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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2011

The Naked Truth: An Analysis of Nudity

in American Avant-Garde Dance of the
Twenty-First Century
Patricia L. Gay

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 THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE & DANCE

THE NAKED TRUTH: AN ANALYSIS OF NUDITY IN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE

DANCE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

By

PATRICIA L. GAY

A Thesis submitted to the

School of Dance
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

Degree Awarded
Spring Semester, 2011
The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Patricia L. Gay defended on April 1,
2011.

___________________________________
Tricia H. Young
Professor Directing Thesis

___________________________________
Jennifer Atkins
Committee Member

___________________________________
Gerri Houlihan
Committee Member

___________________________________
Sally R. Sommer
Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.



 ii

 Dedicated to brave artists everywhere who bare it all in the name of art.


 iii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the following people without whom this thesis simply would not
exist. First and foremost, the American Dance Studies program: Jennifer Atkins whose Theory of
Dance class led me to this wonderful topic of nudity in avant-garde American dance; Sally
Sommer for her fabulous mentorship in NYC where she egged on, shaped and edited the heart of
my research and writing; Tricia Young, my expert advisor, who guided me through the whole
long process and helped turn my disparate chunks of writing into a single cohesive paper; and
my partner in crime, Jaime Kight, whose scholarly, logistical and moral support has gotten me
through this crazy process. Thanks too to my fourth committee member, Gerri Houlihan, for
bringing in her expert insight from the field and enlivening the whole defense process. I am
indebted as well to the artists Noémie Lafrance and Miguel Gutierrez for granting me interviews,
which provided me with invaluable information about their wonderful works. I am also
appreciative of the scholarly support of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography,
which gave me access to their materials on Gutierrez and put me in touch with the artist himself.
Lastly, I would like to thank my fabulous local Eiko and Koma expert, Shoko Letton; my
personal grammar hotline, Christopher O’Connell; and my loving parents, Win and Eben Gay.


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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi
1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................1
2. NOT YOUR AVERAGE FAIRYTALE: THE GROTESQUE AND CARNIVALESQUE
IN ANN LIV YOUNG’S CINDERELLA...............................................................................8
3. BODY IN ENVIRONMENT AND BODY AS ENVIRONMENT: NAKEDNESS IN
ANNA HALPRIN’S RETURNING HOME, MOVING WITH THE EARTH BODY AND
NOÉMIE LAFRANCE’S HOME: THE BODY AS A PLACE.............................................24
4. DECENT EXPOSURE: MEDIATIONS OF MALE NUDITY IN MIGUEL
GUTIERREZ’S MYENDLESSLOVE AND EIKO AND KOMA’S NAKED.......................42
5. CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................60
BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................66
VIDIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................71
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.........................................................................................................72


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 ABSTRACT

In the past decade there has been a resurgence of experimental dance artists in the United States
using nakedness—especially utilizing their own nude bodies—in choreography. In an effort to
discover why this trend is reemerging now and how nudity is functioning in new ways in the
world of twenty-first century avant-garde American dance, this thesis critically investigates five
works of choreography as case studies. The first chapter introduces my main ideas, gives a brief
history of nudity in avant-garde dance and outlines the format for the rest of the thesis. The
second chapter investigates grotesque and carnivalesque uses of nakedness in Ann Liv Young’s
Cinderella. The third chapter investigates two radically different ways of relating the bare female
body and environment through analyzing Anna Halprin’s Returning Home: Moving With the
Earth Body and Noémie Lafrance’s Home: the Body as a Place. The fourth chapter focuses on
how male dancers refute, transgress and move beyond the cultural taboo of male bodily exposure
through studying Miguel Gutierrez’s myendlesslove and Eiko Otake Yamada and Takashi Koma
Yamada’s Naked. Finally, the thesis closes by posing some potential political, economic, cultural
and scientific reasons why nudity has been reappearing in choreography over the past ten years
and highlighting a new use of nudity as a mediating tool in the five aforementioned works.


 vi

 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The unclothed body has existed, naturally, since the very origin of our species. Yet, the
term “nude” did not come about until the early 1700s, when it was fabricated by erudite critics.
Fine art, such as a disrobed figure within classical Greek sculpture or a Renaissance painting
depicting an unclothed Venus, became examples of this invented category. The educated elite
created this concept of nudity not only to justify the use of the exposed body in high art but also
to clarify, especially for the uninitiated, the difference between the beautiful, pristine,
desexualized and socially acceptable “nude” versus the vulgar, scatological, sexual and socially
proscribed “naked,” which appears in low-class art and everyday life.1
Nudity, though it provides a safe context in which skin can be shown, is inherently
fictitious in the sense that it depersonalizes and idealizes the body to conform to a specific set of
Western aesthetics. Nakedness, in contrast, is accurate but treacherous. Classical art historian
Kenneth Clark, in his vanguard book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, claims that to be naked is
to be devoid of covering and invokes all the connotations of embarrassment, vulnerability and
societal scorn that arise in that exposed state.2 John Berger, an influential literary critic and art
historian, further probes this distinction in his book Ways of Seeing. He asserts that while “to be
naked is to be oneself,… nudity is placed on display… to have the surface of one’s own skin, the
hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise.”3 According to these scholars, while nakedness



























































1
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1956), 3.
2
ibid.
3
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 39.


 1

is somewhat vulgar, it is also unidealized, whereas a depiction of a nude, though considered
“high art” in this definition, is merely a manufactured archetype. Nudity, seen in this way, is just
as much a costume as clothing.
Berger and Clark were exclusively referring to static visual art when they described this
rigid polarity between nudity and nakedness. Once an undressed artistic subject begins to move,
however, such clear distinctions start to blur. An unclothed dancer, with his or her undulating
and bouncing mass—despite performing in an undeniably high art setting—begins to look
suspiciously naked. Theater scholar Jeffrey D. Mason, points out that here in America, in our
very laws, “dancing raises the stakes. There seem to be no laws specifically prohibiting nude
speaking or nude singing. Apparently the lawmakers contend that if the naked body is dangerous
and transgressive, then there is even more concern and risk attached to a naked body that is
moving, moving to music, and moving with the skill and intent we ascribe to the dancer.”4 In the
face of the undeniable fleshiness of an unclothed performer, it is hard for observers to retain the
requisite façade of disinterested detachment. In this way, dance breaks down the artificially
constructed dichotomy and exposes nude vs. naked as actually a messy, multi-layered spectrum,
which is constantly being redefined.
Recent theoretical discourse further discredits the legitimacy of nudity as a monolithic
entity. Cultural historian and critical theorist Rob Cover explains how “the differences between
naked and nude are moot points when viewed through a post-structuralist lens. Kenneth Clark
(1956) suggests that artistic representation – high art – has the ability to render the naked as
nude, as if ‘nude’ is another form or style of clothing, leaving behind ‘naked’ as the truly
disrobed. Treating the naked body in this way ignores how it is always already represented and
constrained by codes of behavior, contexts, differentiation from the clothed body, loose
significations and cultural rituals.” 5 In the world of today, there are too many mediating factors
for bared skin to ever truly fit into the lofty and uncomplicated category of nudity. For this
reason, except as above where the distinction itself is the focus of my discussion, in this paper I
will use both “nude” and “naked” interchangeably and simply to denote an unclothed body.



























































4
Jeffrey D. Mason, “‘Affront or Alarm’: Performance, the Law and the ‘Female Breast’ from
Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls,” New Theatre Quarterly 21 (2005): 180-181.
5
Rob Cover, “The Naked Subject: Nudity, Context and Sexualization in Contemporary Culture,”
Body & Society 9:3 (2003): 53.


 2

 In the 1960s, the radical shift from modernism to postmodernism in the art word
heralded, as one of the many changes around that time, a return to the body—both the physical
and the performative. “The body, which previously had to be veiled to confirm to the Modernist
regime of meaning and value,” explains feminist art historian Amelia Jones, “has more and more
aggressively surfaced during this period as a locus of the self and the site where the public
domain meets the private, where the social is negotiated, produced and made sense of.”6 Jones’
words explaining the rise of performance art seem, at first, inapplicable to dance—which
necessarily always deals with the human form. Yet, in avant-garde dance, as well, there was a
shift that occurred around the 1960s: generally, dance artists moved from using a representative
and objective figure to employing a personal and subjective self. In modernism, a person might
stand in for a mythological goddess or socio-political ideal, whereas in postmodernism the
physical corpus was usually a representation of self. Progressive choreographers, like other art
makers of the time, rather than looking externally for sources, looked internally for inspiration—
asserting their unique identities as men, women, black, white, gay, strait, etc. through their
artwork. By turning to their own—sometimes unclothed—bodies, postmodernist performance
artists, choreographers and visual artists put primacy on the formerly repressed conception of
selfhood.
In the 1960s and into the 1970s, the anti-puritanical ideologies and sexually explicit
visual imagery of the so-called “hippie movement” were commonplace and the general Zeitgeist
of openness and unrestrained sensuality of this time had an undeniable effect on the art being
made. Dance, as a necessarily bodily medium, was particularly susceptible to hippie influence. In
discussing nudity in dance of the 1960s and early 1970s, dance anthropologist Judith Lynne
Hanna asserts that, “1960s-inaugurated sexual freedom [was] reflected in dance imagery.”7 Thus,
nakedness in dance of this era was, to some extent, a result of the lifting of inhibitions that was
concurrent in mass culture as a result of the sexual revolution.
In opposition to the ideologies of the sexual revolution, many second wave feminists
intentionally chose to not display their bodies. “Historically perceived as sex objects,” explains



























































6
Amelia Jones, “Survey,” in The Artist's Body (Themes and Movements), ed. Tracey Warr
(London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 20-21.
7
Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex and Gender (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1988), 191.


 3

Hanna, “women’s denial or downplaying of their sexuality conveys a strong statement of choice
and autonomy.”8 The early postmodernists’ cerebral, cool and austere choreography utilized a
formal, rather than sexual, body. Yvonne Rainer’s minimalist masterpiece Trio A, for example,
was, in the words of dance critic Jill Johnston, working “toward a removal of seductive
involvement with an audience.”9 Interestingly, as shown by one notorious performance of
Rainer’s Trio A, there were certain circumstances where postmodern dancers used nakedness.
The choreographer recalls how “in November [1970] Jon Hendricks invited me to do something
at the opening of the ‘People’s Flag Show,’ an exhibition at Judson Church mounted to protest
the government’s prosecution of gallery owner Stephen Radich for showing the work of sculptor
Mark Morrell, which was alleged by the prosecutors to be a ‘desecration of the flag.’… I invited
five dancers who knew Trio A to perform it with me nude, with five-foot flags tied around our
necks.”10 In this, now famous, instance Rainer and her dancers utilized the inherent power that
resonates from naked skin in order to politicize their dancing.
In the decades following the Judson Flag Show event, choreographers and dancers
increasingly turned to their own exposed figures as a viable method of conveying their
progressive agenda. Such choreographers were tapping into the inherent potential of bared
bodies to convey radical messages. “In societies in which there is a legislated taboo on public
nudity,” explains cultural theorist Ruth Barcan, “the naked body is an effective weapon in
political protests…. Moreover, the nude protestor is aided by the longstanding symbolic equation
between nakedness and freedom.”11 Thus, the dance artists who began using nakedness as a tool
of political expression in the last decades of the twentieth century were following, whether they
knew it or not, well established historical precedent. The contemporary avant-garde
choreographer and dancer, David Parker, explained in a recent article why choreographers at that
time needed a vessel for political expression by saying that, “in the '80s and '90s it [nudity in
dance] was political—laden with concerns about gender, disease, oppression, and identity.”12 In



























































8
ibid, 214.
9
Jill Johnston, “Rainer’s Muscle,” in Marmalade Me, Exp. ed. (London: University Press of
New England, 1998), 67.
10
Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 343.
11
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 93.
12
David Parker, “Renegades in Birthday Suits: Experimental Dancers Get Naked,” Dance
Magazine (Nov, 2006): 52.


 4

the face of the societal unrest caused by such tumultuous events such as the civil rights
movement and the AIDS epidemic, dance artists needed a comparably powerful method of
expression—nudity was the perfect tool for the time.
Lately, there has been a resurgence of naked choreography. “In many recent
performances,” notes dance critic Gia Kourlas in a 2006 article for the New York Times, “skin
has practically taken the place of costume. At the moment, the upsurge isn't rooted in sexual
liberation, as it was when nude bodies appeared onstage in the 1960's, or in political defiance, as
when they re-emerged in the 80's. Instead, choreographers are baring it all as a way to reveal
something essential about human experience. The nudity on view is tough and raw yet
unmistakably vulnerable.”13 Kourlas begins to explain what impetus current dance artists have
for using nudity. Yet, her explanation that choreographers are attempting to express the true
reality of the human condition, is vague and incomplete. In this thesis I critically investigate
work by five choreographers made since the turn of the twenty-first century that make use of the
naked dancing body in order to delve deeper into why this phenomenon of bodily exposure has
been resurfacing and to identify some overarching meanings of this nudity.
This thesis analyzes a few key examples of this recent reemergence of bodily exposure in
avant-garde dance in order to answer the question Parker and Kourlas posed: why is naked
dancing suddenly resurfacing here and now and what does it mean? While the trend is not merely
isolated to the United States, dance historian Ramsay Burt clearly lays out the problem with
looking at the body and gender across national boundaries in his book The Male Dancer: Bodies,
Spectacles, Sexualitites. Burt explains that, “a somewhat overused adage has it that dance is a
universal language. If this is so, globalism not withstanding, one shouldn’t underestimate the
differences between its dialects. Representations of gender in the dance and theatre traditions of
different parts of the world are each grounded in different, socially constructed ides about the



























































13
Gia Kourlas, "The Bare Essentials Of Dance," New York Times (Front Page, Morning
Edition), February 12, 2006, accessed March 16, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/arts/dance/12kour.htm.


 5

body.”14 Therefore, in the interest of clarity and cross-compatibility, this analysis is limited to
dance artists living and working in the United States and pieces made within the past ten years.
The second chapter of this thesis, “Not Your Average Fairytale: The Grotesque and
Carnivalesque in Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella,” analyzes a 2010, New York performance of Ann
Liv Young’s new work, Cinderella. Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, I
show how Young’s celebration of the graphically explicit body—one that is naked, shitting,
cursing, urinating, etc.—is very much a carnivalesque romp into the socially unacceptable.
Young’s elimination of the fourth wall and her use of nudity, especially in conjunction with
scatology and sadomasochism, restructure the performer-spectator power relations within her
work and disrupt sexual norms. By reveling in the grotesque, Young forced audiences to
confront their own unconscious scatological biases and reassess their culturally constructed
negative views of the grotesque in body and language. Young not only pushes the boundaries of
what is acceptable subject matter for avant-garde dance in America but also stretches the
parameters of how dance can be created, performed and experienced.
The third chapter, “Body in Environment and Body as Environment: Nakedness in Anna
Halprin’s Returning Home, Moving with the Earth Body and Noémie Lafrance’s Home: The
Body as a Place,” explores the naked female figure in an outdoor environment and the exposed
female body as a dance landscape in specific works by Anna Halprin and Noémie Lafrance. In
the video Returning Home, Halprin documents a series of site-specific improvisations she
performed in 2003 in which her bare skin was painted and adorned to compliment the
landscapes. Halprin’s corporeal exposure is radical because she confronts the ingrained societal
construct of the abject. Through utilizing the costume of nudity and embracing a connection to
nature and death, Halprin creates her own aesthetic of the aged female as beautiful. Alternately,
in her 2009 dance Home, LaFrance literally turns her bare body into an environment through
attaching mud, miniature trees and small animal figurines directly onto her skin. She taps into the
generative and transgressive potential of her physical self within the safe space of liminal
ritual.15 Then, through incorporating text, Lafrance and her fellow performer Maré Hieronimus,



























































14
Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities. Second Edition. (London:
Routledge, 2007), 5.
15
Liminality here refers to Victor Turner’s conception of being in between states of existence
physically, spiritually or psychologically.


 6

physically realize the French feminist theory of a l’ecriture feminine (uniquely female
expression) by creating a fertile new relationship between language and their own bodies.
In the fourth chapter, “Decent Exposure: Mediations of Male Nudity in Miguel
Gutierrez’s myendlesslove and Eiko and Koma’s Naked,” I analyze how nudity as a form of self-
expression is radically different for male dance artists. As a jumping off point, I investigate the
ways that both artists subvert or overcome the mass cultural fear of male genital exposure. In his
2006 piece myendlesslove, Miguel Gutierrez’s homosexuality and his use of text allow him to
transgress limiting understandings of male nudity and establish a meaningful, reflexive
relationship with his audience. Takashi Koma Yamada, in the 2010 work Naked that he
choreographed and performed with his partner Eiko Otake Yamada, avoided negative readings of
his nudity by desexualizing and abstracting his body. Through creating a unique and specific
situational setting for his figure, Koma both challenged viewers and empowered them to create
their own relationship to the work.
In my last chapter I proffer some answers to the motivating questions behind this entire
thesis: why have dance makers in the United States started using nudity again in the past ten
years and to what new end are these choreographers displaying the naked body? This conclusion
analyzes political, economic, cultural and scientific trends of twenty-first century America and
postulate how these overarching themes could have driven artists to use the nude body. Finally,
this chapter closes with my hypothesis on how the five choreographers investigated in this thesis
are using the bare body in a vanguard way by specifically arguing that they all utilize the naked
body as a site of mediation between performer and audience.


