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

Abstract

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 rosyfingered 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.