Why we don't dance naked

Alastair Macaulay’s editor must have asked him to think of SOMETHING that would boost readership of The New York Times’ increasingly staid Sunday Arts & Leisure section so he wrote about NAKED BALLET.

But even my Level 1 students could tell you the reason why we don’t dance naked is because the most important part of ballet is the allegro, and you can’t dance allegro with body parts bouncing around – it’s a practical issue, not a moral or philosophical one. All the intellectualizing over what constitutes porn vs. art is beside the point.

Admittedly, the photos are excellent, and Macaulay does make one interesting point about why it is shocking when ballet dancers remove their tights, even when they keep the rest of their costume on:

When you watch a prima ballerina in her tutu, her tights, her point shoes and — more relevant — her arabesques and her fifth positions, you see crucial aspects of the traditional nude. In her, you see the body balanced, prosperous, ideal, radiantly unembarrassed… When tights are removed from ballet, the art itself is changed. Ballet, the genre that once recaptured the ideal quality of nudity, becomes instead… the art of nakedness… The look of the bare leg drastically changes the entire aesthetics of the form. Muscular details of thigh, knee, calf become suddenly distracting. The leg becomes real, the arabesque not.