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 CHAPTER 2

NOT YOUR AVERAGE FAIRYTALE: THE GROTESQUE AND

CARNIVALESQUE IN ANN LIV YOUNG’S CINDERELLA

The carnivalesque and the grotesque date back to Medieval and Renaissance carnivals,
which, for short periods of time, allowed people to freely act sexually and scatologically in
public. Artists of the day put these potent images and themes into their art, especially literature
and theater. Historically, the ideas of grotesquery and carnival were complex and multifaceted
with both positive and negative elements. In contemporary society, however, only the unpleasant
connotations of them remain. Ann Liv Young’s infamous art, such as her newest work
Cinderella, from 2010, makes connections to the historical roots of the carnivalesque and
grotesque. Rather than doing a period piece, Young brings back these potent historical themes
into contemporary art and infuses them with new meanings, relevant to the twenty-first century.
In Cinderella (specifically the September 4, 2010 performance at Brooklyn’s Issue Project
Room, which this chapter analyses) Young restructures performer-spectator power relations and
disrupts sexual norms through her incorporation of her naked form into her pieces, especially in
conjunction with scatology and sadomasochism (S&M). Young’s’ radical use of her body pushes
both her own artistic boundaries by problematizing her authorial control and the boundaries of
what are considered acceptable structural devices, movement material, and subject matter for
avant-garde dance in America.
Performer and choreographer Ann Liv Young was born and raised in the American
Southeast in North Carolina. She graduated in 2003 with an undergraduate degree in dance from


 8

Hollins University.16 Only about a decade into her career, Young has already performed at such
prestigious art and dance institutions as The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, Judson
Church, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Brooklyn Museum, Laban Centre London,
Impulstanz, Springdance, The Arches, Tanz Im August, Motel Mosaique, Donau Festival, City
of Women and the American Dance Festival and been a resident of the FUSED program in
France.17
Young’s raucous on-stage acts—including such antics as getting naked, having sex,
drinking urine and physically attacking people—broaden the definition of dance by incorporating
aspects of theater and performance art.18 Though she employs aspects of other art forms, such as
text, action and characters, into her pieces, Young’s primary identification as a dance
choreographer is validated by her artistic training as a dancer, Bessie nominations, predominant
press being from dance publications and extensive history of performing in dance institutions.
Her early works were more obviously choreographic than later pieces like Cinderella, but still
were radical by contemporary dance standards; especially cutting edge were her use of flagrant
nudity and Young’s vocal on-stage coaching, wherein she sounded less like a choreographer than
a sadistic drill sergeant. As well as blurring genre distinctions, Young pushes the boundaries of
the art world as a whole. Recently, Young’ performance at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center’s
"Saturday Sessions" was censored for her obscene words and sexually explicit and aggressive
actions towards performance artist Georgia Sagri whose piece immediately preceded Young’s.
Because of such wild actions on and off-stage, Young has acquired a reputation in the avant-
garde art, and especially dance, worlds as an enfant terrible.
In her latest work, Cinderella, Young further confused the layers of performative reality
by embodying the character “Sherry,” who plays the role of Cinderella. Often described as
Young’s “southern wildcat alter ego,” Young created Sherry during a European tour of her 2007
show Snow White when suffering from morning sickness. Young was four or five months


























































16
Contemporary Performance, “In Performance: Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella Sept 3 and 4, 2010
(NYC),” Contemporary Performance, http://contemporaryperformance.com/2010/08/06/in-
performance-ann-liv-young%E2%80%99s-cinderella-sept-3-and-4-2010-nyc/.
17
Hunter MFASO, “Visiting Artists: Ann Liv Young & Isabel Lewis,” Hunter masters of Fine
Art Student Organization,
http://huntermfaso.org/blog/2008/11/14/visiting-artists-ann-liv-young-isabel-lewis/.
18
Revel in New York, “Ann Liv Young: Performer,” Revel in New York: a look at the city
through its people, http://www.revelinnewyork.com/videos/ann-liv-young.


 9

pregnant at the time and said she just wanted to sit down, take a break and switch gears. In
addition to being a welcome artistic diversion, Sherry became a way for Young to address public
misconceptions about her work.19 Sherry allows Young to focus her energy on the audience and
enables her to interact more intimately with them.
At the same time, in using the shield of a character Young is able to protect herself from
some of the more violent negative reactions and attacks from viewers. As Young understands it,
“People are always writing ‘Ann Liv is terrifying’. They mean Sherry… I mean, certainly my
personality is there because I am making it, right? But I don't necessarily do things in the real
show that I would do in real life. I'm a very polite person.”20 Sherry is able to engage in activities
and conversations on and off stage that Young would not or could not do as Ann Liv Young.
Sherry allows Young to push her own boundaries, without making herself too vulnerable. During
Cinderella, Young repeatedly pointed out to the audience that she was not Ann Liv Young but
actually Sherry. Yet, Young says herself in the above quote that at the end of the day she is
making the art. Therefore, the shield of Sherry is inherently disingenuous since the Transitive
Property of Equality from basic algebra proves that if A=B=C (Ann Liv Young is Sherry who in
turn is Cinderella), then A=C (Ann Liv Young is Cinderella). Whatever outlandish things
Cinderella does and says, Ann Liv Young is really doing and saying them too. Thus, in this
analysis, the distinction between Sherry and Young the actor will not be made. Young is the
locus of all action.
Cinderella is the second work Young has created around a classic childhood story
following her 2007 Snow White. This loaded title invokes connections to girlhood fantasies and
stereotypically skewed gender roles. Yet, despite the name, Young’s Cinderella shares little with
the well-known fairytale. Ostensibly, Young is acting as the heroine—a connection only made
apparent by the fact that she wears the appropriate blue full-length dress, made ubiquitous by
Disney’s 1950 motion picture rendition of the tale. Of the three primary elements within the
performance, only one even references the storybook events or characters. These different types



























































19
Ann Liv Young, interviewed by Idiom, “This Better Be Decent: Interview with Ann Liv
Young,” Idiom, March 5, 2010, http://idiommag.com/2010/03/this-better-be-decent-interview-
with-ann-liv-young/.
20
Ann Liv Young, interviewed by Christine Elmo, “Ann Liv Young in Conversation with
Christine Elmo,” Critical Correspondence: a Project of Movement Research, May 25, 2010,
http://www.movementresearch.org/publishing/?q=node/687.


 10
of performative activity are Young karaokeing, sometimes with accompaniment provided by her
back-up dancers/bouncers; Young quietly reading introspective monologues from the perspective
of Cinderella; and Young engaging with the audience through asking and inviting questions. The
piece, as performed on September 4, 2010, essentially consisted of a continuously repeating
cycle of these three types of events (though they varied in length), which lasted for four hours.
The premiere of Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn,
New York was as much a carnival as it was a performance. Though the piece looks like a
contemporary festival with balloons, fancy costumes and even a girl peddling candy, Cinderella
is also a carnival in the classic Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s sense of the word. In his 1960’s book
Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin analyses the world of Medieval and Renaissance carnivals in
the work of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais. Young’s dances, such as
Cinderella, are very much modern-day versions of the debauched and wild carnival celebrations
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Young’s work, when examined in relation to Bakhtin’s
theories, may be seen as a fresh take on the classic carnivalesque trope.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, life was tightly regulated: composed almost
entirely of labor, strictly mediated by social rules, and rigidly segregated by gender, class, age
and caste. Holidays punctuated this everyday reality at regular intervals. During these carnival
time, Bakhtin explains, “life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has
a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal,
in which all take part.”21 All the oppressive constraints of life did not simply dissolve during
carnival. Rather, people actively broke down social, moral, and legal rules through wantonly
engaging in all manner of forbidden acts. Free to act out their most repressed desires, people
engaged in a wide variety of antisocial behaviors. For a short week, people gave in to their
bodies’ primal urges, reveling in the sexual, scatological, and consumptive. For a brief span of
time people could allow their mouths to say and their bodies to do whatever they desired without
fear of retribution or judgment.



























































21
Mikhail M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, 1965 (Russian). 1968
(English, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), (Bloomington: Midland-Indiana University
Press, 1984), 7.


 11
 Ann Liv Young’s artworks endeavor to create a microcosmic modern-day carnival. In her
performance space, Young establishes a world in which she and her audience members can enjoy
(or hate) carnivalesque freedoms. In Cinderella, for example, Young’s pleasures include eating,
urinating, defecating, manipulating her feces and showing off her vagina and anus during the
performance. Other than eating, modern-day social morés strictly forbid doing any of these acts
in public. Even more stringently, contemporary conventions of theatrical propriety proscribe all
of Young’s carnivalesque behaviors—even eating—on stage. During Young’s temporary
carnival, however, all these prohibitions were wantonly and intentionally broken. The primacy of
the body and the laws of liberation reigned. As in the liberated carnival days of the Renaissance
and Middle Ages, in the few hours of Ann Liv Young’s performances, such as Cinderella,
anything and everything goes.
Other than its abandon, the two most important characteristics of carnival, which are
inter-related, are its inclusive and participatory nature. According to Bakhtin, “carnival is not a
spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea
embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.”22 Carnivals, by
their very nature, were completely egalitarian. Essentially, they were mandatorily participatory—
meaning that within the carnival paradigm, no person or group was passively observing or
allowed to serve judgment. During the days and nights of carnival, all boundaries between
groups and individuals dissolved and everyone became one and the same. Everyone was a
carnival goer—no more, no less.
Young’s similar sense of inclusivity in Cinderella was liberating in that it gave the
audience, or in some instances forced the audience to take, more power than normally granted
within the performer-spectator relationship. This was especially evident in the sections where she
broke down the fourth wall. For example, near the middle of the dance, Young confronted
observers, demanding to know who did not like the piece thus far and who was bored. Though
this was reasonably intimidating for the viewers, it also empowered them by inviting them to
judge the piece and share those criticisms with the artist—somewhat leveling the unequal power
dynamic inherent in performance. The watchers’ comments to Young held her accountable for
her artwork. A more graphic example occurred during the end of Cinderella when Young had



























































22
ibid.


 12
trouble producing the requisite handful of shit needed for the finale. Young elicited advice from
the onlookers, and proceeded to act upon their suggestions. By involving observers, through
inviting their participation and letting them direct her body and actions, Young, in the spirit of
carnivalesque egalitarianism, let go of some of her authorial control over herself and her work.
Though Young did not relinquish control completely, her piece allowed witnesses to rise
to the position of participant. Throughout the piece, Young had small breaks where she initiated
dialogue with audience members, typically by asking them questions. Sometimes she talked with
volunteers; at other times she rather cruelly singled someone out and talked to them. Thus, her
show was, for those spectators selected, mandatorily participatory as in the historical carnivals.
The performance section of the show climaxed in the scatological spectacle of watching Young
defecate and slather one of her hands in her own fecal matter. She then came around to each
observer, made him or her smell her fouled hand and discuss it (and other topics). Young kicked
out anyone who refused to smell her hand, but told them they were going to miss out on the
really good stuff. By forcing viewers to partake in this socially unacceptable, carnivalesque act,
Young initiated the audience into her piece on a visceral level, transforming them from mere
observers into active participants. Furthermore, in discussing her shit, what it smelled like, the
nuances of odor, etc., Young made spectators engage dialectically with what she was doing and
reflexively identify their own biases and pre-conceived notions about defecation and excreta.
Cinderella’s post-show show, which began after the shit-smelling initiation, highlighted
collectivity by creating a new level of communion between watcher and performer. Motivated by
curiosity, fear of leaving and anxiety over appearing to be afraid or un-cool, a substantial number
of the crowd stayed on through Young’s graphic exposure and shit litmus test. The remaining
audience members moved away from their former positions against the walls and gathered
naturally and informally together into a circle.
Thus began an unpremeditated discussion, which ended up lasting for two hours—the
same amount of time that the technical “performance” itself took. This environment of open
discussion that Young created was absolutely in keeping with the historical carnival tradition.
Renaissance carnival’s “temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank… led to
the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no
distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating [them] from norms of


 13
etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”23 Young too took advantage of “carnivalizing” to
facilitate new forms of communication. Going against the entrenched ritual of dance
performances, which are typically a non-verbal, one-sided exchange with a passive audience,
Young initiated an inclusive verbal dialogue between observers and performer.
Though Young opened up Cinderella and broke the fourth wall, she still, for the most
part, maintained control in the viewer-performer relationship. Young acted out her dominance by
yelling at her technicians and assistants or singling out audience members and relentlessly asking
them a series of pointed, uncomfortable questions. Even in the post-show discussion, when the
piece was most egalitarian and mutually participatory, the element of power play was ever
present; Young was still the one in control. In performance situations in general, however, issues
of power are loaded and complex. Laura Mulvey’s classic and much debated paradigm posits
that in observer-observed relationships, male watchers are in control, deriving sexualized and
scopophilic pleasure from objectified female performers.24 Mulvey’s canonical, but ultimately
flawed, theory of the gaze relegates women to a passive role. Viewed in accord with Mulvey’s
ideas, Young overcame her gendered designation by acting tyrannically. Her confrontational
controlling behavior established her as the dominant power, especially over her spectators. In
this way, Young surpassed objectification and reclaimed her active performative role.
Young’s aggressive control was problematized by how she used the carnivalesque—
specifically with her nakedness. As feminist scholar Janet Wolff explains, “there are problems
with using the female body for feminist ends. Its pre-existing meanings, as sex object, as object
of the male gaze, can always prevail and reappropriate the body, despite the intentions of the
woman herself.”25 Following Wolff’s logic, by exposing her butt and genitals to watchers in
Cinderella, Young made herself vulnerable to sexual objectification.



























































23
Mikhail M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, 1965 (Russian). 1968
(English, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), (Bloomington: Midland-Indiana University
Press, 1984), 10.
24
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975) reprinted in
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Rutledge, 2003), 44-53.
25
Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics,” in Meaning in Motion:
New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1997), 82.


 14
 As Young revealed in a 2007 interview with Gia Kourlas, there are audience members
who do essentially watch her work as relatively socially-acceptable type of pornography because
of its framing as “high art.” In the interview, Young recounts a male viewer’s emailed feedback
regarding one of her performance DVDs, about which he said, “‘the sound quality’s not that
good, you should really hire a professional. And you really shouldn’t have a sex scene wearing
tennis shoes. You’re really beautiful. If you’re ever lonely…’”26 To convey that this was not a
mere fluke response, Young added, “I get e-mails like this constantly.”27 This example clearly
shows that Young’s use of nakedness in her dances engender sexual objectification in some
observers, undermining her dominant role in the viewer-performer relationship.
Even the quoted sexist email, however, hints at how Young’s work does not fit easily into
the category of pornography. The man expresses the most irritation about the fact that her
copulation outfit included tennis shoes, presumably because the incongruous athletic wear
distracted from and unpleasantly distorted his scopophilic consumption of her naked body in
what he was seeing as a “sex scene.” Young’s work frequently incorporates explicit sex and
erotic imagery. As this misogynistic response illuminates, however, the problematic way she
displays her unclothed figure intentionally does not follow the usual conventions of strip shows
or skin flicks. Young’s calculatedly subversive nakedness disrupts a watcher’s purely libidinous
viewing pleasures.
In Cinderella, Young similarly tempered her sex scene. At the end of the work, Young
got down on her hands and knees, raised her dress over her head, and displayed her butt and
vagina to the spectators. This image of prostrate explicit display could have come straight out of
a mainstream sex show. However, in this potentially titillating position, Young proceeded to take
her newly produced feces out of its glass bowl and re-insert them into her anus. This act
graphically skewed the eroticism in her dance, disrupting the pornographic sexual connotation of
female butt and genital displays. By intentionally defiling her peep show, Young made it
impossible for viewers to simply consume her nakedness in a normative, sexually objectifying
way.



























































26
Ann Liv Young, interviewed by Gia Kourlas, “Pure as the Driven Snow? Hell, No! At Least
Not Ann Liv Young’s Snow White,” Time Out New York 597 (Mar 8–14, 2007),
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/dance/2108/pure-as-the-driven-snow.
27
ibid.


