via Lifebuoy
Nude dance theatre, always a welcome treat
Aussie dancers Fiona Jopp [1][2][3] & Olivia Kingston [1][2]: A Night Of Nudity And Dancing At Art Gallery Of New South Wales
by Kate Hennessy, Peter Munro & Clive Paget
Photography by Pedro Greig
Sydney Dance Company performs a world-first all-naked event to the delight of avid nudists. Just be careful where you look
In a room titled The private nude, dancer Fiona Jopp, 30, twists and turns her taut skin by a Pierre Bonnard painting of his wife in a bath.
"It was nice when people turned around and saw my face and didn't just look at my tits," she says later, after slipping into a light summer dress.
The thought of being nude in public is worse than actually getting your kit off, she adds. "While I am doing it I don't really feel embarrassed or out of place, there is no sense of being judged. But then I go home and see myself naked in the mirror and go 'My legs are hairy' and 'I have cellulite' and 'Did I pull my stomach in?'"
Exhibitionism at the exhibition: the Sydney Dance Company takes over the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
“Here?” I ask. “We undress here?” The man beside me already has his pants off.
His name is Matt and he got a head start while the Sydney Dance Company’s artistic director, Rafael Bonachela, gave a welcome speech on lower level one of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. As Bonachela talked Matt had removed his sneakers and stuffed his peeled-off socks inside. About 150 of us begin to follow suit.
Matt, naked already, beams at me. “This was my idea!” Matt, it turns out, is the New South Wales co-founder of Young Nudists of Australia. When he saw the nude dance performance advertised – Bonachela’s choreographed response to an exhibition of nudes from London’s Tate collection – he contacted the gallery to suggest a naked night.
Bonachela had tabled, and discarded, the idea. “We had talked about everyone participating, disrobing, at the gallery,” he says. “When he got in touch, I was like, ‘We still have time, let’s do it.’” The slowest-selling show was swiftly rebranded as nude-only and sold out within a day. Two nude nights were added. They sold out too, faster than the clothed shows.
Matt was delighted. “I’m no connoisseur of fine arts. We want to show people that the nudist lifestyle is not just old people playing volleyball. These one-off events are a way to interest people in nude social recreation.”
Connoisseurs at Australia’s major arts institutions are indeed interested. Naked tours lead by the Melbourne artist Stuart Ringholt returned to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art late last year after premiering there in 2012. Ringholt’s tour was so enlightening for the MCA’s director of audience engagement, Gill Nicol, that she is leading a women’s naked tour in March for International Women’s Day.
“I learnt so much,” Nicol wrote. “It is just you, literally bare, and with your feet firmly on the floor – no phones, no clothes, no bags – just an authentic, real experience.”
Ringholt introduced nudity to the National Gallery of Australia in 2015 with tours of the perspective-defying work of the US light artist James Turrell. “We eat light, drink it in through our skins,” Turrell wrote. Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival, meanwhile, programs a nude dawn swim in the river Derwent each year to mark the winter solstice. Up to 800 people dive into what organisers call a “ritual” that “invites them to shed their skins and inhibitions”.
Curator-speak aside, why are people drawn to the experience? Is it a gimmick for middle-class art appreciators to be titillated in a sophisticated setting? A plunge into the unknown in pursuit of shock’s retreating frontier? An appropriation of niche scenes like nudism for artists who’ve run out of ideas? A desire to occupy our bodies at a time when we feel more disassociated from them than ever?
In Europe, nakedness is not novel. “If you see a [dance] performance and there isn’t a naked body, it’s weird,” Bonachela says. “In French Canada you have companies doing full nudity for the full show.” Yet it is Bonachela’s Sydney festival show that is by all accounts the world first: nude dancers in front of nude paintings before a nude audience. The extra combo deal.
