Dance and Costumes. Elna Matamoros

the handkerchief, with a pleased gesture. Of the many versions of this piece that will be choreographed over the years, the one premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1953 created by Jerome Robbins masterfully maintains the same erotic tension as Nijinksy’s original, but with a diametrically opposite setting, and without any showing or insinuating. In the solitude of a dance studio, a couple of dancers in rehearsal clothes, man and woman, find themselves and dance together looking through the mirror, which turns out to be the ‘fourth wall’ between the stage and the audience. The mere fact of being able to witness the action –which takes place in a space normally inaccessible to the dance audience– and almost like being part of it throughout the connection and the illusion of the false mirror, has a magnetic effect on the viewer.⁷⁹

      3.14 - Rudolf von Laban and his dancers at Lake Maggiore in Ascona. From right to left, Laban, Betty Baaron Samao, Maja Laderer, Käthe Wulff, Suzanne Perrottet and Karl Waysel. Autochrome photographic plate by Johann Adam Meisenbach, 1914.

      3.15 - Laban Dancers. Autochrome photographic plate by Johann Adam Meisenbach, 1914.

      Almost in the same years, a student of the moving body, Rudolf von Laban,⁸⁰ went far beyond what all those above mentioned had proposed, totally undressing his disciples; Laban lived in moral freedom and sexual permissiveness, both in his professional and personal existence,⁸¹ as he revealed in his work; it is not rare to find images in which some of his dancers appear totally naked, something that we never saw in the works of Isadora.

      A collection of images taken in the summer of 1914 by the Lake Maggiore in Ascona, Switzerland, show Rudolf von Laban and six of his disciples in an interesting series of choreographic evolutions; in some of them they are all dressed, playing group games whilst holding hands in what seems to be an experiment on different planes of space. In others, however, some of the dancers are naked as they continue to be part of the same group and explore the same movements as their colleagues.⁸² Nothing has changed in their behaviour or attitude; they only uncover their bodies ignoring the colourful tunics worn now by the other dancers, without having incorporated any eroticism to the scene.⁸³

      In another two images, only those dancers unclothed are pictured: in one of the portraits they hold their hands at different heights, as in a basic wheel dance;⁸⁴ in another image one of the dancers is shown frontally, without any modesty, while holding in her hand the tunic she previously wore –draping it across the floor– as in a conspiratorial sign to the dress that was covering her body before.

      The naturalness of the naked body in motion was not uncommon in Germany at the time. At the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games,⁸⁵ the images of the dance montage on the sports grounds were replaced by nude shots of young people practicing Eurythmia⁸⁶ something that Laban had already developed.⁸⁷ The poster of the film itself exhibited the image of a naked woman celebrating the glorification of her uncovered body, in which there is no inherent modesty or excessive exhibition; only a harmonious body in full exercise of its movement proficiency.⁸⁸

      Laban changed the way we understand and perceive human movement today; his disciples would follow his footsteps and even those who later distanced themselves from his aseptic intellectual method in pursuit of a more dramatic stage work that led to expressionism, would inevitably be influenced by his long-awaited study of the body itself. Mary Wigman, the greatest exponent of Ausdruckstanz⁸⁹ gave priority to these ideas: the memories of one of her students in Berlin, the American Emma Lewis Thomas, embodies the choreographer’s concept of the use of the body. Wigman, Lewis Thomas said, advised her students to look themselves in the mirror, naked, and “learn to know it and to love it, for through this body you will speak for others for the rest of your life, and thank the gods for giving you such a remarkable instrument.”⁹⁰ On the other hand, Wigman explored the individualism that the women of her time seemed unwilling to give up. “I believe that all young females today experience a strong healthy pleasure in pure movement. I also believe that all these young women are entitled to a healthy dose of egoism, which begins by exploring itself before trying to change turning to the world around it. Seek yourself, feel yourself, experience yourself!.”⁹¹

      3.16 - Leni Riefenstahl in the advertisement of the first part (Fest der Völker) of Olympia, 1938, her film about the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Photo probably by Willy Zielke.

      In a conference by designers Jesús del Pozo and Lydia Azzopardi, in March 2008, Azzopardi admitted that she considered it unnecessary to show a naked dancer on stage “if it is for sensationalism” because, as she said, “it has been seen so many times, already….” Jesús del Pozo stated, in the same dialogue, that it is “very difficult” to dance naked and also that he could not imagine “a naked man dancing; a woman, perhaps […] Those kind of things are either done well, or they are terrible, and to do it well is very complicated.” For Lydia Azzopardi, as a designer and dancer, the interesting work is always “to dress the dancers, not to strip them.”⁹²

      In 1951, the American Jerome Robbins created for the New York City Ballet a piece entitled The Cage, based on Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for strings, in which he depicted a community of female creatures where, after mating, the male was left as prey to feed the group.⁹³ The costumes, designed by Ruth Sobotka –a company dancer since 1946– featured nude maillots with a black line crossing the torso both for men and women; the women, including the protagonist –called “the novice”–, danced on pointe and performed some groups parts and pas de deux with the only two men of the piece –called “first intruder” and “second intruder”– that include movements bordering animal attitudes. The pre-release review of The Cage noted that “its subject is dramatic, and its action, according to rumour [sic], is pretty violent.”⁹⁴

      “I portray the novice, which is sort of a new-born baby into a tribe of amazons; the tribe initiates her, so I have to hunt other animals or men… or whatever comes my way”, says the dancer Wendy Whelan, who made out of this character one of the biggest hits of her career. “There is some innocence in the character, she doesn’t really know her own strength; her instincts tell her to kill and then she realizes… [she laughs] I didn’t know that was in me!.” One of the pas de deux, Whelan explains, implies that the protagonist “has feelings for one of her victims and she doesn’t really know what to do.” The choreographer, Jerome Robbins, “just kept repeating that I really didn’t have a mind, but physically it was in my blood; animal instinct was something interesting to think about”, remembers the dancer.⁹⁵ The strangled movements of the character fit perfectly with a minimalist wardrobe that, in addition to insinuating the naked body of an invertebrate, included a short-haired wig for the dancer who starred in it, Nora Kaye;⁹⁶ that hair à la garçonne symbolized not only the freedom of the females of this strange species, but also turned the ballerina on pointe into a surprising and unpredictable creature. The critics of the premiere defined the ballet as “a little horror”, called Ruth Sobotka’s debut as a designer “admirable” and said of Robbins that, although “always manifestly gifted, now seems likely to become the first major choreographer in the field of American ballet.”⁹⁷ Robbins had used the almost naked human body to turn dancers, paradoxically, into creatures difficult to identify, perhaps insects.

      3.17 - Heather Watts and Bart Cook in The Cage, by Jerome Robbins. Photo: Martha Swope, 1982.

      In general, the naked body has been a regular tool of many 20^th century choreographers to the point of no longer provoking any moral scandal or special reaction in the audience. In the last decades, choreographers like Mats Ek or Wim Vanderkeybus have presented naked dancers before the public. The nude is no longer