 15
 The carnivalesque quality of Young’s graphic nakedness and the way it plays with power
dynamics likens it to the alternative sexual practices of sadomasochism (S&M, S/M or SM).
S&M covers a whole array of diverse practices, which include experimentation with humiliation,
urination and defecation. Young’s anal act could most certainly fall under the umbrella of this
branch of S&M. In one of the earliest studies of sadomasochist behavior that incorporated
feminist theory, scholars Gary W. Taylor and Jane M. Ussher describe their findings on the
potential for third-wave, lipstick-type feminist readings of gendered power dynamics in S&M.
“SM was seen primarily in political terms consistent with a feminist analysis of sexuality and its
role within patriarchal control and domination…. SM was positioned as a parody of abusive,
divisive sexual relations, turning ‘normal sex’ on its head, ridiculing it, undermining it,
exploiting and exposing it, with the ultimate intention of destroying it.”28 This description of
feminist S&M practices perfectly aligns with Young’s progressive exhibitionism in her
Cinderella. Utilizing this definition, Young’s carnivalesque finale is a parody of abusive and
divisive viewer-performer relations—ridiculing, undermining, exploiting and exposing classic
patriarchal gaze theory with the ultimate intention of destroying it. By forcing onlookers to see
not just her exposed genitals but also an atypical and potentially disturbing sexual act, Young
assumes the role of, in S&M terms, a “dominant.” In making participants watch this scatological
sex scene, Young positions watchers as her “submissives.” In this relationship, though Young is
displaying herself erotically, her nakedness is empowering rather than objectifying. Other
aspects of Young’s performance, such as her abusive verbal interactions with audience members,
also fit into the repertory of aggressive acts of a dominatrix.
During Medieval and Renaissance carnivals, participants publicly enacted a wide range
of societally-deemed “shameful” activities—things normally done in the privacy of one’s home,
if done at all. Bakhtin labeled these formerly private, now carnivalized, pleasures as “grotesque
realism.” He described this category specifically as “the material bodily principle, that is, images
of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life.”29 Though Bakhtin was
looking at manifestations of this in the art of Renaissance writing, specifically the works of


























































28
Gary W. Taylor, “Making Sense of S&M: A Discourse Analytic Account,” Sexualities 4 no. 3
(August 2001): 303.
29
Mikhail M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, 1965 (Russian). 1968
(English, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), (Bloomington: Midland-Indiana University
Press, 1984), 18.


 16
Rabelais, images of material bodily humor have a long history that derives from the pre-
Renaissance culture of folk humor in Europe.30 So, when Ann Liv Young bares her genitals and
shits on stage in Cinderella, she is following in seven-hundred-year-old-footsteps. Though she
may or may not be cognizant of this, her practices of grotesque realism on a contemporary
American stage inevitably places her in dialogue with a centuries-old tradition, situating her
performances within a long line of artistic celebrations and a large collection of sanctioned anti-
social artistic practices.
Young’s finale segment in Cinderella is the most radically grotesque. Towards the end
the evening she had to complete a task she set for herself of defecation, anal and vaginal
exhibition, and fecal reinsertion followed by an olfactory, scatological meet and greet. This was
her radical denouement—her metaphoric equivalent of thirty-two fouetté-turns. A bout of
unplanned suspense heightened the climactic nature and the grotesque pay off of her final scene.
For the Saturday night New York City Cinderella show, Young was extremely constipated and
after profuse apologies about her inability to excrete, had to resort to a variety of different
methods in order to produce—not the least of which was the use of anal suppositories. After
sitting for some time on a glass bowl, Young began to poll onlookers for help. One person
advised her to squat over the bowl rather than sit on it. So she repositioned, but nothing came of
it. Another told her to have a cigarette. So she procured one from yet another viewer and smoked
it, but to no avail. A third spectator chimed in that she should drink coffee. So Young proceeded
to enthusiastically, but ultimately fruitlessly, guzzle the nearest beverage. Throughout this
uncharacteristic bout of anal retention, however, Young continued to perform. Cinderella
became a dance of shifting positions, inserting supplements, drinking fluids, smoking cigarettes,
asking for advice, singing songs to relax, and telling the audience how much they were going to
like what was coming up.
After sitting through two hours of verbal abuse and violent imagery, Young’s anal
denouement was too much for many viewers to handle and it drove about half the crowd away.
However, this demanding rite of passage was in many ways a good thing. Though, admittedly,
the climax was brutally shocking, Young did not frame her act in an offensive or aggressive way.
In the meet-and-greet-and shit-smelling section, Young intentionally, but gently, asked



























































30
ibid.


 17
individuals what it smelled like or how terrible was it to inhale. Over and over participants
consented and said that it actually was not that bad—far less horrible than they imagined it
would be. Young forced all the audience members who stayed for the after-show show to
confront ideas that society teaches people from a young age. Societal norms condition people to
fear and hate their excretory organs and their bodies’ byproducts. Participants in Cinderella
actually faced these fecal phobias literally, through smelling and seeing, and intellectually, by
engaging in a critical discussion on the subject. The end result was that most people claimed to
find the experience not nearly as bad as their pre-conceived notions. This shift in perspective
subtly de-alienated the audience members from their own anuses and excrement.
Historical arts of grotesque realism too emphasized the positive and perspective-altering
nature of excrement in particular. Bakhtin explained that in carnivalesque literature, “we find the
ambivalent image of excrement, its relation to regeneration and renewal and its special role in
overcoming fear.”31 Though in today’s culture shit has almost exclusively negative connotations,
historically, the functions of bodily waste were more ambiguous. By confronting participants
with live human guano, Young effectively proved that feces, this thing that society decries as
bad and disgusting, is actually not as horrifying as the cultural stigma surrounding it. In doing
this discussion, Young connected excrement to some of its positive historical associations, in
relation to grotesque realism, and helped viewers get past their pre-existing, socially-conditioned
fear of shit.
Young’s open stance on excrement and nakedness is entirely in line with historical
precedent. Bakhtin described that in grotesque realism “the bodily element is deeply positive. It
is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as
something universal”32 By attempting to remove the fear and stigma, or at least get the audience
to recognize and question these reactions in themselves, Young was taking a classic stance on the
grotesque. Also, Young’s use of excrement—presenting it for smelling and discussing—
somewhat dissolved the typical artistic ego of a performer. Though she alone produced the feces,
and she exposed and penetrated herself, the individual greetings and group discussion that
followed transformed the performative paradigm and highlighted the viewers as individuals. This
post-show excrement ritual, in a way, cleansed Young of her artistic ego. It shifted the work


























































31
ibid, 175.
32
ibid, 19.


 18
from being about her, with her as sole authorial controller, to being about the whole group—
letting the watchers share in the power. Unlike the first half, in which audience participation was
forced and sometimes disquieting, in the second section the performer-spectator interaction was
more of an equalitarian dialogue.
Another positive quality of grotesquery in Young’s performance was its return to the
physical and refusal of disembodiment. Bakhtin describes, “the essential principle of grotesque
realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a
transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”33 Young
applied this historical ability that the grotesque has of corporeal re-centering, to her
contemporary art. Though her method of grotesque imagery comes from the Middle Ages, she
employed it in a progressive manner.
Young’s nakedness and scatology were not just acts, but statements about art and anti-art.
In choosing to make her work visceral and literal through being explicit and sexual, she refused
cerebral abstraction—one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. Her apparent denial of
intellectuality during the performative first half in favor of carnal, explicit, visceral subject
matter is a radical move that sets her apart from the trends of the past fifty years in American
experimental dance. Choosing the bodily made Young’s performance simultaneously hearken
back to the historic artistic conventions of the carnivalesque while orienting the avant-garde
dance into the position of post-postmodern. Though, interestingly, in the post-show Young
moves away from the body, which she so wholeheartedly championed in the performance
proper, and creates and entirely intellectual, discussion-based situation.
When Young stepped through the fourth wall to have a dialogue with the spectators
during the first section of Cinderella, it initially seemed like an interrogation with Sherry asking
mean, pointed questions and giving snarky, defensive answers. Viewers were obviously
intimidated and reluctant to speak up and afraid of being singled out. One particularly
uncomfortable incident occurred during the September 4th show at the Issue Project Room when
a man in the crowd questioned why she hid behind a mask of ugliness and cruelty. The two had a
terse back and forth in which he asked if she was really going to embarrass him like this



























































33
ibid, 19-20.


 19
(presumably for forcing him to speak in front of everyone else), and she eventually ended by
calling him an “asshole.”
During the two-hour post-show dialogue, one issue Young discussed in depth with the
participants was why the guy in the earlier argument felt embarrassed by being asked questions
in front of the audience. At some point, the man came back from waiting downstairs for his
friends (he did not choose to stay through the hand smelling section), having been told by some
people that he was being talked about. He and Sherry proceeded to have a lengthy discussion,
during which he mostly just answered her questions, which seemed to be more genuine than
hostile at this point. His prodigal return acted as an apology for, or at least reconsideration of, his
earlier cruel words and Young reacted positively to his attitude shift. Together they delved into
deep psychological concerns, like his problems with his father, his relationship issues and his
history with depression and therapy. As the dialogue progressed, the man lost his anxieties and
opened up, which was an inspirational and beautifully rare sight. The discussion was radically
different from the negative, uncomfortable, spiteful argument they had before because be calmed
his fears, and actually contemplated her questions and then answered them honestly and she, in
response, lightened up on him. Their interaction became a more supportive, healthy and
informing one with the onlookers playing the important and active role of participatory
witnesses.
The extremely positive outcome that this man reached from Young’s probing questions
stood in stark contrast to the interaction that followed it. After a while, during the revealing
exchange between the man and Young, his female friend came over and put her arm around him.
Immediately, Young started asking her questions as well, like: why did she walk all the way
across the room to put her arm around him? Instead of rationally considering Young’s queries
and answering them sincerely, the woman became defensive. Young was pointed and relentless
to the point of seeming cruel, and the woman’s over-protective responses merely escalated.
Young ended up saying that this stranger’s soon-to-be-marriage was going to fail because she
was so guarded. The lady, now deeply insulted, stormed out. In the face of Young’s relentless
scrutiny, the woman was uptight and defensive, giving smartass quippy answers instead of
contemplating the questions seriously and giving honest answers. These two diametrically
opposed back-to-back interactions profoundly display the positive and negative outcomes of
Young’s harsh audience interactions. Young’s interactions ignored personal boundaries and


 20
social etiquette, probing into people’s private issues, fears and lives. When these advances were
accepted in the communal sprit of participation, the interaction was surprisingly positive and
freeing. However, when the premise of unanimous participation was rejected, the whole
encounter turned into a massive, emotionally charged fight.
In Rabelais and His Word, Bakhtin explains how vulgar words in historical and modern
language derived from the grotesque. As he describes it, “the grotesque concept of the body
forms the basis of abuses, oaths, and curses. The importance of abusive language is essential to
the understanding of the literature of the grotesque.”34 Though Bakhtin only looks at writing,
crude language is essential to the understanding of all art of the grotesque, including a dance
piece like Cinderella. Young’s utilization of vulgarity and sexualized language was especially
prominent in the finale’s hand-smelling meet and greet. Her conversation at this time revolved
around her shit, ass and vagina. In a way, her graphic words focused the dialogue on her naked
body, intellectually, just as her graphic dancing made the audience focus their gaze on her
corporeal body a few minutes earlier. Interestingly, Young’s use of graphic language had limits,
and she verbally chided one audience member at Cinderella for using the word “pussy,” which
Young, in a sudden bout of potentially affected coyness, apparently deemed too crass.
Though contemporary society employs and views vulgar language as purely negative,
historically, grotesque words held both positive and negative associations and Young endeavors
to bring back some of this positivity. Bakhtin laments that “modern indecent abuse and cursing
have retained dead and purely negative remnants of the grotesque concept of the body… almost
nothing has remained of the ambivalent meaning whereby they [curses] would be revived.”35 In
her piece Cinderella, Young paired vulgar language with her exhibitionistic acts. Though her
cursing may not have been as graphic, shocking, and off-putting as her scatological and sexually
explicit actions, it does represent another way Young tries to address the negative stigma around
the grotesque.
In the after-show discussion, Young and a group of viewers got into an interesting debate
about why excrement and the act of defecating is such a taboo subject to share or talk about in
contemporary society. Participants threw out several theories. One posited that human’s fear
during shitting is a primal survival instinct because animals, while engaging in this act, are


























































34
ibid, 27.
35
ibid, 28.


 21
extremely vulnerable to attack. Another person theorized that it was a result of social
conditioning—that humans train children from a young age to be ashamed and fearful by
sequestering defecation in a locked room, hiding the act in a porcelain contraption, and then
flushing away any incriminating evidence. Whatever the reason, because people are ashamed of
shitting, they are afraid to talk about it, and so all communication, positive or negative,
surrounding defecation shuts down. Even though Young was forcible and graphic, she
effectively re-opened dialogue about this taboo topic, allowing her watchers to reassess their
entrenched biases. While it is uncomfortable, it can be positive for people to identify and
confront their preconceived aversion.
Unfortunately there are also negative repercussions of the carnivalesque. Historical
carnivals, problematically, only existed at specific times, which were few and far between.
Though people could shake off their inhibitions during Saturnalias and act as wild as they
wished, this winter solstice celebration only occurred once a year. Once those specific days were
finished, participants returned to their normal lives. In a way, the debauched freedoms of
carnival acted as a foil to everyday existence. By engaging in crazy activities in a tightly
controlled time frame, people purged themselves of their uncivilized thoughts, feelings, desires,
etc., enabling them to return to normalcy freed from their devious and deviant urges. The
enaction of scandalous desires during festivals does not necessarily validate sin but, rather,
vilifies it as something abhorrent and different by establishing the carnivalesque as the opposite
of normal, civilized behavior. The week of carnival was a carefully controlled safety valve—
placating and isolating society’s insurgent impulses leaving people complacent and willing to
submit to the rules of social law for the other 358 days of the year. Thus, the freedoms of
carnival actually effectively reinforced the oppression and repression of Medieval and
Renaissance existence.
Traditional carnivals had another negative side. Since the holidays were mandatorily
inclusive, participants were essentially trapped. The reassurance of having an escape route or the
safety of having the possibility to opt out was non-existent. Because of this, there were also
gruesome and unpleasant things that happened during carnival, such as women being sexually
assaulted or raped.
Young did not trap her spectators inside the Issue Project Room nor was her work
physically unsafe for bystanders. In fact, Young reached out to her viewers by involving them in


 22
the work through soliciting their suggestions, ideas and opinions. Yet, Young’s grotesque acts
and dominatrix-like behavior elicited tangible fear from viewers—fear of her culturally taboo
scatology, fear of her power play and fear of being singled out for questioning about thoughts,
feelings, personal issues, private life, etc. in front of a room full of strangers. Young denied
watchers the usual security they receive in typical theatrical situations where onlookers are
merely anonymous observers. By randomly addressing, or in some cases actually interrogating,
audience members throughout the show, Young took away the safety of the fourth wall. Her
piece suddenly became mutually inclusive and, consequentially, inescapably real. Young held
viewers accountable for their reactions and opinions and no one was safe from her potential
artistic wrath.
While Young’s modern use of Bakhtinian carnivalesque freed her to act in a grotesque
and socially transgressive manner, it also whether they liked it or not incorporates the audience
into the performative experience. This inescapable inclusivity paired with Young’s use of sexual
exposure, scatology and verbal dialogue pushed Cinderella’s power dynamic between performer
and spectator into a state of flux. Sometimes Young, like the wicked stepsisters of the
performance’s namesake, was domineering and downright abusive. At other times, Young, like
the meek child in the fairytale, was touchingly vulnerable—at the mercy of her audience’s
piercing looks and questions. Such constant hierarchical renegotiations encouraged spectators’
reflexivity by making them aware of the normally unspoken, but omnipresent, power dynamic
within a performance.


 23
 CHAPTER 3

BODY IN ENVIRONMENT AND BODY AS ENVIRONMENT:

NAKEDNESS IN ANNA HALPRIN’S RETURNING HOME,
MOVING WITH THE EARTH BODY AND NOÉMIE
LAFRANCE’S HOME: THE BODY AS A PLACE

Though expressed most famously in eighteenth and nineteenth century writings, the idea
that women are viscerally connected to the natural world harkens back at least to ancient Greek
philosophy.36 This essentialist notion weaves femininity inexorably into the ostensibly inferior
realms of body and nature. Woman is then in juxtaposition to masculinity, which is instead
firmly connected to the supposedly more enlightened spheres of the mind and science. Taken
from this perspective, the image of the nude female is packed with regressive connotations of
inferiority due to its corporeality and earthliness. Because of this established cultural trope,
performances where the nude female body is displayed in relation to nature frequently carry the
stigma of essentialism. In her dance for the camera work Returning Home, Moving With the
Earth Body, choreographer and performer Anna Halprin impressively manages to employ her
unclothed figure for progressive, not regressive, means—establishing her own multilayered
meanings behind her nudity. Choreographer and dancer Noémie Lafrance, instead of performing
her dance outdoors, brings nature inside. In her dance piece Home: The Body as a Place,



























































36
Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics,” in Meaning in Motion:
New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1997), 86.


