Rudolf von Laban and his dancers, Ascona, 1914. By the time the Dadaist and Surrealist movements exploded in Europe, Laban’s women dancers were performing quite frequently in the soirées of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Numerous paintings as well as photographs of thousands of people featuring naked in an ecstatic dance, denote the central position of the body to the creation of a modern, liberated identity.

The reference to Greece, as a synonym for classicism, had the power to “purify” taboos associated with the naked body as well as womanhood.Įxpressionist dance pioneer, Rudolf von Laban also explored the naked body as a site and source for liberation in the utopic society of Monte Verità in Ascona (1913-1918). “What mattered in Isadora’s Hellenic dances,” explains Ann Daly, “was not the Greek themes or the gauzy costumes but the uninhibited vitality, the sense of a glorious nakedness about to be affirmed, not only in the rituals of lovers but in every part of life” (9). But her idea to combine the body as flesh with the inner symbolic notion of the soul, shifted the image of the female body away from eroticism. Tracing the history of the naked body in the past century, Isadora Duncan, in an era still dominated by Victorian morals, dared to expose her breasts in some of her dances. The word political applies to dance pieces that deal with questions of power, hierarchies, law and justice, inclusions and exclusions. Thus dance and sex may be conceived as inseparable even when sexual exploration is unintended” (212).ĭespite the public discomfort with the inevitable sexualization of nudity, the living body in dance, like in no other art, can change the way we think about the relation between dance and the political (Franko 2007). As Judith Lynne Hanna notes in her essay on sexuality in dance: “Dance and sex both use the same instrument-namely, the human body-and both involve the language of the body’s orientation toward pleasure. By returning to the body, free from the symbolism of clothing and of moral codes, dancers and choreographers seem to be exploring the sense of being human.Īnd how do different audiences perceive the sense of intimacy that nudity attaches to performance? Although nudity signifies our purest form of existence, it remains a controversial issue in the arts and in society at large. In A Brief History of Nakedness, Philipp Carr-Gomm argues that: “Nakedness in ballet may still be rare, but when it comes to contemporary dance there have been many more naked performances in dance over the last fifty years than there have been in the theatre” (203).īut how can we interpret this increasing display of bare bodies in contemporary dance? From an aesthetic-phenomenological perspective, the dancing body resists the traditional Western dualism of body/mind and opens up a new conceptual space for the exploration of the embodied basis of being (Albright 2011). Photo: Nellyīeyond the boundaries of political activism, an explosion of nakedness has also been present in the performing arts, and particularly in dance. The site of these incidents also brings to mind that nudity has been an integral part in the arts for thousands of years, as an expression of the freedom of humankind. This incident brings to mind Isadora Duncan photographed in the Parthenon by Edward Steichen in 1903, or Mona Paiva, dancer in the Opéra Comique, in Paris, who posed in the same place for Nelly in 1927, followed, two years later, by the Hungarian dancer Nikolska. “No God, No Master” was written across the chest of a blond woman from the “Femen” group, who posed in front of the Erechtheion Temple on the Acropolis, as a Caryatid of modern times. Many activists have stripped themselves of clothing to draw attention to the vulnerability and power of the body in the social system we live in.Īn activist protest occurred in May 2013, in the centre of Athens, Greece. Recently, we have been experiencing an explosion of global naked protests in which the body “is strategically employed as a mode of social and political action” (Lunceford x). The public display of the live, bare body with its multiple and complex associations has a powerful impact on our awareness of the self and otherness. Naked or nude, the human body has been a source of creative inspiration in all forms of art, from painting and sculpture to theatre, film, performance art and body art, digital art and live political activism.

Ballet nude vimeo