Bras and boxers shed, we file as a fleshy mass towards the exhibition. Walking in the same direction, it is all wobbling arses, jarring tan lines and back tattoos. It’s been a hot day; I smell sweat and its combatants. “Isn’t this great?” Matt whispers. On entering the exhibition we disperse, as instructed, to see dance pieces going on simultaneously in multiple rooms and suddenly people’s privates are public.
I was told as a girl that making eye contact with a stranger signalled availability. The comment has never left me; not for a day. Like many woman I’m afflicted by a conviction that unwanted attention is my fault. Still, eye contact has been a habit I’ve struggled to shed. As a writer I am in constant, reflexive observation. I stare a lot. But I’ve learnt to drop my eyes if my look is returned, especially – no, always – if it is a man.
Here, the tactic backfires. My gaze keeps falling on penises and pubic hair. To be clear, I’m OK with that. Some of my best friends have genitals. But I don’t want to look as though I paid to perve. Besides, the exhibition features work from Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Gwen John and Tracy Emin, as well as the sublime bodies of seven dancers. Why waste eye time on randoms?
I keep my head erect and eyes level. I don’t fold my arms or clasp my hands because it communicates a defensiveness I’m elated to realise I do not feel. I find myself assuming the closest I’ve come to Tadasana (mountain pose) outside a yoga studio. With nowhere to hide, yet everything on display, in a rapid and total way – I quit trying. And Matt is right: it feels great.
I tap his expertise further. “How does it work? Can I look at people?
“Just don’t stare.” And by and large, people don’t. I’ve felt more scrutinised and objectifed in boots, beanie and a winter coat.
For textiles like me (the name nudists give people who’d rather wear clothes), this rush of freshly minted freedom distracts me from the task at hand: art appreciation. That is until I see a male and female duo entwined and circling Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. The dancers are not only naked, they are very close to us. We watch in awed silence. No shoes clack, no bags rustle, no slacks slide.
An unclothed audience is quiet yet bold. The clothed audience, says Bonachela – who strolls the eight rooms tonight as blithely naked as the rest of us – held back a lot more. “They were quite shy because they’re let into this room with nude people, oh my god,” he says. “The nude audience immediately spread through the whole gallery. They go in!”
My second highlight is a coquettish cabaret-style routine danced by a female duo. Their hair hangs loose and they are makeup free. They look like two uncannily toned women who’ve sprung up from towels on a beach, unclipped their bikinis, and begun to joyfully dance. We laugh, agog, delighted. I barely clock Francis Bacon’s stunning, tormented triptych of paintings behind them.
They don’t recoil from high kicks. “When I created this work I was not going to be shy about it,” Bonachela says. “Like, I am bending forward and this is my bumhole. This is how between my legs looks. I didn’t choreograph like, ‘Let’s hide this.’”
It is not all beautiful moments. Waiting in the Domain before the show a leathery guy on a park bench eyes me and I fervently hope he’s not a ticketholder. Later, at the show, I retreat into a smaller room to be alone and look at art. When I turn to leave, three men close the exit with their naked bodies and a panic rises, primal, a need to escape. They turn harmlessly to the art, just three silly bottoms, and I sidle out.
In the room where Ron Mueck’s Wild Man looms, the hyper-real and oversized sculpture gripped by paranoia’s paralysis, a trio of three male dancers overwhelms me too. And in the main room when the dancers reach out to spectators and waltz them around, arrange them in formation like artworks themselves, I again retreat to the darkened room of The Kiss, one layer of interaction too much.
When my clothes came off, so did an exhausting volume of psychic weight – but processing its disappearance is tiring too.
Putting my underwear on in the foyer feels far more intimate than being naked a few minutes before. It evokes the sexuality of a striptease while there had been little of overt sexuality or sleaze about the 45 minutes among the artworks.
It is likely Australian audiences will have more chances to be exposed to living, breathing naked art. “This has been a highlight in my career,” Bonachela says. “So who knows, I may bring more nudity to the stage. It may have another life.”
There are no modesty patches
Nude Live: Sydney Dance Company members Dave Mack, Fiona Jopp, Olivia Kingston, Zachary Lopez and Izzac Carroll perform at the Art Gallery of NSW.