 24
Lafrance creates corporeal environments through which she explores the landscape, ritual and
language of the naked female body.
Anna Halprin is indisputably one of the groundbreaking foremothers of American
postmodern dance; she pushed the boundaries of the form through experiments in minimalism,
improvisation and task-based movement. Also, Halprin is integral to the history of the avant-
garde for teaching such important figures as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti.
Still living and working in San Francisco, California, Halprin has outlasted the trend of
postmodernism and has more recently explored inter-disciplinary collaboration, improvisation,
human connection to nature, performance as a healing process and kinesthetic awareness. Her
2003 film Returning Home, Moving With the Earth Body documents a series of outdoor dance
installations Halprin did in partnership with performance artist Eeo Stubblefield. At multiple
sites, Halprin and Stubblefield physically painted Halprin’s nude body with pigment and natural
materials that specifically compliment the distinct visual aesthetic of each environmental setting.
In these stunning landscapes, Halprin did simple movement improvisations. Filmmaker Andy
Abrahams Wilson, in collaboration with Halprin, turned the resulting site-specific dance pieces
into a series of dance for the camera vignettes, which are documented in Returning Home.
Noémie Lafrance is a New York City-based, Canadian-born site-specific choreographer.
Over her decade-long career, Lafrance’s dance locations have been as extravagant and varied as
a twelve story Stanford White stairwell (Descent, 2001-2003), a parking garage with the
spectators seated in parked cars (Noir, 2004), a massive abandoned swimming pool (Agora and
Agora II, 2005-2006), and the rooftop of a Frank Gehry building (Rapture, 2008). Lafrance’s
2009 work Home: the Body as a Place is a radically different approach to the idea of site-
specific dance. The work was performed indoors in Lafrance’s apartment with only herself and
another female dancer as the performers.37 LaFrance documented the piece in a short, informal
video of the same title, which opens with the explanatory statement “home invites the audience
to convene around the body, interact with the performer and explore the body as a place.”38 In
Home, Lafrance investigates how the body (especially the naked body) can be a site of creation
and meaning both literally and metaphorically.



























































37
“Noémie Lafrance,” Sens Production, http://sensproduction.org/Noémie-lafrance, n.p.
38
Noémie Lafrance. Home, 11 min., 36 sec.; Online Video; http://vimeo.com/11512883.


 25
 Historically, society viewed nudity in the outdoors as natural, and it was only in the
context of manmade environments that the undressed body became obscene.39 In contemporary
society, however, nakedness is almost universally conflated with eroticism. In these days of child
pornography scares and ubiquitous dirty locker-room scenes in teen movies, even previously
neutral situations (like unclothed children, public showers and nakedness in nature) are now
charged—making desexualized instances of undress extremely rare. Jones explains that, “nudity
is associated with sex because the naked body is a prerequisite for the sex.”40 In utilizing
nakedness in their dances, Halprin and Lafrance both must contend with the sexual connotations
inherent in removing clothing.
One key way that both choreographers direct their audiences’ responses away from the
erotic is by mediating their dances through the camera lens. Since their invention, people used
cameras to capture the naked body in motion. Pioneers, such as Eadweard J. Muybridge, made
extensive use of the educational, artistic and erotic properties of the unclothed moving figure. As
scholar M.T. Jones explains in an article on exhibitionism in online media, “by capturing
movement, film brought the naked body out of photographic abstraction, and amplified the
voyeuristic quality of the viewing experience, thus enhancing the object status of the naked
body.”41 The nude body moving on screen is the ultimate voyeuristic experience. Because it is
uncomplicated by the power that performers achieve through live theatrical embodiment and
because the camera frame can break up the exposed body into easily consumable pieces, moving
images heighten what Barcan describes as the “inevitable violence of subject/object relations.”42
In these ways, filmed performance enhances the audience’s power to objectify the performers.
The ability of film to direct the audience’s gaze, however, can also counteract this imbalance of
power and actually inhibit sexually-objectifying viewership because the camera frame
specifically delineates the frame of view. In this way, performing artists working with video can



























































39
M. T. Jones, “Mediated Exhibitionism: The Naked Body in Theory, Performance, and Virtual
Space,” (paper presentation, Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American
Culture Associations, New Orleans, Louisiana April 8-11, 2009)
http://mattsmediaresearch.com/MediatedExhibitionism.html. n.p.
40
ibid.
41
ibid.
42
Ruth Barcan, ''The Moral Bath of Bodily Unconsciousness: Female nudism, bodily exposure
and the gaze,” Continuum 15: 3 (2001): 305.


 26
precisely regulate what viewers see of their bodies, which, in turn, controls how their watchers
are seeing.
This mediated spectatorship is crucial in the unclothed sections of Home and Returning
Home. By participating in the film creation process, Lafrance and Halprin precisely control the
visual output of their works in ways that are not possible in live performance. By working in the
genre of video dance, these choreographers effectively temper the slippage of the gaze through
their cinematographic authorship—creating their own performer-spectator relationships
Within Returning Home and Home, Halprin and Lafrance create their own meaning by
generating liminal otherworldly spaces in which their performances are situated. These special
environments are necessary because of the cultural tendency toward automatic sexualization of
the unclothed body by the watcher. Scholar Rob Cover describes how “for nakedness to occur
among the gaze of others without sexuality… discrete frames or contexts need to be established
which permit the signification of that nakedness to elude sexuality.”43 In this vein, both Halprin
and LaFrance fashion alternate spaces in which they place their naked dancing bodies. Inside
these special performance settings, nudity sheds many of the usual associations the spectator may
put upon it and it is able to take on new meanings.
Halprin and Lafrance managed this escape from cultural constructs by creating, in their
respective performance places, what social theorist Erving Goffman refers to as a site of “playful
deviance.” These are spaces that exist outside the normal societal observation where individuals
can act more freely than in normal life. Scholar David Redmon succinctly explains how such a
site is created. “First there must be a ‘setting’ which supplies ‘the scenery and stage props for the
spate of human action played out before, within, or upon it.’ Second, individuals must enter these
settings because they cannot perform ‘until they have brought themselves to the appropriate
place and must terminate their performance once they leave’ (Goffman 1959:22). Third, these
settings offer ‘extra protection for performers who are or have momentarily become, highly
sacred’ (Goffman 1959:22).”44 Halprin and Lafrance both follow this schema. They use special
accoutrements and locations in Home and Returning Home in order to transform their dance



























































43
Rob Cover, “The Naked Subject: Nudity, Context and Sexualization in Contemporary,” Body
& Society 9:3 (2003): 56.
44
David Redmon, “Playful Deviance as an Urban Leisure Activity: Secret Selves, Self-
validation, and Entertaining Performances,” Deviant Behavior 24:1 (Jan. 2003): 28.


 27
arenas from everyday into extraordinary environments. Halprin worked with Stubblefield to find
visually stunning, secluded, natural locale that they turned into found art-type installations in
which Halprin could perform. Lafrance used her own house and through physical additions, like
a massive wooden banquet table, and behavioral proscriptions, such as making audience
members wash their hands and don nametags before entering the performance space,
transformed her living room into hallowed arena of ritual. These exclusive areas acted as safe
spaces wherein Halprin and Lafrance could expose their bodies without anxiety.
Though the image of unclothed women in nature is a firmly entrenched historical
construction appearing again and again in classical art such as literature, painting and sculpture,
modern legislation finds fault with it. “American law has long disapproved of public nudity,”
academic Jeffrey D. Mason explains, “usually describing the infraction as ‘indecent exposure’,
although some jurisdictions use the terms ‘public indecency’, ‘lewdness’, or ‘obscenity’.”45
Halprin’s choice to set her naked improvisations in outdoor settings carries the ideological
danger of reinforcing dated, essentialist gender stereotypes. At the same time, Halprin’s
unclothed dances also carry the very tangible peril of breaking social and legal codes. By being
undressed in the public sphere, Halprin very possibly risks being arrested and accused of
committing a crime of obscenity. In this harsh real-world context, Halprin’s exposed body
becomes a transgressive and potentially dangerous weapon.
Realistically, however, the inherent danger in Halprin’s disrobing in Returning Home
comes not from where she is undressing, but rather from what she is exposing. Being an
octogenarian at the time of the filming, Halprin’s body no longer conforms to the societal
standards for female beauty. In contemporary American society, women are supposed to be
young and supple while still buxom and fertile. An attractive lady should have a slim figure with
long legs paired with a shapely buttocks and perky breasts. Halprin’s aged and worn body does
not match this sleek and smooth ideal making her, according to cultural codes, no longer
desirable. Following this logic, in deference to misogynistic and patriarchal rules of propriety,
Halprin should hide her imperfect form from public view. Instead, in Returning Home Halprin
actively goes against societal taboos and proudly displays every inch of her body.



























































45
Jeffrey D. Mason, “‘Affront or Alarm’: Performance, the Law and the ‘Female Breast’ from
Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls,” New Theatre Quarterly 21 (2005): 179.


 28
 The expressly visual and bodily medium of dance is especially sensitive to cultural
proscriptions of female beauty. Feminist dance scholar Evan Alderson explains how Marx’s
theory of policing the body affects body image in the dance world. Marx postulated that
ideologies are standard values established by a dominant group and used to control other people
in the subsidiary classes. They become “a ‘veil’ of perception… which sublimates group
interests into a set of justifying ideals, ideals which from behind the veil appear as socially
integrated values.”46 The conception of a beautiful woman as young, delicate, and pale is an
ideological construction created by upper class white men—epitomizing the social biases of this
dominant class.47 This artificial and unrealistic ideal gets shared and passed down through the
generations until its unnaturally fabricated roots become almost completely obscured. Western
women who internalize this aesthetic as the desired goal then try and shape and change—through
dieting, exercise, makeup, plastic surgery and the like—their own figures. Such self-scrutiny is
especially rampant in the dance world, because a dancer’s livelihood is dependent on being
constantly surveyed, by self as well as by others.
Halprin’s unabashed display of her body is all the more radical in light of the dance
world’s obsession with looks. Through her dancing, Halprin actively engages in questioning
hegemonic conceptions of Western aesthetics—breaking down culturally pervasive negative
images of female nudity, such as the abject body. As described by feminist theorist Julia Kristeva
in her seminal “Approaching Abjection,” the abject is that which the body and mind abhors.
When confronted with it, one experiences “a gagging sensation, and, still farther down, spasms
in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase
heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.”48 When applied to gender and the female body,
the “abject” refers to what is commonly considered to be grotesque and abhorrent physical
aspects of women such as folds, orifices and bodily excretions.
The most damning factor that forces Halprin into the realm of the abject is her age. “An
aged woman, in particular,” explains Barcan, “may also be a cipher for the sexist and ageist
fantasms of our heritage—figures like witches, hags and crones, who were often associated with



























































46
Evan Alderson, “Ballet as Ideology: Giselle, Act 2,” Dance Chronicle (1997): 292.
47
ibid, 301.
48
Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed.
Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003): 390.


 29
nudity. The nudity of elderly people is rarely prized or publicized.”49 Halprin’s Returning Home
flies in the face of such ageism. In her dance vignettes, she flagrantly and unabashedly displays
her sagging, wrinkled and purportedly “abject” figure for the entire world to see. Through
explicit cinematographic choices Halprin even emphasizes these elements of her flesh by
zooming in on and having close-ups of the textured landscape of her body.
In Returning Home, Halprin pushes the abject concept of aging to its furthest extreme by
bringing in issues of decay and death. Female bodies are already connected to mortality, as
Barcan explains. “To the extent that ‘Woman’ is aligned with (vulnerable, weak, ultimately
uncontrollable) flesh, then death (the epitome of the vulnerability and uncontrollability of flesh)
can be understood as a ‘feminine’ state.”50 By exposing her undeniably female figure, Halprin
makes her body available to this flesh-vulnerability-death relationship. In one episode in
particular within Returning Home, she exaggerates and physicalizes this connection. This dance
section shows Halprin—body painted dark brown from head to toe and coated with rich, woody
debris—luxuriating in the fallen body of a massive decomposing tree trunk. After moving for a
few minutes, Halprin comes to rest lying on her back in the grotto of the tree with her arms
wrapped across her chest. Through the special effect of time-lapse, branches and other debris
slowly cover Halprin’s body until she is entirely engulfed by the earth and only the shallow slow
rise and fall of the earth betrays her presence. Clearly, Halprin is encouraging her viewers to
meditate on the mortality and ephemerality of her human form.
This dance segment in the woods is immediately followed, in Returning Home, by a clip
of Halprin cleaned, clothed and indoors discussing her own death. Calmly and with a smile,
Halprin conjectures that she is perhaps so drawn to natural settings because it is a way of, in her
words, “rehearsing for my own returning to the earth.”51 This macabre sentiment is softened by
her previous comment that after each site-specific improvisation she “always came back feeling
reborn in some way.”52 There is a sense that, for Halprin, death is not the end; it is just another
step in the continuous cycle of life. Her dancing within the forest vignette, too, highlights this
theme of reincarnation. At one point Halprin’s entire body is buried in sticks, leaves and bark.


























































49
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 198.
50
ibid, 118.
51
Anna Halprin, Returning Home: Moving With the Earth Body, DVD, Directed by Andy
Abrahams Wilson, Sausalito, CA: Open Eye Pictures, 2003.
52
ibid.


 30
From under this massive pile of earthen matter, her hands slowly feel their way upward—
reaching, pushing and finally breaking through to the light. Her limbs become like delicate
tendrils of budding shoots, pushing through the decaying debris of the forest floor, gathering
strength and nutrients from the expired plants and growing on up into the air. When
contemplated in related to the environment in this way, Halprin’s age is not undesirable or
abject, but rather is just the natural way of life.
Within today’s society, in deference to fear of the abject and rigorous social sanctions of
beauty, the bare surface of the female body is a battleground. Jones describes how, “shame
motivates the individual to conform to beauty ideals. Thus, social forums that are permissive of
public nudity often circumscribe it to approved body types and, in so doing, transform the naked
body into an unnatural costume.”53 When bodies, especially women’s bodies, are so carefully
policed, even nudity—ostensibly natural and pure—becomes just another highly regulated mode
of dress (or undress). This is unconsciously reflected in the phrase “in one’s birthday suit,” a
common twenty-first century American colloquialism for “in the nude.”54 This conception of
nakedness as a guise is not exclusive to the modern age, however. In ancient Greece, for
example, people viewed the exposed form as a costume—a special uniform one donned for
religious rituals or athletic competitions.55
In Returning Home, Halprin dons her own illusory costume, which allows her to create a
progressive personalized construction of nakedness. In her videodance pieces, Halprin utilizes
what scholar Lauri Lewin’s refers to as a “primal costume.” This is a cultural fantasy, which is
the “direct result of a dressed society’s longing for ‘a primal virtue, a primal human beauty, a
primal sexuality.’”56 According to Lewin, in undressing, a person is actually donning a fanciful
guise that allows them to get in touch with an ancient sense of, ostensibly, greater bodily truth.



























































53
M. T. Jones, “Mediated Exhibitionism: The Naked Body in Theory, Performance, and Virtual
Space,” (paper presentation, Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American
Culture Associations, New Orleans, Louisiana April 8-11, 2009)
http://mattsmediaresearch.com/MediatedExhibitionism.html. n.p.
54
Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, (London:
Routledge, 2002), 94.
55
Larissa Bonfante, “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art,” American Journal of Archaeology
93:4 (Oct., 1989): 548 and 554.
56
Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire, (London:
Routledge, 2002), 94.


 31
While the “primal costume” has the potentially negative outcomes of eroticizing and
sensationalizing the nude, it can also be positive and progressive because it enables the undresser
to access meanings of nakedness that are no longer present in modern day American society. “In
ancient times,” explains Barcan, “female nudity had magic power, like the phallus, and there
exists a long history of wild, powerful, sinister or sacred meanings of female nakedness. The
process of modernization involved the curbing and limiting of some of the archaic meanings of
female nakedness and the domestication of many of its wilder meanings.”57 By removing her
clothing to reveal her primal costume of nudity, however, a woman can connect with positive
and powerful primeval expressions of female body image, identity and sexuality.
Halprin’s elaborate body paint and attire made from found materials in Returning Home
is a physicalization of her empowering primal costume of nudity. To compliment the previously
discussed performance vignette, Halprin includes a filmed sequence of her artistic collaborator,
Stubblefield, physically applying the woody textural coating to Halprin’s flesh—emphasizing the
inherent fabrication of her skin covering. By ironically making her “primal costume” literal,
Halprin exaggerates its presence and thus its function of facilitating the reemergence of ancient,
more powerful and complex understandings of the female body. Simultaneously, by revealing its
existence, Halprin makes fun of the artificiality of her nude costume. Watching Stubblefield
throw, press, and brush this bark and detritus onto Halprin’s naked flesh draws the viewer’s
attention to the fact that the merging of nature and human in Halprin’s nakedness is actually a
carefully crafted artistic construction. These women are very intentionally authoring the visual
re-writing of Halprin’s naked body and, in their book, her revealed figure is beautiful, strong and
evocative.
In Returning Home, Halprin performs this reauthoring of her body from abject to
beautiful within specific liminal spaces of playful deviance that Goffman describes as
“backspaces.” This term refers to a place where a person can “stand exposed and find they need
not try to conceal their stigma, nor be overly concerned with cooperatively trying to disattend
it.”58 Such spaces, like nudist beaches or Mardi Gras’ Bourbon Street, allow those who enter
them to be free from particular societal prohibitions or cultural scorn for a short time. Halprin, in



























































57
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 191.
58
David Redmon, “Playful Deviance as an Urban Leisure Activity: Secret Selves, Self-
validation, and Entertaining Performances,” Deviant Behavior 24:1 (Jan. 2003): 28.


