Naked Ballet

Naked ballet may seem like a ridiculous idea, but the fact is that choreographers, dancers, fans and critics all have strong opinions both for and against the idea.

The whole art of dance is a celebration of the ability, shape, and form of the human body. Considering the skin-tight outfits that dancers usually wear, it would seem a very small step to simply move to nudity, to show the skin of the dancers and not have the lines concealed in any way.

Some choreographers even argue that clothing does not make any sense in some dances. During the bedroom scene of Romeo and Juliet, for example, is there really any necessity for the lovers who have supposedly just gotten out of bed to be wearing clothes? Rite of Spring, with its blatant celebration of sexuality, has often been held up as a ballet that would be more artistically integral if portions of it were performed by nude performers. Often the male dancers are actually simply wearing dance belts, as close to nude as most dancers ever get.

Other choreographers and dancers use nudity as a way to attempt to challenge or move beyond prudish attitudes – such as La Pudeur des Icebergs by Danielle Veille Danse. The objective is, according to the creator, .. to look past the nudity and focus on the movements." The director Yu Nengsheng of Taiwan, when asked about using naked ballet dancers in one of his pieces, defended it by saying it was "artistic" rather than "pornographic" simply due to the stage lighting.

In spite of honored choreographers such as Bob Fosse and Li Chiao-Ping who have used nudity to enhance their work, many people object on several terms to naked ballet, jazz, modern, or anything else. There is an almost strange dichotomous attitude about the use of the human body – the same people who are enthusiastic about the beauty of the arch of the foot recoil in horror at the idea of a man's genitals being visible on the stage. While sheer leotards covering and even emphasizing the curve of the breast is fine, there is as much furor and uproar about an actual naked chest as there was about a certain halftime show of the SuperBowl.

While some of these arguments come down to a simple matter of personal taste and "Ewww…", the critics do point out that any dance done in the nude is most likely going to distract from the meaning of the movement. In other words, regardless of how unselfconscious, dignified, and beautiful the setting, dancers, and moves are, the audience is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get past the cultural discomfort of seeing body parts they don't normally see. Unlike other fine arts such as painting and sculpture, where nudity has been able to divorce itself from the automatic implication of sexuality, naked ballet and other dances are still considered by many to be lewd and sensationalistic. Naked ballet is a shocking idea; due to the movement vocabulary – as some critics pointed out on the Ballet Talk website - a ballerina doing an arabesque and turning would be "flashing" the audience her genitalia.

Proponents of naked ballet might argue that that is precisely the point – that there is no logic to the idea that one part of the body is more or less sacred or profane than any other. It's all connected by skin, after all.

There are also some simply practical considerations to naked ballet as well – for example, it is impossible to dance pointe without special shoes, and a dancer wearing those shoes would not be able to maintain any semblance of "purity" in her nude state. Wearing ballet leotards hides and unifies the various imperfections of the human body, lending the choreographers, lighting designers, and other artistic staff (especially the costume designers) more control and a wider range of creative choices in their creation.

Naked ballet may, in the future, be able to be judged purely on the basis of its merit as movement; for now, it will continue to be unusual and challenging for audiences and performers alike.

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