A nude woman walks by, wearing naught but a nose ring and ponytail. Her breasts bounce as she wanders among the paintings and sculptures within the Art Gallery of NSW on a crisp Thursday morning. She struts in the buff while people stare, conspicuously overdressed in their skinny jeans and sneakers.
Six brave souls are butt-naked for this undressed dress rehearsal of Nude Live, a celebration of the unclothed human body. There are no modesty patches or pouches as they go about in the raw, revealing something of their religion, grooming habits and low body-fat percentage.
One has a birthmark on her left cheek. One man has a pierced left nipple and low-cut tan line. Dancer Dave Mack, 35, has a tattooed doodle down below his navel. "I love being naked," he says.
"Not feeling like I should be embarrassed, not feeling there is something that has to be covered or that I am ashamed of."
The Sydney Festival show is a collaboration between the Sydney Dance Company and the art gallery as part of their exhibition Nude: art from the Tate collection. During the rehearsal disrobed dancers move among the artworks, their fit young bodies in harmony with paintings by Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud and Henri Matisse.
In a room titled The private nude, dancer Fiona Jopp, 30, twists and turns her taut skin by a Pierre Bonnard painting of his wife in a bath.
"It was nice when people turned around and saw my face and didn't just look at my tits," she says later, after slipping into a light summer dress.
The thought of being nude in public is worse than actually getting your kit off, she adds. "While I am doing it I don't really feel embarrassed or out of place, there is no sense of being judged. But then I go home and see myself naked in the mirror and go 'My legs are hairy' and 'I have cellulite' and 'Did I pull my stomach in?'"
The 18 evening performances, from January 7, are recommended for people aged 16 and older. At one special sold-out show for adults-only, arranged at the request of a naturist group, the audience will be nude too.
The crowd at this week's dress rehearsal was warned "don't touch the art unless the art touches you". It's hard to know where to look first. Modigliani's Seated Nude with Necklace? Or the pair of lithe women intertwined on a bench nearby?
After the first blush of full-frontal nudity, the dancers seem to meld with the other artworks on show.
Jopp leads me by the hand to a room where dancers are in flux before a Francis Bacon triptych. Despite all that jiggling flesh and perfectly tended pubic hair, it's not meant to titillate – oddly enough, they'd be more alluring in their undies.
"The human body is pretty weird, really," Mack says. "Sometimes as a man you are quite happy for people to see your penis but other days, or in other temperatures, you are not OK. But we have no control over what people are looking at."
Choreographer Rafael Bonachela says the naked body is beautiful, raw, sensual and confronting. "Everyone's curious about what you don't see," he says. "We tend to associate how someone dresses with who they may or may not be.
"By taking away the designer clothes and the designer bags, you realise it doesn't really matter. We are all naked and we are all human beings. We become a blank canvas."
Review: Nude Live (Sydney Dance Company, AGNSW, Sydney Festival)
From the corner of the room, Ron Mueck’s towering Wild Man stares awkwardly at me like some nervous, naked Colossus of Memnon. My only companion is a toned young man who, like the 12-foot high wild man, wears no clothes. I’ll admit, I cast him curious side glances. He gazes at the art, which gazes back. Gradually he warps, spasms, retreats into a corner and collapses. A series of distressed reflex actions sees him writhing across the cold marble floor, the living embodiment of Louise Bourgeois’ extraordinary Arched Figure that contorts in an adjacent room. At one point he comes within six inches of me and makes contact by staring into my eyes with an intense desperation. All this takes place to Schubert’s poignant G Flat Impromptu.
Ron Mueck's Wild Man (2005)
The dancer is the remarkable David Mack and the room is “The Vulnerable Body”, the last of eight classifications in Justin Paton and Emma Chambers’ immaculately curated Nude: Art from the Tate Collection showing at Art Gallery of New South Wales and currently forming part of this year's Sydney Festival. It's a stunning, smart, insightful exhibition, but whoever had the brilliant idea of pairing it with work by Sydney Dance Company deserves a medal, for this is one of those truly unique, one-off events that will stay with you long after a festival has added up its box office receipts.