 32
Returning Home, creates her own personal backspaces out of the aesthetically pleasing natural
environments where she chooses to perform her dances. In these exceptional places, she escapes
the oppressive grasp of the omnipresent cultural dichotomy of “attractive” versus abject female
bodies. During her dances, Halprin’s aged, unclothed form does not look ancient, saggy,
wrinkled or undesirable. Instead, in her movement, Halprin promotes a “sense of reverence for
this aged body… It’s a beautiful old body”59 Within her personal backspace, Halprin is able to
define her own body image and assert her nude figure as attractive, not abject.
The second unnamed site-specific dance piece in Returning Home, in particular,
celebrates Halprin’s nude body and articulates her personal redefinition of aesthetics of
attractiveness. Covered only in sky blue body paint and wearing a crown of plant roots, Halprin
begins the scene in an artful tableau—sitting in a hollowed-out grotto underneath a tree. Slowly,
Halprin picks up the brown soil and lovingly smears it all over her face, breasts, arms, and legs.
Her fingers luxuriate in their careful caressing explorations of the irregular and nuanced
landscape of her physicals self. Halprin’s delight in feeling her body is unmistakable; her simple,
yet exciting, tactile dance invites viewers to share in her palpable enjoyment of her naked body
and appreciate her extraordinary beauty—the beauty of age.
In Home, Lafrance too redefines the possibilities of the naked female body. Compared
with the rest of Lafrance’s oeuvre, Home is something of an exception. In juxtaposition to the
undulating roof of a breathtaking Frank Gehry building or an abandoned greater-than-Olympic
size swimming pool, the site for Home—Lafrance’s apartment—seems inconsequential. Even
though, as Lafrance explains, “most of the work that I do I’m working with sites—architecture,
outdoors, indoors—... [with Home] I was wanting to ask the question ‘how is the body a
space’—not only on the surface of the body as like a place where you could actually put things,
but also as a place that stores emotions and history and past contact with other people.”60 Next to
Descent, which was seen by over 5,000 people, or Agora and Agora II, which had a total
audience of over 15,000, Home’s twenty to twenty-four person audiences are miniscule.61 Yet, as
Lafrance describes, it “is a different form of public art, making the body public as a site and



























































59
Anna Halprin, Returning Home: Moving With the Earth Body, DVD, Directed by Andy
Abrahams Wilson, Sausalito, CA: Open Eye Pictures, 2003.
60
Noémie Lafrance, in Skype interview with the author, January, 14 2011.
61
“Noémie Lafrance,” Sens Production, http://sensproduction.org/Noémie-lafrance, n.p.


 33
touching on viewer’s sensitive zones. It’s a much smaller reach and concept than our usual work,
with only 20-24 spectators at a time.”62 Obviously, in Lafrance’s opinion, Home still is public
and site-specific art—all that changed from her previous projects is the scale and form of her
installation space. And despite her long history of vast, complex large-scale pieces, Lafrance
professes, “I love intimate.”63 This reverence for small-scale is apparent in Home; Lafrance takes
her prodigious skill at creating immense, immersive dance environments and applies it to the
microcosm of her living room and the bodies of herself and dancer Maré Hieronimus. She
creates a series of movement vignettes, involving varying degrees of dress and undress, that
revolve around potent images such as Japanese tea ceremonies, Russian nesting dolls, teeth
brushing, and more.
From the very first image in the piece, Home explores relations scale. The dance starts
with the eight-months-pregnant Lafrance slowly crawling across the big wooden dining table
wearing almost nothing, save a pair of antlers on her head. Her right leg and hip are covered with
a miniature diorama of an outdoor landscape. As viewer and long-time dance critic, Deborah
Jowitt, described it, “two-inch parsley florets serve as trees. Minuscule animals are scattered
around, some in a herd near a single piece of fencing. It’s a devastatingly brilliant and witty
image… of the female body as a fecund place in more ways than one.” 64 The choreographer’s
assistants hand out magnifying glasses, encouraging the viewers to closely examine this
Lilliputian world, which runs along Lafrance’s thighs and legs. This section, according to
Lafrance, was trying to express an artistic hypothesis of hers that “maybe inside our body there
are particles that are inhabited with people like the planet earth. This idea that infinity would be
expressed in something contained inside something, inside something, inside something….”65
Lafrance was picturing the body as a sort of human fractal that continues on forever into the
microcosmic, revealing layer after layer of life. This opening image of woman/artist/body/soon-



























































62
Noémie Lafrance, interview by Kelsey Keith, “Exclusive: Home by Noémie Lafrance — Our
Bodies, Ourselves,” Flavorwire, April 3, 2009. http://flavorwire.com/16707/home-by-noemie-
lafrance-our-bodies-ourselves.
63
Noémie Lafrance, personal communication with author, September 8, 2010.
64
Deborah Jowitt, “Noémie Lafrance, Melanie Maar, and Keith Hennessy Inscribe the Body,”
Review of Home by Noémie Lafrance, The Village Voice, April 8, 2009.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-08/dance/no-mie-lafrance-melanie-maar-and-keith-
hennessy-inscribe-the-body/.
65
Noémie Lafrance, in Skype interview with the author, January 14, 2011.


 34
to-be mother spawning her own miniature ecosystem from her body is also fecund
ideologically—generating an abundance of different interpretations.
By starting her piece displaying an entire world on her right lower half, Lafrance
instantly situates the work within the rest of her artistic oeuvre, which exploits the specificity of
place. In creating her dances, Lafrance typically starts with a site such as a staircase, parking
garage, abandoned pool, etc. The site was also the genesis of inspirational for Home, but in this
case the site was not an external environment, but rather Lafrance’s own flesh.66 Before each
performance, LaFrance and her helpers took about an hour transforming her body into a pastoral
nature scene. They painted her leg hair green, and attached dirt and scale models of trees,
animals, and outdoor structures like fences to her legs with honey, metamorphosizing Lafrance’s
body into an outdoor environment.67 Her hair became the grass, her body’s curves morph into
rolling hills, and her gradual movement along the table turns into the undetectable but ever-
present motion of the very earth itself.
As a choreographer, Lafrance’s living diorama is a metaphor for the creative process.
From a poetic viewpoint, Lafrance is making literal Ted Shawn’s (forefather of American
modern dance) famous quote “dance is the only art in which we ourselves are the stuff of which
it is made.” In this scene of Home the entirety of Lafrance’s being is literally the physical
bedrock and generative force behind the piece. Just as her mind conceptually spawns her dance
choreography, so does her flesh become the very stage on which the performative action unfolds.
The fact that Lafrance is a woman and, at the time of performing, was eight months
pregnant opens up this poignant opener to feminist readings. From one perspective, Lafrance
exposes her body in an essentialist feminist way. By donning antlers, displaying her very fertile
belly and creating a miniature outdoor world on her leg, she turns herself into the image of a
primal female goddess. She taps into ancient conceptions of women’s bodies as sites of creative
energy, because, according to feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, the much-trumpeted Freudian
“fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power.”68 Ostensibly,
men might fear this purely female type of strength because it is a power they will never posses



























































66
Noémie Lafrance, in Skype interview with the author, January 14, 2011.
67
Noémie Lafrance, personal communication with author, September 8, 2010.
68
Julia Kristeva, “From Filth to Defilement,” The Powers of Horror: Essay on Abjection (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 77.


 35
nor wield. Contemporary patriarchal society, therefore, represses expressions of generative
ability. For example, social codes dictate that soon-to-be mothers should not bare their bellies in
public, even though the only difference between a pregnant stomach and any other is the size.
Thus, modesty is not really the issue. Rather, a woman cannot display her pregnant belly because
it is an unmistakable physical representation of her female power: the awesome ability to create
human life. In Home, Lafrance blatantly ignores the cultural proscription and proudly displays
her powerful pregnant body.
At the same time, by emphasizing her leg hair, Lafrance is going against the established
rules for women in contemporary western society. Feminist theorist Sandra Lee Bartky
articulates those unwritten social codes wherein, “a woman’s skin must be soft, supple, hairless,
and smooth…hair must be removed not only from the face but from large surfaces of the body as
well, from legs and thighs.”69 Not only is Lafrance not removing her hair, in Home she
purposefully draws attention to it—painting it in order to create an entire miniature scene
growing up from and moving around in the hairy, grassy landscape of her culturally deemed
abhorrent, unshaved leg. She takes a typically abhorred element of the female body and turns it
into something undeniably beautiful.
Home was only successful when the audience members fully immersed themselves into
the work. Because the situation of the performance was so intimate the performers, Lafrance and
Hieronimus, were extremely vulnerable. During a few shows, some viewer/participants so
separated themselves from the dancers that they did not treat the women with the common
decency normally afforded to fellow human beings. Rather, these individuals saw the dancers as
merely objects, which caused these select audience members to do things like manhandle
Lafrance’s body or write disrespectful things on her collaborator’s skin.70 While these reactions
were thankfully not the norm, they do, to some eyes, illuminate how real and unconsciously
integrated bodily objectification—especially the objectification of the female form—is in
contemporary American society. These incidents also show how tenuous and fragile Lafrance’s



























































69
Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in
Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia
Medina and Sarah Stanbury. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 136.
70
Noémie Lafrance, personal communication with author, September 8, 2010.


 36
ritualistic space was, and how, just under the surface of the piece, runs a current of potential
sexual and physical danger for the women performers.
One of the ways Lafrance combated the potentially dangerous self-distancing of viewers
in Home was by integrating them into the piece. The entire work, with its audience initiation
procedures, natural themes, and nudity falls into the category of ritual as famously defined by
anthropologist Victor Turner. The introductory rites of hand washing, creating nametags, and
being ushered into seats along a large dining room table, incorporates the audience as initiants in
the ritual with Lafrance and Hieronimus. As Turner explains, becoming a ritual participant “is
more that just a matter of entering a temple—there must be in addition a rite that changes the
quality of time also, or constructs a cultural realm which is… beyond or outside the time which
measures secular process and routines.”71 In conversation, Lafrance expressly noted how pieces
of Home were “like a ritual.”72 By requiring the viewers to perform the simple but symbolic acts
of cleansing and naming, Lafrance subtly, but clearly, turned the space of her house into an
otherworldly realm wherein the watchers became initiated participants in the dance ritual.
This air of collective ritual is one of the things that kept the dancers safe in Home as they
exposed themselves bodily and emotionally. Normally in performances, dancers are protected by
the bureaucratic and operating structures of the presenting organization. A typical theater has
ushers, managers and supervisors who act as monitors and, in severe cases, bouncers to temper
audiences’ reactions. Additionally, in social situations, individuals tend to practice what Michel
Foucault calls “discipline.” This term describes the phenomenon of a person abiding by the laws
and moral codes of proper conduct even though they might not be in the presence of an authority
figure. This acting with propriety without having to be actively regulated is effectively a policing
of self. Because Lafrance’s piece was not performed in a normal public venue, however, she
could not count on the audience feeling bound by the usual codes of conduct they uphold within
a traditional performance space. Rather, Home took place in her Brooklyn loft, a private arena
that Lafrance made available to the select outsiders who purchased admission. Likely, most of
those who attended Lafrance’s off-the-grid shows were initiated members of the dance world,



























































71
Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay on Comparative
Symbology,” in From Ritual to Theatre, (New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications,
1982), 24.
72
ibid.


 37
but since ticketing was open to the general public, ostensibly, anyone could have attended.
Because the dancers did not have the safety net of theater personnel nor could they necessarily
count on the audience self-policing because they were in the ambiguous space of a house, the
dancers depended on the collective unity and sacred feeling that comes from their work being a
ritual to force viewers to behave respectfully.
In her vanguard essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” feminist writer and philosopher
Helene Cixous preaches that “woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into
history—by her own movement.”73 Cixous calls for a new form of language by women, of
women and for women. English, for example, is inherently masculine-based with terms like
“human” establishing maleness as the normative and descriptive words such as “seminal,”
declaring patriarchal superiority. It follows then that women who are using English are
inherently oppressing themselves or at least limited in their artistic freedom because they are
expressing themselves through an intrinsically patriarchal medium. In Cixous’ estimation, “by
writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her,
which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display… write yourself. Your body must be
heard.”74 This idea, conceived of and expounded upon by the French feminists Kristeva, Luce
Irigaray and Cixous herself in the middle of the twentieth century, is called a l’ecriture feminine.
The closing section of Lafrance’s piece Home seems to directly address this classic
feminist theory. It begins with Hieronimus playing the role of a schoolteacher leading the
participants in a group writing exercise. Each person jots a word on a sheet of paper and passes it
to the person to their right, all the way around the table until the paper has a whole twenty-word
sentence on it. Hieronimus, standing at the head of the table, passes out sheets from the huge
stacks of paper and reads aloud the audience’s creative results as the pages circle back around to
her. Throughout the exercise, she verbally encourages them, though her comments get
progressively more aggressive. She keeps commanding them to write and pass more quickly
until the whole table is in a veritable writing frenzy. At this climax, Hieronimus spills the piles of
paper down the table, undresses and climbs on top of the sheets. Now silent, Hieronymus directs
by example—taking up a watercolor pencil and drawing a few words on her body. She then lies
down and lets the audience continue to compose their word poetry, this time with Hieronimus'


























































73
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1: 4 (Summer, 1976): 875.
74
ibid, 880.


 38
blank body as their paper. One viewer remembers herself thinking about how Hieronimus'
“composure is astonishing. I pick up her wrist and turn it to inscribe a bracelet of words; I
wonder what it feels like to her. One person writes a phrase in her armpit, and my skin
prickles.”75 This switch from writing on paper to writing on human brings all five senses into the
equation; instead of being trapped in the cerebral landscape of language, the participants must
now open to, and engage with, the world of the body— someone else’s and their own.
The video of Home records some of the wide variety of words written on Hieronymus
during a performance. One shot pans across from the “om” being written next to “tiny toe” on
the dancer’s toes, through “synovial” and “angry” emblazoned on the her left ankle, to the phrase
“agent provocateur…” boxed off across her entire left calf. All these different words become
emotionally charged since they are recorded on a woman’s prostrate flesh. “Agent provocateur,”
especially, engenders a palpable response when viewed in this situation. What illicit act is the
writer claiming this stranger is provoking him or her to do? Because of their proximity with
Harmonious’ body, these ordinary characters inscribing themselves in simple black ink, become
accusatory, aggressive and downright alarming. Actually coming face to face with the reality of
the offensive and disturbing ideas that people project onto people’s bodies—especially women’s
bodies—every day, through seeing them inscribed on Hieronimus' flesh, forces the audience to
rethink their own gendered conceptions about the female body.
At the same time, a result of this embodied writing is a collective catharsis. Lafrance
herself describes this interaction as being a release from oppressive stories and writing and,
presumably, a release from all the verbal and narrative proscriptions, especially for women,
hidden within stories and writing.76 Spelling them out on Hieronimus' body literalizes these
unspoken frameworks, thoughts and images. Perhaps by writing “agent provocateur” on
Hieronimus' flesh, the author was able to rid himself or herself of that unpleasant thought. From
this perspective, the dancer’s figure acts as a receptacle—taking unto it the power and aggression
of language and neutralizing it. Hieronimus' body, in its non-judgmental acceptance of the



























































75
Deborah Jowitt, “Noémie Lafrance, Melanie Maar, and Keith Hennessy Inscribe the Body,”
Review of Home by Noémie Lafrance, The Village Voice, April 8, 2009.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-08/dance/no-mie-lafrance-melanie-maar-and-keith-
hennessy-inscribe-the-body/.
76
Noémie Lafrance, personal communication with author, September 8, 2010.


