No hidden agenda.

The recent increase in performers appearing onstage sans clothing has offended and confused many audiences. This is not a return to 1970s seeking, which was done for its shock effect, nor is it a boycott of fashionistas-cum-costume-designers. It is about dancers doing what artists do--making meaning.

In painting, that meaning may be a paean to the grace and beauty of the arrangement of the human body itself, sometimes reclining, sometimes in flight, sometimes dancing or running. Through a more abstract eye, it may be the deconstruction of the idea of the body as it is fractured into body parts (some of which don't quite fit back together). In photography, it may be a revelation of the magnificence of skin tones or the muscular development of an excellent athlete (for example, note the glorious photographs of Bill T. Jones in this issue, on the cover and starting on page 28). In dance, it is likely to reflect the movement possibilities that arise when the body is unimpeded by billowing sleeves, flowing skirts or trousers, or elaborate head and foot gear.

Dancers and choreographers learn early in their training to view bodies as their instruments, as their vehicle for making dance art or for gaining the oohs and ahhs of an audience. Like any instrument, the body must be cleaned and oiled and fine-tuned to maintain its highest performance potential. In this process, there develops a certain distance between the self and the instrument--between "I," the self, and "my body" or "my feet," a part of the instrument. With this distance, dancers are able to make their instruments graceful or awkward, comic or tragic, naked or clothed--perhaps more readily than your ordinary man on the street. There is, for a parallel example, no moral viewing of an inanimate instrument, such as a saxophone or Porsche engine. Those are merely devices to make music and speed. In Balanchine's leotard ballets, we see the dancers' bodies used as vehicles of simple or complex line and form, examples of pure dance as an art without artifice, the instruments covered only by a thin film of leotard and tights (see Balanchine's comments on the body in the review of Toni Bentley's book Sisters of Salome on page 80).

Usually there is a message underlying the use of unclad dancers by contemporary choreographers. It may be a tribute or insult to contemporary standards of beauty, which obviously change through the ages. Dancers have been decorated throughout time with tattoos on the naked skin, billowing tunics lit with colored lights, grass skirts, panniered and hooped skirts, stiletto heels, towering Cambodian crowns, large tubes, and all manner of fashions of the day. In contemporary terms, some are amazing, some are ridiculous. And sometimes costuming can reflect the believability of a character: Artistic directors must decide, for example, whether Romeo and Juliet should leave their bed fully clothed, or whether the ravaged Chosen One in The Rite of Spring ends up with not a shred of covering.

More frequently, the choreographer's message is just a subtext for the conveyance of straightforward honesty--the naked truth.