If that first encounter feels portentous and very, very serious – and I’ll confess that moment of ‘contact’ affected me powerfully – Nude Live is not as dark as it might sound. SDC Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela is blessed with an innate sense of playfulness ensuring that for every piece of choreography reflecting the psychological baggage that seems to come with our naked bodies there is a counterweight in a moment of laughter at the more ludicrous aspects of the various taboos surrounding nudity.
Entering the exhibition, the seven dancers strike you gradually, their nakedness almost irrelevant at first. One man is tightly curled on a plinth, bottom up, two women browse the art, just like us, the fact that they are unclad simply a tangential element. Others stand guard, alongside the regular gallery staff, living X-rays of their uniformed brethren. Secret doors allow them to come and go. As the audience fans out through the exhibition, the dancers can manifest themselves at any moment.
In “Body Politics” a fierce battle of the sexes takes place between a tall man (Izzac Carroll) and a woman (Olivia Kingston). A tight sequence of stretches and lifts sees them exploring each other’s bodies one moment, wrestling each other into submission the next. Barkley Hendricks’ strikingly aristocratic portrait of a black man, Family Jule: NNN (No Naked Niggahs) presides approvingly over the scene as does Nick Wales’ effective electro-ambient music.
One of the beauties of Nude Live is that no two people could possibly have the same experience. Moments of one-on-one intimacy mingle with the communal, but at any time you may be aware of others in a room opposite encountering who knows what. In “Paint as Flesh”, what started as a solo by Mack on a bench in front of Bacon’s painful Triptych – August 1972, becomes a whole lot more.
As Mack's body melts into shapes suggested by the artist’s morphing figures, the six other dancers (Carroll, Kingston, Marlo Benjamin, Zachary Lopez, Fiona Jopp and Oliver Savariego) join the audience, sitting or standing, before taking our hands with warm smiles and rearranging us around the room like so many prosaic works of art. A beautiful and magical moment. The sculptural septet that follows, to a soaring soprano aria from Adriana Lecouvreur, is full of delicate bends and turns capturing the elegance of the classical nude.
Meanwhile, in “Real and Surreal Bodies” Carroll stretches out on a plinth beneath Stanley Spencer’s brutally honest Double Nude: The Artist and his Second Wife, his languid genitals intimately paralleling the artist’s own. He’s joined by Kingston who arranges and rearranges Carroll's inert, vaguely compliant limbs in a comedic duet of love and lust. Never satisfied, she clamps his hands to her breasts and buttocks, finally giving up in mock despair. It’s clever, funny and painfully real, and neatly offset by Mahler’s most famous Adagio with its resonances of Mann's Death in Venice.
I missed the beginning of what went on in “The Private Nude”, but it involved three dancers (Carroll, Jopp and Benjamin) sporting around a bench occupied by two ‘volunteers’. The teasing balancing of a pair of breasts or a cock and balls on top of the furniture was a riot, and coming late in the hour-long programme not at all shocking in its more confronting aspects. Similarly, in “The Modern Nude” I just caught the end of an extraordinary display of rippling sinew and raw anatomy played out by Carroll in front of David Bomberg’s machine age The Mud Bath.
The grand finale was a fiercely dynamic duet for Jopp and Benjamin to the Dances of the Young Girls and Ritual of Abduction from The Rite of Spring. Hands locking down on genitals, buttocks and breasts, Bonachela’s provocative and earthy choreography was tailor-made for the sexual violence inherent in Stravinsky’s seminal score.