 39
writing, admonishes the words of their potency, turning them into simply beautiful, black,
graphic patterns covering smooth white skin.
This section, additionally, acted as the culmination of the relationship between audience
and performer in Home. As one viewer recalls, “one of the most beautiful moments in the piece
is when she [Lafrance] is naked, on the table (we’re all seated around a big banquet table),
arranging a series of Russian Nesting dolls while whispering ‘something inside something inside
something…’ She looks so full: full with child, her breasts full with milk; that I found myself
astonished, wondering what it must feel like to be so completely full. Full to bursting.”77 For that
viewer, the mere sight of Lafrance made her long for some sort of corporeal connection with the
performer. By physically touching and drawing on Hieronimus' body during the closing ritual,
audience members are finally able to consummate the bodily connection that had been
developing between themselves and the dancers during the course of the work and, through their
writing, contribute part of themselves to it. Though spectators watching Home on screen cannot
tangibly engage in the aforementioned tactile bond, by vicariously living through the spectator-
participants captured on film, the video viewers can too achieve this heightened connection with
the performers.
Practically and ideologically, Halprin and Lafrance’s pieces Returning Home and Home
share many commonalities besides sharing similar titles. They each displayed their culturally
taboo bodies to the public—Halprin in order to establish an aesthetic of aged beauty and
Lafrance to tap into the generative power of her pregnant self. The choreographers also chose to
share their artwork with the world at large through the media of film, though Lafrance did also
invite audience members/participants to attend her performances. In Returning Home and Home,
both performers position their nude bodies in relation to nature—Halprin by actually dancing
outdoors in various scenes of natural splendor and Lafrance by creating her own miniature
natural world on the landscape of her body. Both women may be seen within classic French
feminist theories—Halprin rallying against the conception of the abject body and Lafrance
literalizing the idea of a l’ecriture feminine. Despite the unquestionable differences that also
existed between them, in the aforementioned ways Halprin and Lafrance both effectively created



























































77
Andy, “Home is,” Review of Home by Noémie Lafrance, Culturebot April 1, 2009
http://culturebot.net/2009/04/2984/home-is/.


 40
nurturing spaces in which they could bare their figures in order to tap into their bodies’ unique
power and ability to connect in original and meaningful ways with their audiences.


 41
 CHAPTER 4

DECENT EXPOSURE: MEDIATIONS OF MALE NUDITY IN

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ’S MYENDLESSLOVE AND EIKO AND
KOMA’S NAKED

Men have always held a complicated place in the world of American modern dance. Ted
Shawn in the early decades of the twentieth century was the first of many male artists to
endeavor to create a space for men in modern dance. Before Shawn, the field had been wholly
gynocentric; all the foremothers of the form focused on creating a medium of expression almost
exclusively for women. Thus, Shawn spent his entire artistic career trying to prove to a skeptical
public that dancing could be a virile and masculine endeavor.78 Oddly, in Western concert
dance’s infancy during the Baroque era, the business was largely a male preserve.79 It is only
within the past century or two that essentialist Victorian conceptions of separate spheres for the
sexes have moralized and stigmatized male performance. Dance and gender studies scholar
Ramsay Burt explains, “‘Modern’ ideas about masculine social behavior and the male body,
which developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have exerted a residual
influence on more recent social attitudes towards creativity and expressiveness of male artists as
a whole up to the present.”80 When it comes to male performing artists, contemporary American
society still clings to regressive conceptions of dancing as sissy, unmanly and homosexual. This



























































78
Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
2007), 87.
79
Susan Au, Ballet & Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1988), 25.
80
Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
2007), 13.


 42
cultural perspective thus colors all men who perform in America including the modern dance
choreographers and performers Miguel Gutierrez and Takashi Koma Yamada.
In Gutierrez’ piece myendlesslove and in Koma’s collaboration with Eiko entitled Naked,
the two men confront another omnipresent stigma: male bodily exposure. Barcan describes how
in Western society there is a “modern taboo on the penis in public space. It can also be seen as
evidence of the persistence of the ancient attribution of secret or magical powers to the penis. It
also draws on the prevailing cultural homology between the penis and a weapon and on women’s
fear of the actualization of this homology in rape.”81 In contemporary society male nudity is not
just looked down upon, it is actively decried and often feared. Perhaps this strong implicit
interdict against penile display is the reason that so few men—especially heterosexual men—
choose to perform naked in avant-garde dance. This proscription is in direct opposition to the
typical cultural conception of unclothed women. “The naked female body may still be considered
morally dangerous (seductive, tempting, likely to lead one astray),” explains Barcan, “but is less
likely to be construed as quite so literally deviant or criminal as is the naked male body in public.
A naked female body on the streets is more likely to be seen as in danger rather than
dangerous.”82 Though Gutierrez and Koma do not reveal themselves on the street, they both bare
their flesh in public venues in front of strangers of different ages and both sexes. When Gutierrez
and Koma shed their clothes they are inevitably confronting their audience members,’ especially
the females,’ culturally embedded adverse responses to exposed male body parts such as fear and
also awkwardness, discomfort, unfamiliarity etc. For this reason, Gutierrez and Koma use
specific strategies in order to subvert society’s deeply ingrained anxiety surrounding male bodily
exposure. Moreover, Gutierrez and Koma complicate this important but limited and
unrealistically negative view of nudity—actively soliciting from their audiences varied responses
to their naked bodies.
Gutierrez is a choreographer and performer currently based in Brooklyn, New York,
though his artistic education was both geographically and stylistically diverse—from San
Francisco to New York City to Europe, working with choreographers and companies such as Joe
Goode Performance Group, Jennifer Lacey, and John Jasperse. In his own work, both as a soloist
and with his company the Powerful People, Gutierrez explores compelling subject matter such as


























































81
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 185.
82
ibid, 110.


 43
human emotions or philosophical investigations into the nature of existence. His solo
myendlesslove, which he worked on as a 2006 fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for
Choreography (MANCC) in Tallahassee, Florida, is an introspective solo that pairs his dancing
with live and recorded video and music. Gutierrez explores his sexuality through his various
performative activities in myendlesslove (singing, dancing, speaking, stripping, etc.).83
Though the work was officially premiered on Saturday November 11, 2006 at the 19th
annual MIX, New York’s Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, this thesis focuses on the
piece as it was worked on during Gutierrez’s October 22 to November 9, 2006 tenure at
MANCC. The fact that only a few days transpired between the two dates makes this chapter’s
analysis of the earlier iteration minimally problematic. From a scholarly perspective,
investigating Gutierrez’s residency is exceptionally fruitful because the superb documentation
crew of MANCC filmed over forty video tapes during Gutierrez’s time at the center—including
interviews, rehearsals and more formal choreographic showings. The abundance and diversity of
this footage provides exceptional depth and variety of information about Gutierrez and his work.
Also, while at MANCC Gutierrez more intimately confronted the cultural biases surrounding
male nudity. Although Gutierrez’s creative residency with MANCC was housed in the Florida
State University School of Dance, FSU, in general, is a large educational institution located in
the largely conservative city of Tallahassee, which is rife with societal stigmas. FSU is a non-
specialized university; consequently, the population is young—some students are even minors—
and the majority of the student body is uninitiated into the world of dance. Compared with the
unproblematic and welcoming situation of an experimental lesbian and gay film festival in New
York City, Gutierrez’s time at FSU’s choreographic center more tangibly confronted the biases
against male bodily exposure omnipresent in contemporary society.84
The way that Gutierrez approaches his undressing in myendlesslove is integral to how the
audience perceives his nakedness. For most of the dance Gutierrez is clad in the somewhat
revealing (though not in a particularly aesthetically pleasing way) outfit of a form-fitting, black,
long sleeved, v-neck shirt; small, tight, light gray briefs; calf-height argyle socks and mid-calf


























































83
Though I am focusing on his use of nudity in myendlesslove in this paper, it is important to
note is that not all of Gutierrez works utilize nudity, and even in myendlesslove only one short
section features Gutierrez in a full state of undress.
84
“myendlesslove (2006),” Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, accessed February 17,
2011, http://www.miguelgutierrez.org/pieces/myendlesslove/.


 44
tan stiletto boots. The nude section comes towards the middle of the dance, when the audience is
already familiar with Gutierrez and used to seeing his body. In a pedestrian fashion, Gutierrez
walks to the back of the stage space and meticulously, but without theatrical emphasis, removes
his clothes starting with his top, followed by his necklace and finishing with his underwear; he
then adjusts his genitals and fixes his hair. Gutierrez imbues this series of actions with such
emphatic, but not affected, functionality that they read as no more unexpected or provocative
than watching someone changing in a locker room. And the clarity of his task—removing a
layer, folding it and then placing it on the floor—makes his final, full-body exposure the
inevitable logical conclusion of his endeavor rather than a sudden dramatic surprise or the
consummation of a suspenseful build up. This straightforward treatment of the nude body
intentionally subverts the cultural conception of male genital display as shocking, aggressive,
overtly sexual or imposing and instead establishes Gutierrez’ nakedness as innocuous and
habitual. By minimizing the cultural baggage typically associated with penile exposure,
Gutierrez highlights the possibility that he can create his own concept of male nakedness.
One key way that Gutierrez takes control of the meanings implicit in his bare body is by
pairing his nudity with text. Dance scholar Karl Toepfer explains that by combining exposure of
flesh and voice a dancer can achieve a “more naked” body. In his words, “a completely
unclothed body, with genitals exposed, can become ‘more naked’ or signify even greater
vulnerability by speech emanating from it, speech addressed to it, or speech about it”.85
Undressing reveals the physical self, but a dancer is more than just a hollow shell. By verbally
communicating a performer can easily and clearly unveil the intellectual, spiritual and emotional
elements of his or her being. Thus, a speaking naked body is more fully exposed than a merely
nude one because it also exposes the mind. Toepfer’s argument that the fullest nudity
incorporates the voice gives rise to a holistic somatic. Frequently in dance, the body becomes
merely the sum of its physical parts. From Toepfer’s perspective, however, the voice is as much
a part of the body as any corporeal component. Gutierrez similarly understands the relationship
of text and dance in his art, saying,
increasingly the way speech exists in my work is that it is a choreographic act. I
design [it] in relationship to and as an extension of the rest of the body’s action.



























































85
Karl Toepfer, “Nudity and Textuality in Postmodern Performance,” Performing Arts Journal
18, no. 3 (Sept., 1996): 77.


 45
 I make sound when I warm up. I make sound when I’m thinking out loud. my
earliest professional dance experiences were with people where talking was part of the
deal.
again, talking/speech is just one more thing that we DO. I never understand the
presumption that dancers are meant to be silent. a lot of times when I see dance I wonder
why people’s lips are closed. it’s such a big part of our bodies. why wouldn’t I use it?
I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 13 years old. language making, writing, words,
singing... all of it has been a huge part of my life as an artist. [lack of capitalization sic]86
Gutierrez’ personal relationship to his speech fuses his voice and his physical body to create a
greater-than-corporeal understanding of selfhood. Because of this integration of voice into body,
Gutierrez’s performance aligns with Toepfer’s assertion and his verbalization is, in a way,
analogous with his stripping, in that the speaking bares his private mental parts just as the
undressing exposes his hidden physical features.
Onstage, Gutierrez uses his speech to reflect upon his body, imbuing his physical form
with qualities of cerebral and independent thought. One particularly striking example of this
relationship Gutierrez builds between his verbal and physical selves is in a mantra-like repetition
towards the end of myendlesslove. Though this monologue is extensive, the closing lines read:
I went to my fingers and I realized I love you.
I went to my dick and I realized I love you.
I went to my ass and I realized I love you.
I went to my legs and I realized I love you.
I went to my feet and I realized I love you.
I went to my toes and I realized I love you.
I went to my bed and I realized I love you.
I went to my dreams and I realized I love you.87

The beginning items in this laundry list draw the audience’s attention to very specific anatomical
elements of the performer. Yet, the text is linking these body parts to the intangible realm of
emotions; Gutierrez is claiming that from investigating, for example, his feet he became aware of
his feelings of love. Thus, Gutierrez imbues his bodily figure with additional meanings and
abilities than are typically ascribed to mere flesh.
This unique verbal treatment of the body reflects on Gutierrez’ nakedness earlier in the
piece and causes audience members to rethink how they understood and connected to Gutierrez’s



























































86
Miguel Gutierrez, in e-mail interview with the author, April 5, 2010.
87
Miguel Gutierrez, myendlesslove, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography,
MiniDV, Tape 31, 2006.


 46
body. At this point in the dance the stage is in a blackout so the audience cannot see the
performer; they can only hear his voice. Spectators, upon hearing Gutierrez verbally highlight
aspects of his anatomy that they cannot actually see, are probably apt to use their imaginations—
especially since at this point in the piece viewers have just spent about forty minutes staring at
Gutierrez’s half-undressed figure. When Gutierrez names his private parts, spectators are likely
transported, mentally, back to the unclothed section of the work. The specific speech that
Gutierrez pairs with this verbal/mental nakedness informs audience members’ understanding of
his bare body and pushes them to think about Gutierrez’s private regions as having the power of
emotive thinking and quantitative reasoning. In this way, Gutierrez’s sexual organs transcend
their wholly libidinous role, as proscribed by mainstream society, and achieve deeper meanings
and purpose. In Gutierrez’s recitation, he empowers his body parts while simultaneously
encouraging his audience to investigate new, different and more complicated understandings of
his nudity.
In myendlesslove, Gutierrez uses nakedness as a way to explore his sexuality. The dance
is a personal journey on which Gutierrez embarks in front of the judging, witnessing, validating
or supporting eyes of his audience. Gutierrez describes the work on his website as “a (almost)
solo performance about sex, desire and objectification which incorporates movement, video and
music. The piece unravels as a search for the poetics of gay sex, exploiting time-honored clichés
about sentimentality, longing, and how we look beyond ourselves for love.”88 Thus, the entire
work exists within the context of gay culture at large and Gutierrez’s personal understanding of
his homosexuality, in specific.
For the entire history of the form, male modern dancers have struggled against belittling
and dismissive labeling as effeminate and homosexual, which are symptomatic of the anxiety the
majority of (straight) men in the U.S. feel about the male sexual body. Realistically, however,
within the art field, and especially the subgenre of dance, homosexual men actually are visible in
larger percentages than in the rest of American society. “On the fringe of society and receptive to
the unconventional,” explains Hanna, “the art world offers gay men an opportunity to express an
aesthetic sensibility that is emotional and erotic, an insulation from a rejecting society, an avenue



























































88
“myendlesslove (2006),” Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, accessed February 17,
2011, http://www.miguelgutierrez.org/pieces/myendlesslove/.


 47
of courtship, and an arena in which to deal with homosexual concerns.”89 Dance provides an
avenue through which homosexual males can explore and express their non-mainstream
sexuality.
In myendlesslove, Gutierrez expresses his personal and complex sexuality to the
audience. According to fashion historian Joanne B. Eicher, historically, “fashion itself may have
provided the most important signifier in the construction of queer identities in the West. Gay
men were marked simply by being fashionable against the backdrop of a masculinity”90
Gutierrez’s disjointed and not particularly attractive outfit blatantly does not conform to this
swish queer stereotype. Furthermore, by removing his clothing, Gutierrez removes this easily
readable external symbol of homosexuality (signifying layer) altogether. Interestingly, Gutierrez
does not remove absolutely all of his clothes; he keeps his shoes on. His footwear for this piece
is a pair of tan, calf-height, square-toed boots with two or three-inch stiletto heels. In
contemporary society, explain fashion historians Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-
Higgins, the “establishing [of] gendered forms of dress for males and females provides a visually
economical way to reinforce the fact that wearers have the sex organs that are the primary
physical distinctions between the sexes.”91 High-heeled shoes, as an example of gendered
women’s clothing, act as a visible external signal of the concealed primary and secondary female
sex characteristics of the wearer’s body. Because Gutierrez retains his heels in the naked section
of myendlesslove, the gender implied by his footwear opposes the gender unquestionably
established by his penis. In this place of contradiction and confusion, Gutierrez is able to assert
his personal homosexuality, which relates to, but is not rigidly defined by, either of the
aforementioned external gender indicators: biology nor fashion.
By exposing his body and establishing his gay sexual identity, Gutierrez subverts
females’ anxiety about his body, while increasing males.’ Gutierrez’s homosexuality removes
him from the omnipresent cultural paradigm of men dominating women and establishes



























































89
Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex and Gender (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1988), 136.
90
Joanne B. Eicher, “Dress, Gender and the Public Display of Skin,” in Body Dressing, ed.
Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (New York: Berg, 2001), 218.
91
Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, “Definition and Classification of Dress:
Implications for Analysis of Gender Roles,” in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning, ed.
Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (New York: Berg, 1992), 17.


