Attitudes.

I still remember my first sight of a naked woman. I was 12 years old, and for months, perhaps years, I could think of little else. I knew what I wanted for Christmas. It was 1939. My mother had been given tickets to a West End revue called Black and Blue in which an "art gallery attendant" showed people around the "pictures," which were decorously posed nude women. They were called tableaux vivantes, and at that time were quite a feature of revues both in the West End and on Broadway. Sixty-four years ago, my mother was mildly shocked; in a different way, so was I.

But in the past thirty years of so stage nudity has, rather like movie nudity (although with no body doubles!), become an almost unremarkable part of the scene. So is nakedness in the theater good, of at least acceptable, in proper context, or is it a sign of irreversible decay? Even now, it does have shock value--first discovered perhaps by Peter Brook in Marat/Sade--which a playwright or, more likely, a director can put to shrewd and purposeful use.

Attitudes toward nudity are changing all the time. In film, theater, and even television, nudity is accepted to a degree unthinkable even fifty years ago. You might have expected dance to be at the forefront in any expression of the naked truth. But there are physical difficulties.

In classic ballet, with all that jumping around, it is effectively, indeed practically, a no-no. I once asked Sir Robert Helpmann, the celebrated Australian dancer and choreographer, his opinion of classical ballet in the nude. Sir Robert pondered for a little and then replied: "Well, it would be awkward, wouldn't it, with all those bits and bobs bobbing and bitting around all the time." Besides, imagine a woman wearing pointe shoes and nothing else--it might be fiesta time for foot fetishists, but most of the public would find it odd rather than exciting.

However, naked bodies have always played a part in modern dance. At the beginning of the last century Isadora Duncan occasionally bared more than her soul, and some of her successors, such as Mary Wigman and Doris Humphrey, at times danced nude solos, Indeed, modern dance, with its more sinuous movement, is better adapted to nudity.

New York's first mass encounter with dance nudity came to us via the West Coast, specifically San Francisco. It was 1967 when Anna Halprin (justly regarded by many as "the mother of postmodern dance") brought her troupe from San Francisco to appear at Hunter College.

The performance ended with her dancers cavorting joyously naked in, as I recall it, a pile of brown corrugated paper and a blaze of yellow light. For this they were hauled up in a New York court on either obscenity or public decency charges. I was subpoenaed as a witness, and a bushy-tailed assistant DA asked, "Mr. Barnes, did you find the naked women sexually stimulating?" I replied no. He then looked piercingly at the presiding judge, and, presumably noting my English accent and charming lisp, asked, in tones of Perry Mason-like triumph, "Did you, by chance, find the naked men stimulating?" The truth, I suspect, is that whatever your gender of sexual preference, you are unlikely to find naked dancing stimulating in any fashion other than the artistic.

One leading proponent of nude dancing is the French dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz. He and his troupe customarily dance nude, and it is a different audience experience. However much you play the blase card, people coming onstage stark naked and remaining onstage stark naked is, al any level, a statement. I first saw Charmatz at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, dancing an athletic, nude duet with another man, Dimitri Chamblas. Once the initial awareness of nakedness had been absorbed, the mind settles down serenely to watch the dance. Any eroticism would have to be in the eye of the perceiver--but that's true of much of dance.

Charmatz was classically trained, having studied at the Paris Opera School. But he soon decided that appearing in Giselle was not for him, and he obviously had not seen Mats Ek's version. So he went his own way. How did that way lead to total nudity? When I talked to him about three years ago, Charmatz assured me that at first it didn't.

"I almost fought against complete nudity. One work we danced dressed just in T-shirts--but it looked more nude than nude! And in fact [in this work] we are not really nude; we are wearing wigs. That sounds silly, but this piece [is] called herses (une lente introduction), which means we are not exactly ourselves. These '30s-style wigs put a certain distance between the dancers themselves and the dancers and the audience."

Charmatz is keenly aware of dance history. "Naked dancing is by no means unusual. It is ... connected with the cultural background." And of course, ancient art, from frescoes to vases, is full of it, some naughty, some not. So advocates of nude dance have history behind them. As Charmatz himself suggested, "The naked body hides every bit as much as it reveals. Audiences notice we're naked, and then forget it."

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to DANCE MAGAZINE since 1956.