anonymity, and the dancer needs her objectivity in order for the relationship to maintain its mutual, beneficial nature. The answer to breaking the relationship of spectator-owner of exotic dance is revealed in concert dance and lies in the dual action of seeing that happens between the dancers and the audience during a dance performance. For the dancers, this seeing manifests in two distinct ways. Essentially, the dancers can either directly see individual audience members, or they see only darkness. Any dancer with performance experience can explain the phenomenon of seeing the audience but not recognizing them as individual beings but rather as one cohesive communitythat is looking out and identifying those watching as a single mass rather than a large grouping of individuals. This type of seeing from the dancers traditionally occurs when the dance is performed on a large proscenium stage. In this type of performance, the dancer can maybe discern a few faces from the first rows of the audience, but in general the audience becomes a black mass of energy that the dancer feels rather than sees. In this instance, the dancer projects her or his seeing out to the large gathering that is the audience. Though the dancer cannot discern each individual watching the dance, the audience perceives that the dancer is looking at everyone as individuals and all at once. This gaze grants the dancer the ability to break the fourth wall, a term often used in theatre to describe when an actress or actor intentionally addresses the audience thereby breaking the invisible wall that separates the audience from the action of the stage at the level of the proscenium. However, I maintain that because the dancers continually address the audience through their gaze and movement, no fourth wall can exist within concert dance. Even within traditional story ballets, the

Hughes 10 action is choreographed around the gaze of the audience. Though the separation between reality and fantasy is larger, the presentation is towards this audience, which breaks this division by asking the audience to gaze. Whether ballet dancer or post-modern mover, the dancing revolves around the gaze of the audience and the dancers presentation to them. The second type of seeing occurs when the dancer is closer to the audience, typically on a smaller or unconventionally styled stage. In this instance, the mutual exchange of seeing between dancer and audiencethe dancer seeing the audience and acknowledging their gaze and the audience seeing the dancer looking back outis more obvious. This type of performance blurs the line between what is and what isnt the dance because in some way the more immediate position of the audience affects the dancer, which in turn affects the audiences perception of the work as a whole. Though slightly different, both modes of performance place the dancer in a position of power, a power given by the gaze, which is directed outwards and meant to be seen. To analyze this idea more fully, I will engage with two separate and distinct works that involve nuditythough eventually I will argue for nakedness rather than nudity. The first work is a piece by American artists Raja Feather Kelly and Ami Garmon who both work in Berlin, Germany, where this piece was showed and filmed. The video is a showing from a series of works entitled MUTT-AIRS. In it, two dancers interact with the audience members, who are in very close proximity, and alternate between undressing and redressing. The piece itself is an experimental work that lives on the border of dance and theatre, but most notably is the use of nudity and nakedness in the work. As the two dancers undress for the first time, there is a palpable shift in the energy of the audience one that is even seen and felt through video. The audience, in extremely close proximity to

Hughes 11 the dancers, initially sees the dancers in partially bare states until finally the dancers completely shed their clothes and take the downward dog yoga position completely unclothed. The audience members shift in their seats and touch themselves in gestures of discomfort in these initial stages. Seeing human bodies so close and so bare creates a nervous tension in the room. However, the dancers continue to move in slowly, all the while maintaining this inverted position. The movement inherently exhibits intimately human qualities. The male and female dancers drag their knuckles across the floors, displaying contralateral, developmental movements all humans can understand. As the dancers continue their movement across the space, their nudity transforms into nakedness. The prolonged exposure to a human body moving in space at such a basic level strips the audience of its need to separate from the dancers. The lack of clothing only enhances the humanness of the dancers and the audience responds by transforming their gaze. Here, nudity becomes nakedness. The next work that I will examine is entitled Strange Fish. Originally choreographed for the stage by DV8 Physical Theatre artistic director Newson, it was adapted for the screen in 1992. It is important to mention that this work contains nudity that includes themes of religion and sexuality, topics that I will not specifically address in this paper. In this portion of the film, a female dancer pulls off her clothes and stands in the doorway of a room, staring at the male dancer in her doorway. Slowly they move towards each other and kiss. Moving towards the bed in the room they continue kissing, both unclothed from the waist up. Their dance begins as the dancers mime the motions of sexual intercourse. In a moment of comedic relief from the sexual tension created by the dancers, the female dancer moves out from underneath the male dancer. Despite the loss of her presence, the

Hughes 12 male dancer continues to thrusts his hips like the female dancer has not left. In this work, the use of nudity conveys slightly different, and perhaps even more potent, meanings about the relationship between dancer and viewer. With both dancers, male and female, in a similar state of dressboth only wear clothing on the bottom half of their bodies the sexual relationship between the two of them becomes paramount to the way they are viewed by the viewer. In the beginning of this scene, the two dancers stare at one another; however, with the cameras viewpoint, the audience becomes the one being looked at as the cameras viewpoint shifts to mimic what each dancer sees. In this way, the audience is pulled into the action with the dancers. The audience cannot own them, partially because the dancers look directly at them and partially because the intimate nature of their sexual relationship triggers feelings of voyeurism in the audience. In this way, the audience cannot take on the role of spectator-owner and the dancers nudity can transform into human nakedness. While these examples may not make this theory applicable to the entirety of the dance field, they display the theorys relevance to many instances of nudity in dance performance. Based on these dance works, what conclusions can then be drawn about the nature of nudity, nakedness, and dance? As the dancer looks out into the audience, whether that be on a proscenium stage, a smaller venue, or a movie screen, she or he claims the power and ability to recognize the audiences gaze and look back at the spectators, transforming their nudity into simple nakedness. The dancer gains gazing power through the ability to look back out at the audience that is looking at them. Because of this, there can be no fourth wall in any type of concert dance. The dancer or dancers break this wall simply by looking towards and performing for the audience. The dancers are free to simply exist in their

Hughes 13 individual human form, but they can also engage the audience just like a clothed performer. In this way, nudity is converted into nakedness and becomes a costume-less costume. It is a costume choice that negates any need for costume or disguise, any transformation from being anything but purely human and simply naked.

Hughes 14 Works Cited Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Print. Dijkstra, Bram. Naked: The Nude in America. New York: Rizzoli, 2010. Print. Eaves, Elisabeth. Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print. MUTT-AIR. Dir. Raja Feather Kelly and Ami Garmon. 2012. Vimeo Strange Fish. Dir. Llyod Newson and David Hinton. Perf. Kate Champion Nigel Charnock. BBC, 1992. DVD.