The Emperor's New Clothes: The Naked Body and Theories of Performance

In the past few decades, naked bodies have taken the stage to aggressively signal the power of theater and performance. In the experiments of The Living Theater and productions such as Dionysus in '69, as well as in much of the body art of the 1980s, and early 1990s, the naked body was presumed to organize a dramaturgical site from which both a political charge and a seductive promise could be launched. The body bared was perceived as enabling the stage and the social. Looking back at these naked bodies from the perspective of the new millennium, we can understand the hyperbolic proclamations of the body's significance as a kind of last hurraw of the capabilities of the flesh to establish public and civic powers as well as sovereign semiotic ones. However, rather than bathing in the rosy-fingered dawn of a new age, as they imagined, these bodies were actually washing up onto the stage, like whales and dolphins now do on our beaches, to offer an image of their demise. As it turns out, they were prescient in their insistence. By the late 1990s, the body could no longer set the site for the generation of meaning; instead, it had become a theater of operations where medical, genetic, and virtual systems took it as their stage. Moreover, the attendant practices of theater, or performance, were challenged by the critical analogue of the virtual.

Staging the naked body both provoked and was inscribed by revolutionary attitudes toward the gender and sexual systems it signified. Within the past decades, new theoretical and performative strategies concerning gender and sexual practices have redefined our understanding of how performance, even more, representation itself may mean. Moving alongside the parade of nudes, from Julian Beck to Tim Miller, we might review just how the notions of theatricality, performance, and performativity were formed, both on stage and in the culture at large. Hopefully, this close encounter of the three kinds will provide an understanding of how, in the late twentieth century, a revitalization of the sense of performance has signaled its demise.

Naked Theatricality

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, "theatricality" is a term that denotes the practice of theater, but also connotes eye-catching displays of the body. As the dictionary defines it, theatricality is composed of "exaggerated self-display and unnatural behavior; affectedly dramatic." In the experiments of the 1960s through the early 1970s, this notion of an exaggerated self-display of the body was shared by theatrical experimentation and counter-cultural organizations alike, through the practice of stripping it bare in public spaces. Certainly, conservative forces received this public nudity as both exaggerated and unnatural. The sense of excessive self-display marked visibility in both the experimental theaters and the hippie subculture. Excessive, exaggerated breaks with traditional public behavior, both on the stage and in the streets, sought a semiotic sovereignty through claims that these experiments were part of a cosmological or metaphysical shift. There could be nothing more excessive than the claim that what they were making visible was in tune with the universe. The Living Theater called it Paradise Now as they yelled, "I can't take my clothes off in public," and proceeded to do just that. In Hair, naked bodies presumably signaled the "dawning of the age of Aquarius," and the Performance Group resurrected the god Dionysus in '69 through naked improvisations. In other words, theatricality was the practice and the dawning of a new age ideology. The hyperbole was set to detonate social restrictions that hampered the cultural revolution these groups perceived was possible. The naked body offered up, in the costume of a "moment of truth," both a demand for change and an appeal to a given condition that social structures oppressed. It was a utopic site, where oppression was stripped away, sometimes gleefully cavorting in a new, wild jumble of proximate, pleasurable social relations. The sense...