The Naked Truth
Shall we pretend that when the Sunday Times Arts Section blasts us with a review of dancers inserting dildos in their anuses, their reviewer is simply commenting on what is out there in the zeitgeist? Alistair Macaulay cites this along with several other examples of choreographed anal sex as examples of “exposed flesh in dance…opening up new areas of thought and feeling.” They are included in a critique entitled “Nakedness in Dance, Taken to Extremes” that was the lead article with accompanying photographs in the Aug 19th Sunday Times. Another dance cited had the male dancer bend over from the waist exposing the inner portion of his backside and a rear view of his genitals to the captive audience. As if to prove that this attempt to epater le bourgeois and to simultaneously under-react to the politics of gay choreography is just one of many phenomena in the dance world, Macaulay ends with a discussion of the cataclysmic effect of removing ballerina’s tights from classical ballet: “the look of the bare leg drastically changes the entire aesthetics of the form. Muscular details of thigh, knee, calf become suddenly distracting.” Hmmm – that bare ballerina leg becomes a game changer while the graphic depiction of uncommon sexual acts doesn’t raise the critic’s temperature: “Even for those of us who have now seen a great many naked bodies onstage, the bent-over rear view of Mr. Weinert in “Gobbledygook” was something new. It was not, however, a problem. Though I didn’t much admire the work as a whole, that use of nakedness made Mr. Weinert memorably vulnerable.”