Profoundly thought provoking, Nude Live is not just a refection of art through dance, it’s a two-way mirror where the art itself is enhanced, while an audience is permitted to see something more of itself through the prism of movement, sculpture and painting. It’s also a rewarding chance to take contemporary dance out of the studio and into the ‘real world’. Bonachela's choreography is at its most creative, an endless series of flights of fancy, and to be so close to such physical talent with barriers bravely down is a rare privilege. A genuine one off, I’d imagine the show is a guaranteed sell-out. If you can, though, this really is a kill for a ticket event.
Nude Live: Sydney Dance Company & Art Gallery of NSW
Fiona Jopp was born on the Gold Coast and began her training at The Gold Coast City Ballet with Dawn and Joy Ransley. At the age of 15 she travelled to Europe, where she studied at the Palucca School in Dresden and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
As a dancer, Fiona has worked extensively in Australia and internationally across many disciplines.
As a freelance dancer she has worked with Michael Clark Company in their productions of The Stravinsky Project, Mmm…, th, and come, been and gone, in the UK, Europe, New York, Seoul, and Japan; with Bonachela Dance Company in the original production of Rafael Bonachela’s The Land of Yes & The Land of No in the UK and Europe; for Emanuel Gat in Brilliant Corners touring the UK Europe and USA; in Javier de Frutos and The Pet Shop Boys The Most Incredible Thing at Sadlers Wells in London; in Gravitas, a duet by Cameron McMillan; and for Sydney Dance Company in Rafael Bonachela’s Outsiders in the City of London Festival. She has performed the roles of the Cheetah and Sarafina in the Australian production of The Lion King for seasons in Sydney, Melbourne and Shanghai.
In 2010 Fiona took time out from her commitments in Europe to join Sydney Dance Company for the tour of we unfold around Australia and to the Biennale di Danza in Venice, and performed in the Company’s production of Emanuel Gat’s Satisfying Musical Moments. She rejoined Sydney Dance Company in May 2013 and has since performed in numerous Company productions in Australia and internationally, including Rafael Bonachela’s 2 One Another, Project Rameau, Les Illuminations, 2 in D Minor, Scattered Rhymes, Frame of Mind and Triptych (2015); alongside works by guest choreographers including Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, Andonis Foniadakis’ Parenthesis, Lee Serle‘s White Elephant, Cass Mortimer Eipper’s Dogs and Baristas and Gabrielle Nankivell‘s Wildebeest.
Commercially, Fiona has appeared in PUMA advertising, music videos for M.I.A and Calvin Harris and in the films Filth and Wisdom directed by Madonna, World War Z by Marc Forster and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.
Fiona was the assistant choreographer and played the role of Anybodys in Pimlico Opera’s production of West Side Story in Wandsworth Prison, London. She assisted Cameron McMillan on RE:sounding motion for Ipswich’s DanceEast CAT scheme with Aldebugh Young Musicians. Fiona also assisted Rafael Bonachela, rehearsal directing and managing Revolving Door by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadill for Kaldor Arts Projects’ 13 Rooms.
Fiona created a new piece for Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed 2015 season at Carriageworks – her first professional foray into choreography.
She will perform in Nude Live at the Art Gallery of NSW from 7-23 January 2017 as part of the Sydney Festival. You can also see Fiona in Crazy Times at the Sydney Opera House from 14-18 March 2017.
Olivia Kingston from Uki, Northern NSW started her training at The Ballet Factory in Tweed Heads.
Furthering her dancing studies, she completed two years of full-time classical training at Professional Ballet Coaching Academy in 2012/13.
In the first year of full-time training, Olivia completed her RAD qualifications and travelled to New Zealand to compete in the Genee International Ballet Competition 2012, where she was a semi-finalist.
In 2013, she completed her Higher School Certificate.
Olivia was accepted into the Sydney Dance Company Pre-Professional Year of 2014 and worked with many choreographers and mentors both Australian and international. She was then accepted into a second year at SDC PPY 2015.
After finishing, Olivia joined Limitless Dance Company in May 2016 and premiered Both Sides.
Olivia will perform in Nude Live at NSW Art Gallery from 7-23 January 2017 as part of the Sydney Festival.