Risqué ballet

Claire Bauroff (photo by Trude Fleischmann)

There’s a long history of trying to keep art apart from sex. Especially in the English-speaking world, as soon as the sexual element comes to the fore the work is likely to be dismissed as porn. This is especially clear in dance. When someone’s described as a dancer, I catch myself wondering whether she’s a ballet dancer (or practitioner of some other artistic form of dance) or “just a stripper.” If the dancer’s clothes are off, then the dance is about sex only and therefore it isn’t art and the dancer’s “just a stripper.”

This habit of thought is of course bogus — nude dance can approach some pretty ambitious artistic, moral and spiritual aims.

This is a central theme in Karl Toepfer’s book, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Toepfer devotes a chapter to nacktballett, or naked ballett. It was practiced initially only in private as a kind of exercise by dancers in (for example) Ida Herion‘s school in Stuttgart. It isn’t clear who first went public with the art form in the Weimar era. Claire Bauroff  is associated with nacktballet, but (according to Toepfer) she seldom danced nude, and her association with nacktballet is mainly due to the photos of her in nude dance poses by Trude Fleischmann.

Anita Berber certainly gave public, nude dance performances with an artistic purpose. She had trained as a ballet dancer, but much of her work was in a more modern, expressionistic dance form. In spite of her artistic aims, she was hounded by the authorities, who assumed that nude dancing could only be stripping and therefore not art.

Celly de Rheydt was a true practitioner of nacktballet, but was put on trial in 1922. In spite of her artistic achievement, she was convicted of lewdness.

There are today more examples of artistic nude dance. The performers seem to agree that the nudity heightens the sexual dimension of their art. So sex does indeed come to the fore in their work, but that only makes it better art. A good example is the work of Dasniya Sommer, who’s interviewed here (in German).

She put her expertise in Japanese rope bondage to use on the set of Romeo Castellucci’s production of the Wagnerian opera Parsifal (which involved the rope suspension of some peformers). Here’s a review of Castellucci’s Parsifal.

Then there’s Karina Sarkissova, who was fired by an Austrian ballet company after she posed in the nude for some photos.

Karina Sarkissova

LiveLeak.com – full nude ballet, posted with vodpod

A study connecting sex to cardio health and more naked opera

Ludmila Tcherina

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse: “‘He was not a pornographer, in any sense,’ says Dreyfus. ‘He was always trying to imagine some ideal representations of desires.’”

Links to some naked opera from recent years

Vagina: a Cultural History by Naomi Wolf will soon be available

The Kinsey collection of films at Indiana University is in an old bowlling alley

Liberated sexuality wrecks the social order but “if liberated sexuality is world-destroying from the mythic, fundamentalist point of view, it is world-creating from a pluralistic one.“

An analysis of women-in-prison flicks: “This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream.”

About those 19th-Century free-love communes in upstate New York and the northwest: “This essay explores the politics of social and geographical location in several histories of the 19^th century American and Pacific Northwest free love movements.”

Ludmilla Tcherina in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann:

On the Flash Press — “racy” “libidinous” male weeklies in 1840s New York

“The high priestess of free love … Victoria Woodhull: spiritualist, blackmailer, wife, prostitute and the first female presidential candidate“. Woodhull’s bio

“Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930′s — Part I“

“Praising the mound of venus: … While there are great artists that have given the vulva praise in art such a Georgia O’Keefe – the vulva does not get’s it due compared to the male member when it comes to praise and adoration.”

“Erectile dysfunction (ED) is considered a well-established risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) …. Our results suggest that a low frequency of sexual activity predicts CVD independently of ED and that screening for sexual activity might be clinically useful.“

An amazing production of Tales of Hoffmann:

Tannhäuser erotica

Tannhäuser is one sexy opera. It’s based on an old legend. Wagner finished his opera in 1845. The opera and/or legend stimulated the production of many erotic works of art, including more than one naked opera production.

Sexo explto en una a de Wagner | elmundo.es videos, posted with vodpod

Nadja Auermann posing as opera figures

Nadja Auermann as Venus in Wagner's Tannhäuser

In 1896, Aubrey Beardsley wrote a pornographic story (which he didn’t complete) called The Story of Venus and Tannhauser (aka Under the Hill). Olympia Press released a version of this book in 1959. This version was completed by John Glassco (pdf).