 48
Gutierrez as innocuous and “safe.” Furthermore, by revealing himself Gutierrez exposes his body
literally and metaphorically. Scholar Sarah Kent explains that, “those few inches that should
epitomize male strength and potency need more protection than any other part of the male or
female anatomy. The sight of the limp penis sparks off the anxiety and ambivalence that men
feel about their own sexuality.”92 The naked male in art, especially, in the words of art historian
Richard Leppert, “produce[s] tension in the male viewer, who, when looking, is forced to
acknowledge the power exerted on him by the ideal body of another male.”93 As a whole,
straight American men—the dominant socio-sexual group—love to assert their macho sexuality,
through catcalls and the like but, ironically, are hyper-fearful of the powerful sexuality of other
men. Male nudity in art, such as that in myendlesslove, exposes this mainstream male
vulnerability. Thus, by getting naked Gutierrez is, at the same time, making himself harmless and
inoffensive from one (female) perspective, while becoming increasingly contentious and
provocative in the eyes of other (male) viewers.
Gutierrez, as a gay male dancer, uses his nude homosexual figure to initiate a dialogue
with the audience and encourage reflexivity. Typically, Western concert dance has traditionally
maintained a theatrical “fourth wall” by keeping a literal and symbolic distance between
audience and performer. However, “gay male dancing bodies,” theorizes Burt “because of their
positioning within discourses on gender and sexuality, have the potential to subvert notions of
disinterestedness and objectivity that are a prerequisite for the rational unitary subject.”94
According to Burt, gay male dancers, such as Gutierrez, achieve agency by dissolving the
conception of the neutral, disinterested spectator through engaging them in a dialogue of (sexual)
meaning. Since a dialogue necessitates two actively engaged participants sharing their ideas,
engendering such an interchange has the potential to establish a space for a gay male voice in a
largely heteronormative society.



























































92
Sarah Kent, “Looking Back,” in Women’s Images of Men, ed. Sarah Kent and Jaqueline
Morreau (London: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1985), 72-73.
93
Richard Leppert, The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western
Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2007), 165.
94
Ramsay Burt, “Dissolving in Pleasure: The Threat of the Queer Male Dancing Body,” in
Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, ed. Jane Desmond,
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 210.


 49
 By removing his clothes in myendlesslove, Gutierrez forcibly exposes himself to an erotic
discourse—compelling the audience into a dialogue with him. After putting on Sonique’s 1998
garage house sensation “It Feels so Good” and casually undressing down to his socks and a pair
of beige high-heeled boots, he walks over to a small square of pink linoleum that had been sitting
for the duration of the work in the middle of the floor. Stepping onto this portable stage surrogate
Gutierrez begins to perform. He spreads his legs, plants his feet in a wide parallel second
position and bares his crotch for all the audience to see. In that power stance, Gutierrez proceeds
to roll his head and shoulders in slow seductive circles that are part 1980s aerobics warm-up and
part cheesy sex show. The whole time, his arms remain close to his body and his hands never
leave his skin. As he rotates his torso, his palms slowly slide up and down along his upper thighs
and hips, as if inviting viewers to imagine their hands following the same trajectory. After a
whole series of these alternating circles, he brings his feet together and simply stands facing the
audience for a thirty-two-count instrumental break in the music. Then, he resumes dancing. This
specific use of nudity draws viewers into a dialogue of intrigue, passion and desire with
Gutierrez.
Though he does not deny that his engagement with the audience can be sexual, Gutierrez
also expands the dialogic possibilities to include more than mere eroticism. As he described it,
nudity in dance can be “a way, sometimes, of highlighting the subtle transaction that is
happening in performing – my body is AVAILABLE to you for your judgment, admiration,
derision, interest, disinterestedness, etc.”95 Gutierrez recognizes that while some audience
members may find his work sexually stimulating, others may engage intellectually, viscerally or
perhaps emotionally. Titillation is just one of the many responses an audience member might feel
while watching Gutierrez performing onstage, and Gutierrez uses his naked body to bring these
audience responses to the fore. In the beginning, Gutierrez’s nudity is minimally problematic
since his locker-room-style undressing fits nicely into the socially-acceptable category of
functional nudity, while his techno-backed bump-and-grind align neatly with another familiar
category of nakedness: strip shows. However, when Gutierrez abruptly quits performing and
simply stands and stares back at the audience, he suddenly no longer conforms to any easily
consumable category of nakedness. Viewers are, in this moment of performative standstill,



























































95
Miguel Gutierrez, in e-mail interview with the author, April 5, 2010.


 50
forced to stop and think about how they are relating to Gutierrez’s undressed body. In this way
Gutierrez’ nudity instead of creating an interchange with the audience actually highlights the
already existing exchange between performer and audience members.
By making viewers aware of their responses to the dancing, Gutierrez engages them in
reflexive thought—they become aware of their habitual spontaneous responses. Because these
unconscious conceptions are unearthed, Gutierrez empowers his audience members to rethink the
ways they are positively or negatively judging his dancing. This audience involvement equalizes
the power dynamic within the performance, allowing both dancer and viewer to have a hand in
determining what the undressing means. Instead of passively defaulting to their familiar reaction,
his spectators become actively engaged in finding their own meanings behind the performer’s
exposure in the dance. In this way, the spectators’ reflexivity helps distance them from limited
and inflexible responses to male nude dancing and enables viewers to find other positive,
original and more multifaceted ways of engaging with Gutierrez’s work.
Koma’s straight, male sexagenarian body engenders remarkably different responses from
his audiences than Gutierrez’s gay, male tricenarian one; thus, Koma must mediate his nudity
through different methods. Takashi Koma Yamada met his partner in both life and art, Eiko
Otake Yamada, in 1971 in their home country of Japan when he was 23 and she was 19. The two
dancers worked with the Butoh gurus Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, learning both of these
masters’ unique takes on the intrinsically Japanese movement form. While with Ohno, Koma and
Eiko began collaborating artistically. In 1972 the duo moved to Germany to study with Manja
Chimel, a former student of German Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. They then moved to
the United States in 1976 and have since claimed New York City as their home and artistic base.
While their work does show the influence of their training in Butoh and Neue Tanz, Eiko and
Koma have, throughout the years, developed their own unique choreographic voice and
movement style.
Eiko and Koma’s most recent work, entitled Naked, was a performative installation at the
Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which debuted on November 2, 2010. It was
modeled after the only other dance museum installation the duo has ever done, which was called
Breath and performed twelve years earlier at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York City. For Eiko and Koma, Naked is part of a three year Retrospective Project chronicling
their forty-year collaborative performing career. For the Walker, the piece celebrated thirty years


 51
of joint artistic activities between the choreographers and the organization. It was exhibited as a
part of “Event Horizon,” an exhibit of the Walker’s permanent collection, wherein the dance was
installed in Gallery 2 of the Walker Art Center’s permanent collection next to iconic works of
visual art by famous artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. The dancers, completely
undressed as the title suggests, were enclosed behind four walls of ceiling-length canvas curtains
crusted with rice paste, sea salt, feathers and sand with fist-sized holes burned all over the
surface.96 Koma described the performance as, “not a dance, but a
time/space/body/movement/texture/smell-based experience.”97 Any museum patron was
welcome to watch the dance either by peering through openings in the curtains or, alternatively,
by entering the dark performance space and sitting on benches mere feet from Eiko and Koma
and watching the dancers move around on the floor. The runtime of Naked, unlike traditional
concert dance, lasted for 144 hours in total. It was performed during regular museum hours—six
hours a day (with one fifteen-minute break in the middle), Tuesday through Sunday—for the
entire month of November. In analyzing Naked, this chapter will refer specifically to the official
publicity video of the performance on the Walker’s YouTube channel entitled “Eiko & Koma’s
Naked.”
The unique situation of Naked’s performance installation amplified the potential for
anxious audience responses to the nudity within—especially Koma’s more radical bodily
exposure. Traditionally in the theater, customers buy tickets to a specific performance. Thus, a
typical audience member is knowledgeable about what they are going to see at least to the extent
that they know it is a dance, who is performing and the title of the show. In the case of Naked,
however, someone visiting the Walker during the month of November, 2011 might have had no
idea that there was a dance performance involved in the “Event Horizon” exhibit and,
potentially, may have never heard of Eiko and Koma. Such an unsuspecting and uninitiated



























































96
Eva Yaa Asantewaa, ”Dance Matters: The Art of Taking It Slow,” Dance Magazine,
November, 2004, accessed February 22, 2011,
http://www.dancemagazine.com/issues/November-2010/Dance-Matters-The-Art-of-Taking-It-
Slow.
97
Jesse Leaneagh, “Wrapping up ‘Naked,’” Walker Art Blog, December 1, 2010,
http://blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts/2010/12/01/wrapping-up-
naked/?hp=link&poster=Blogs.


 52
observer could easily react negatively to being suddenly confronted by undressed dancers—
particularly a live naked man—in the middle of the museum.
Moreover, Koma was exposing his flesh in a public place frequented by people of all
ages, making his state of undress more treacherous. Nudity, especially the threatening nudity of
men, is something from which American society endeavors to protect children. Because of this,
laws often attach more severe punishments to perpetrators who indecently expose themselves in
the presence of minors.98 The Walker Arts Center is a cultural institution that actively solicits
kids. Though people of all ages may attend, the museum offers incentives for families to bring
their children, such as free gallery admission for those under nineteen-years-old. Thus, not only
was Koma exposing himself in a public space to an unsuspecting audience, but also that audience
frequently included minors—a set of factors that, from a social perspective, heightened the
potential for viewers to read his nudity as alarming and dangerous
Koma tempered this reading of his nakedness as aggressive by clearly establishing
himself as part of a heterosexual couple. “In real life,” explains dance writer Robert Greskovic,
“this man and woman are a married couple, suggesting the rapport inherent to the ‘perfect
partnership’ recognized almost universally in the Fred-and-Ginger label.” This analogy to Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers is apt. Like the legendary stars of the stage, Eiko and Koma have
become entwined; through their decades of personal and artistic communion, the two have
become a single entity: “Eiko-and-Koma.” Because of this collectiveness, Koma’s nudity is
constantly mediated by the implication of Eiko’s existence and presence.
For viewers who are unfamiliar with Eiko and Koma, the fact that they are a famous
couple in the dance world means little. Thankfully, one of the most powerful aspects of dance is
its ability to express ideas without the need for words. Koma explains how, “to see male and
female figures, all at same time—to see so closeness—gives some special implication [sic].”99
Simply the presentation of a naked male beside a naked female conveys something to the
audience. In the video of the piece, the intimate proximity between the two dancers is
inescapably apparent. Eiko and Koma both lie on the ground forming an acute angle with their
bodies. Though their heads are a few feet apart, their feet are mere inches away from each other.



























































98
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 91.
99
Koma Otake, “Talking Dance with Eiko & Koma,” interview by Philip Bither,
http://www.youtube.com/user/walkerartcenter#p/u/19/1aSu0HWEnFQ.


 53
In contemporary American society, when strangers interact, each individual maintains a bubble
of personal space. Thus, the extreme physical closeness of the pair of bodies in Naked implies
some sort of connection between the two people. Also, the couple’s nudity links them.
Surrounded by clothed viewers, the dancers’ costume of undress separates them from the
watchers and binds them together. In these ways, the spatial arrangement of the duo’s bodies and
the collectivity of their nakedness links Eiko to Koma and conveys their partnership to visitors
who are unaware of the dancers’ legal and artistic union.
Koma’s membership in this partnership grants him a more socially acceptable method of
being naked. In modern-day society, the presence of a single unclothed man reads, at the very
least, as creepy. Even in situations where nudity is permissible—nudist resorts for example—
lone men are often banned; if allowed, single males must, as Barcan explains, self-consciously
“embody their own innocence or good intentions. Male violence and its interrelations with
aggressive sexuality have rendered even the ‘natural’ male body always prone to suspicions of
ill-intent.”100 Similarly, in Koma’s case, the security of his artistic, emotional and legal
connection to Eiko makes his nakedness, to some extent, innocuous. In this way, Koma’s
(partnered) heterosexuality effectively renders his body as “safe” or, at least, “safer.”
The set-up of Naked—a nude man and woman lying together on a makeshift bed—when
taken at face value and out of context, sounds pornographic. This inherent sexuality within the
dance’s situation could easily have caused watchers to view Koma’s undressed body as erotic. In
order suppress to such libidinous readings, however, Koma deliberately desexualized his bodily
exposure in Naked.
An important method Koma used to repress the sexual potency of his nudity was by
controlling what parts of his body he exposed. To explain contemporary American society’s
automatic conflation of nudity and sex, Jones explains, “the exposure of genitals implies a sexual
situation because that is the context in which they are operative.”101 In light of this, Koma avoids
automatic sexualization and makes his body less erotic simply by not displaying his penis.
Throughout the video of Naked, Koma lies supine across the bed of straw, grass, feathers, dirt


























































100
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 110.
101
M. T. Jones, “Mediated Exhibitionism: The Naked Body in Theory, Performance, and Virtual
Space,” (paper presentation, Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American
Culture Associations, New Orleans, Louisiana April 8-11, 2009)
http://mattsmediaresearch.com/MediatedExhibitionism.html. n.p.


 54
and other debris. At one point Koma is lying on his left side with his legs extended and his arms
across his chest. His torso and head are spiraling to the right so that his head points straight
upward and his right shoulder is almost touching the floor. In this very open and extended
position, Koma still manages to hide his crotch. His right leg is draped ever so slightly over his
left, obscuring his penis in a shadowy hollow. Slowly, Koma rotates his head to the left until his
face points at the ground and his shoulders become perpendicular to the floor. All the while, his
legs remain ever vigilant in their decorous positioning. By obscuring his genitals though careful
body positioning, Koma makes his nudity less sexual because the source of his eroticism—his
penis—is out of view.
Koma also toned down the sexuality of his nude body by mediating the appearance of his
skin. “When we become naked,” he explains, “we have to put lots of stuff: makeup—heavy
makeup.”102 Before performing, the duo cover their figures with a thick white powdery
coating.103 For Naked, Koma and Eiko manipulated the surface of their bodies further through
applying dark smudges all over their white powdered arms, legs, faces, torsos and hands. This
pigmentation, while it does not hide their bodies, does provide a level of distance between their
flesh and the audience—somewhat abstracting and obfuscating the form. In this way, the makeup
on Koma’s skin, effectively, functions like clothing in that it separates Koma’s body from the
rest of the world. By creating a layer, both physically and metaphorically, between performer
and viewer, Koma makes his nakedness less indecent and lewd because it is not fully exposed.
Koma’s very movement also disassociated his body from vulgar corporeal readings. Eiko
and Koma’s iconic dance style—what they refer to as “delicious movement” when they teach—
is exaggeratedly slow and contorted. Koma’s use of this approach in Naked serves to abstract his
visual image. Two thirds of the way through the video there is a short clip of Koma lying in the
fetal position on his left side. His knees are all fully bent and his arms are crossed with his left
hand lying limply on his right thigh. Slowly, Koma takes his weight onto his right arm as he
curls his head into his core, nearly resting his forehead in the crook of his left arm. In this
compacted position Koma’s body is hard to recognize. His dark hair blends into the feathers on



























































102
Koma Otake, “Talking Dance with Eiko & Koma,” interview by Philip Bither,
http://www.youtube.com/user/walkerartcenter#p/u/19/1aSu0HWEnFQ.
103
Rose Eichenbaum, “Eiko and Koma,” in The Dancer Within: Intimate Conversations with
Great Dancers. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 266.


 55
the ground and the anatomical distinctions of his form become obscure. Such easily recognizable
physical elements as the protuberance of his scapula, the crease of his hip joint or the bulge of
his bicep are hard to isolate in this extreme and contorted posture. Rather, Koma’s body becomes
simply a series of overlapping and intertwined amorphic elements—with a few recognizable
pieces, like his hand, which reaches upwards out of the center of this sculptural mass. The
slowness of his movement (during this fifteen-second clip Koma moves mere inches) adds to the
reading of Koma as an aesthetic object. By abstracting his form through his distinctive style of
dancing, Koma removes himself from all the uncomfortable, floppy, and sexualized implications
of male nude dancing.
Another source of tension concerning Koma’s nakedness likely arose from the fact that
people in the modern-day United States are unused to looking at naked men. Images of half
naked (and sometimes fully naked) women proliferate within contemporary society; female
bodily display is ubiquitous in magazines, television, advertisements, movies and even in the
streets. In contrast, explains Eicher, “men’s dress does not visibly display a sexed body. Instead,
they minimize and mask the outlines of their bodies and bare only their faces and hands.”104
Typically, male fashion, as exemplified by the suit, obscures the figure masking almost all of
men’s primary and secondary sex characteristics. Even in zones where exposure is permissible—
like beaches—American men prefer loose-fitting swimming shorts rather than European-style
trunks, which hug the curves of the body. Thus, contemporary Americans are simply
unaccustomed to seeing male bodies.
Within Naked, Eiko and Koma intentionally increased their audiences’ discomfort. The
situation they set up for viewers tangibly heightened spectators’ awkwardness. By allowing
audience members the possibility to stand outside the performance space and peer inside at the
dancers, Eiko and Koma placed their spectators in an uncomfortable position. A museum-goer
approaching Naked had to fight between his or her ingrained cultural conditioning, which
disallows spying, and his or her voyeuristic desire. One audience member recalls that when he
“used the peepholes, I found myself leading a wave of peeping toms. Everyone enjoys it,



























































104
Joanne B. Eicher, “Dress, Gender and the Public Display of Skin,” in Body Dressing, ed.
Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (New York: Berg, 2001), 244.


 56
apparently, but no one wants to be the first to spy.”105 Within the performance space, as well,
Eiko and Koma set up an uncomfortable relationship between the spectators and themselves—
particularly with Koma. Americans are already unused to seeing male nudity, as stated earlier, so
being forced to sit mere feet away from a live naked man in the tiny installation space must have
heightened the strangeness of the situation for viewers.
The Walker and Eiko and Koma’s stationing of the dancer’s bodies within the museum
context, however, repressed and normalized their nakedness—especially Koma’s more
uncommon male bodily exposure—by connecting the dance to the other works of art that
surrounded it. Senior curator of performing arts for the center, Philip Bither, described the dance
as “not at all provocative or profane…. It’s a very painterly experience that is, to me, very
profound.”106 In legitimizing Eiko and Koma’s nakedness, Bither connects them to the more
socially acceptable forms of nudity found in his museum—paintings. This connection is quite
astute; there are actually a few clear artistic choices that Eiko and Koma made in creating Naked,
which caused their bodies to look more like nude figures from visual art.
Since viewers, unless they lay down on the ground, were observing the dance from a high
angle, Eiko and Koma did effectively present themselves, to the extent that it is humanly
possible, as if they were a painting. By spending the duration of the piece lying on the floor, the
pair minimized the volume of their bodies—creating a nearly two-dimensional presentation to
the audience. The set for Naked also aided in this painterly reading. The dancers executed their
entire performance on a round “island” composed of natural materials set in the middle of their
square installation space. Because of the way the couple moved and used the space, the island
served less as a stage upon which they danced; rather their organic bedding acted as an
environment in which Eiko and Koma existed—framing the performers and making the duo
appear as if part of an elaborate natural history museum diorama.
Probably the most obvious connection between Eiko and Koma’s work Naked and visual
art, however, is the overarching scenario of their presentation. The couple was performing within



























































105
Lightsey Darst, “Living the Dance,” MNArtists, December 16, 2010,
http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=279762.
106
Mary Abbe, “Getting 'Naked' at the Walker - For Art: Japanese Performers Eiko & Koma
Bare It All in a Monthlong Installation at Walker Art Center Starting Today,” Star Tribune,
November 1, 2010, accessed February 22, 2011,
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/art/106494093.html?page=1&c=y.


 57
an art museum right next to, for example, one of Andy Warhol’s Jackie paintings. This
situational environment places Naked, physically, within the context of visual paintings. Thus, it
is logical that a patron within the art museum would view Eiko and Koma, ideologically, from
the same perspective that he or she would view any other work in the Walker. By comparing
Naked to visual art, spectators would likely view the dancers’ undress, especially Koma’s less
normalized nakedness, from an artistic standpoint wherein nudity is simply a conventional
aesthetic choice used to depict both men’s and women’s bodies.
The spatial relationship between viewer and performer in Naked gave an
uncharacteristically large amount of power to the watcher; by increasing observers’ control over
the situation, Eiko and Koma made audience members more comfortable in the strange scenario.
Eiko and Koma’s recumbent dancing posture meant that audience members were looking down
at them from above. This dominant viewing position is markedly unlike the dancer-spectator
relationship in a usual theater with a raised proscenium stage. Also, unlike traditional concert
dance, in Naked the audience was free to move around while the dancers remained stationary in
one designated spot. This set-up provided spectators the freedom to decide from what position
they wanted to observe the dancers and how long they wanted to watch the dance. Being above
the performers and choosing where and when to look, shifted the power dynamic between Naked
viewers and the dancers. The empowerment that resulted from this shift of audience-performer
dialectic is clear in one viewer’s account of “a little boy whose first impulse was to walk to the
very edge of the dirt and stand there leaning slightly forward, looking down at Eiko and Koma.
Had he been a grown man, you would have said he was standing over them; this little boy
appeared to me to be reveling in all the dominance implied in that phrase. Adults - naked -- and I
can just look at them! The next stage, I imagined, would be poking them with a stick.”107 Most
museum goers were likely more restrained in their enjoyment of the power that Naked granted
them than this small child was. Still, this incident exemplifies how the freedom of viewership
impacted the whole dynamic of the piece. By giving viewers control, Eiko and Koma made
spectators more at ease and freed them to find their own individualized ways to connect with the
work.
Gutierrez and Koma, as dancers, have dramatically different bodies and use them to


























































107
Lightsey Darst, “Living the Dance.” MNArtists, December 16, 2010,
http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=279762.


 58
radically different end in their pieces myendlesslove and Naked. Both artists, however, have to
deal with mass cultural preconceptions of the exposed male body. They each use individualized
methods in order to work against the taboo of the penis as aggressive and sexually dangerous.
Furthermore, both artists question the pervasive notion that, as Barcan states, “female exposure is
more readily justifiable within aesthetic discourses that see female nudity as more ‘beautiful’
(and hence more acceptable) than male nudity.”108 Gutierrez and Koma actively engender
multiple responses to their exposed bodies, through their choreography and performance,
expanding the scope of possibilities for male nudity in dance.



























































108
Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 197.


 59
 CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

Ann Liv Young, Anna Halprin, Noémie Lafrance, Miguel Gutierrez and Takashi Koma
Yamada are all radically different artists and their works Cinderella, Returning Home: Moving
With the Earth Body, Home: the Body as a Place, myendlesslove and Naked are all markedly
divergent except for three things: all five dances were choreographed within the past ten years,
each piece was created by an artist (or artists) living and working in the United States and every
one of these works involves nakedness—specifically the choreographer’s own exposed body.
The dissimilarities between these artists makes the fact that all five were using nudity during this
time period noteworthy—begging the question: what forces were at work in America during the
early years of the twenty-first century that may have inspired these specific choreographers to
work with the naked body? Pinpointing specific external causes is difficult because this thesis
lacks the clarity and conviction of hindsight. However, because dance often reflects, absorbs and
predicts social and cultural changes, it is still valid, and in fact prudent, to consider how the key
political, economic, cultural and scientific changes that occurred within the past ten years might
have affected the five chosen choreographers and their uses of nudity.
The shift in political climate that occurred at the beginning of the last decade likely could
have influenced the decision of the artists discussed in this paper to use the exposed body in their
aforementioned recent dances. Right-wing politics have been slowly gaining popular favor and
power in this country ever since the star of 1960’s leftism began to fade.109 “In less than forty



























































109
Michael J. Thompson, “America’s Conservative Landscape: The New Conservatism and the
Reorientation of American Democracy,” in Confronting the New Conservatism, ed. Michael J.
Thompson (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 10.


 60
years,” describes political writer Chip Berlet, “the American-as-apple-pie ultraconservatives not
only regrouped but also seized political power in the United States. When the new millennium
dawned, they finished the task of asserting control over all three branches of the government.”110
In this political climate, the body became a contentious issue. Conservative politicians like
George W. Bush, the forty-third president, who was elected to office in 2001, aimed to regulate
citizens’ bodies—especially of marginalized groups like women and homosexuals—through
simultaneously creating restrictive legislation and keeping liberal laws from passing. These
governmental efforts to control Americans,’ physical and sexual selves manifested in such
legislation as bans on abortion and gay marriage. Perhaps the rise of nudity in avant-garde dance
during the same time period was an act of defiance. By using nakedness, dance artists such as
those examined here could be, metaphorically, rallying against the control external political and
social forces were imposing on them through rebellious flaunting their exposed flesh.
The current economic recession within the United States—especially evident in the art
world—potentially encouraged choreographers to turn to their own bodies as the raw material for
dances. Though funding for the National Endowment for the Arts rose steadily throughout the
new millennium, it was rising from the ashes of its near death in 1996 and its budget throughout
the aughts was still millions of dollars less than it was in the early 1990s. The meager
improvements of the NEA have been more than negated by cuts in art funding on the local level.
According to a 2010 article in Back Stage, National Edition, “In 2009, the states contributed a
combined $343 million to the arts, while local governments provided $832 million. The NEA
budget for that same year was $155 million.”111 Therefore, since local governments are by far the
biggest supporters of the arts, the recent budget trimming across the nation on the local level has
understandably resulted in dire economic consequences for artists. Young, Halprin, Lafrance,
Gutierrez and Koma’s use of their own nude bodies could be a be a perhaps snide, perhaps
serious, response to the funding crisis. Artists all over the United States are being forced to
economize—and what could be more pared down than artists using their own bodies? (Except, of



























































110
Chip Berlet, “The New Political Right in the Unites States: Reaction, Rollback, and
Resentment,” in Confronting the New Conservatism, ed. Michael J. Thompson (New York: New
York University Press, 2007), 71.
111
Daniel Holloway, "Art For Anything But Art's Sake: With Government Funding Harder to
Come By, Advocates Portray Cultural Organizations as Economic Engines," Back Stage,
National ed. (18 Feb. 2010): n.p.


 61
course, an artist using his or her own naked body). Stripping down to the bare figure, literally
and effectively, economizes. For avant-garde American artists, nudity is, quite frankly,
refreshingly affordable.
Nakedness in avant-garde dance of the last ten years might relate to the general counter
cultural rise of bodily exposure as a method of breaking social taboos. The New York City based
improvisational comedy group Improv Everywhere’s annual “No Pants Subway Ride” is a
perfect example of recent manifestations of undress in popular subculture. This flash mob event
takes place every January. Its first iteration occurred in 2002 and included only seven pantsless
(but underwear clad) men who successively entered one Metropolitan Transit Authority subway
car pretending not to know each other. They explained their strange attire, when non-initiates
asked, by claiming to have simply forgotten their pants. This year was the tenth anniversary of
that first prank and the growth of the entire operation is simply astounding. 3,500 people took
part in the underground spectacle in New York City alone, and thousands more held their own
events in forty-eight cities internationally.112 In total, there were more than 5,000 people
worldwide who stripped down in public on Sunday January 9, 2011 and went for a ride. In New
York, specifically, the 3,500 participants spanned three boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn and
Queens) and ten subway lines.113 This ultra popular prank is a hilarious and potent example of
how skin exposure can combine with today’s alternative Do It Yourself culture. This recently
emerged trend of DIY surreal humor might have influenced the five previously discussed dance
artists because such events show how bodily exposure has the power to subvert dominant
cultural expectations and regulations in a fun and positive way. Even if the five choreographers
were not directly inspired by the rise of counter culture instances of undress, such wildly popular
alternative uses of the bare body in public must have made at least a few people more receptive
to radical uses of nudity.
The resurgence of nakedness in choreography during the past ten years also corresponds
with certain disembodying scientific trends. The rise of the virtual body, for example, may have
encouraged choreographers to reactionarily return to the corporeal body. In the new millennium,



























































112
“The No Pants Subway Ride,” Improv Everywhere, accessed March 16, 2011,
http://improveverywhere.com/missions/the-no-pants-subway-ride/.
113
“No Pants Subway Ride 2011,” Improv Everywhere, last modified January 17, 2011,
http://improveverywhere.com/2011/01/17/no-pants-subway-ride-2011-2/.


 62
technological innovations and the proliferation of computers and the Internet have actualized and
normalized this once-science fiction idea. Skype, a popular online voice and video
communication system, as of their 2009 forth quarter report, had 560 million users.114 Each one
of these millions of people utilizes Skype to project a digital facsimile of his or her voice or
visual image across cyberspace onto someone else’s computer. The phenomenon of the avatar,
the assimilation of which into mass popular culture is evidenced by the 2009 major motion
picture simply entitled Avatar, virtualizes the body even further. An avatar is a computer
generated representation of a person; it can be as simple as the small square picture that often
accompanies a username on a website or blog or as fancy as the meticulously rendered 3D
characters in modern day video games. Ostensibly, in all manifestations, the purpose of an avatar
is to stand in for, within the digital world, a real live body.115 “As much as one might like to
imagine the virtual body as a discrete entity within one's own control,” explains scholar Kathryn
Conrad, “the body-as-information is dispersed widely throughout an ever-proliferating number
of information systems.”116 Conrad is insinuating here that the virtual body, despite its ostensible
connection with an actual fleshy human being, is largely disembodied and therefore hard to
control. By displaying their corporeal forms, the aforementioned avant-garde choreographers
might be regaining control over their own somas and reestablishing the primacy of the non-
virtual body. Therefore, in this light, nakedness in dance is a reaffirmation of the realness of the
body in the face of the possibility of endless, disembodied virtual selves.
Uses of the naked form in avant-garde American dance are also, possibly, in response to
the confusion and anxiety over individuality and uniqueness of the body, which have came about
because of scientific breakthroughs in the field of genetics within the past decade. In 2003 the
Human Genome Project, a massive undertaking by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National
Institutes of Health and other organizations internationally, was finally completed. The HGC
successfully identifies all the 20,000+ genes within human DNA, creating a complete map of the



























































114
Om Malik, “Skype By the Numbers: It's Really Big,” GigaOM, April 20, 2010,
http://gigaom.com/2010/04/20/skype-q4-2009-number/.
115
This notion is somewhat complicated by the fact that in online games there are Non-Player
Character avatars, which are, essentially, virtual bodies without a real world counterpart.
116
Kathryn Conrad, “Surveillance, Gender and the Virtual Body in the Information Age,”
Surveillance & Society 6:4 (2009): 382.


 63
human genome.117 The implications of this scientific advancement are staggering. The Project
opens the door for all sorts of human genetic experimentation and even, some day, the terrifying
and momentous possibility of human cloning. Also, the isolation of genes allows for the
patenting of DNA. Therefore, companies can literally purchase and own the rights to aspects of
human genetic code. In the face of these awe-inspiring scientific advancements that question the
uniqueness and proprietorship of bodies, Young’s, Halprin’s, Lafrance’s, Gutierrez’s and
Koma’s uses of performative nudity takes on new meanings. Perhaps they were exposing their
figures in a desperate attempt to battle the decentralizing and controlling forces of modern
genetic science. Baring their flesh, in this instance, might have been a way for each artist to
reestablish ownership over his or her own, real, unique body.
Whether the reason why was political, economic, cultural, scientific or something else,
Young, Halprin, Lafrance, Gutierrez and Koma all chose to use the naked body in their twenty-
first century choreographic works. The question then becomes: how were these artists using
nakedness? I believe they reveal a largely-overlooked function of the human body’s physical
periphery: its role as a device of mediation and communication.
French philosopher Didier Anzieu, in a 1989 psychoanalytical study of skin, argues that
there are three functions of this exterior organ:
The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the
goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its
second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps
that outside out;... Finally, the third function—which the skin shares with the mouth and
which it performs at least as often—is as a site and a primary means of communication
with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is, moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’
for the marks left by those others118
The last role of skin that Anzieu describes is perhaps the least obvious and likely most
overlooked. The five artists discussed in this thesis all manage to uncover this subtle but crucial



























































117
“Human Genome Project Information,” U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs, last
modified February 03, 2011,
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml.
118
Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 40.


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understanding of the human epidermis as not merely a static envelope, but rather a conductive
surface that facilitates the transmission of ideas and feelings between individuals.
Though the dance works examined in this study use bodily exposure in radically differing
ways, there is an overarching similarity in how nakedness is used. Young, for instance, uses her
graphically nude flesh as a tool to force viewers to invest fully and without reservations into her
work—opening up the possibility for unprecedentedly honest and fertile dialogue within the
community of the performance. Anna Halprin, however, uses her undressed form first and
foremost to connect with the natural environment through communing physically with the earth.
Though her spectators can only engage with her site-specific pieces through the medium of
video, the way that Halprin handles her own body allows viewers to caress her flesh vicariously
and share in the reverence she feels for her own aged figure. Alternatively, Lafrance, by focusing
on the external architecture of the female body, creates a scenario that empowers the naked skin
to act as a force of connection and arbitration through becoming a metaphorical semi-permeable
membrane. Her dancer’s skin, in this way, conducts emotional osmosis—connecting performer
and audience/participant. Gutierrez uses the sexuality and provocativeness of his raw flesh to
draw the watchers into a dialogue. Within this interchange, Gutierrez encourages reflexivity, so
his spectators are not simply engaging with him, but are actually aware their own responses and
conceptions to his undressed form. Koma utilizes a variety of methods to desexualize and
abstract his body. Simultaneously, the situation of the dance installation, especially in the context
of the performers’ nudity, empowers the viewers to connect with, invest in and develop their
own interpretations of the work. Thus, Young, Halprin, Lafrance, Gutierrez and Koma all use the
naked body as a mediating surface between the individual’s internal creative/personal/psychic
world and the external world—engendering a productive and fecund interchange.


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 VIDEOGRAPHY

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 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Patricia L. Gay
A native of Southborough Massachusetts, Ms. Gay began her dance history studies at Concord
Academy. She then attended Case Western Reserve University, receiving her B.A. in Theater
Arts (Dance) and Art History. Her research foci, aside from naked avant-garde dance, include
hipster clubbing, performance art, Seminole Stomp Dances, Merce Cunningham and the Bauhaus
Theatre pieces of Oskar Schlemmer. Additionally, Ms. Gay is passionate about dance archival
work.


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