Sydney Dance Company's Rafael Bonachela Reveals The Naked Truth In 'Nude Live'

Some people break out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of audience participation, but being pulled up on stage for a few awkward moments in the spotlight pales in comparison to the next-level audience involvement planned at Sydney Dance Company's collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Nude Live. Leaping and lunging around more than 100 artworks celebrating the unclothed human form, currently on loan to the AGNSW from London's Tate Gallery, seven dancers will bare all for the production. However, it won't be just the dancers who'll appear naked - the audience will be naked as well.

If you're inclined to scoff at the notion that any paying ticket-holder would ever agree to strip off in front of a crowd of strangers, it's worth noting that this radical clothes-free concept, in fact, originated as a request from members of the public, specifically a Sydney-based naturist group who felt an obvious synergy with the performance's nudity. "My immediate response was, 'Yes! Let's do it,'" SDC artistic director Rafael Bonachela says. "The idea intrigued me because we express our identity through what we wear. It tells us who is wealthy, and even who is not, who is fashion conscious, what a person's background is, what their beliefs are. We judge people by what they wear, but when you lose those layers, you're left as you were born, and in a way, that makes us all equal. There is no camouflage, just the naked truth."

Initially, just a single performance from the upcoming Sydney Festival season of Nude Live was earmarked for a naked audience, but after this show sold out a second was added by popular demand. This box office success is no surprise for Bonachela, who says he will also disrobe along with the rest of the audience for the performances. "It will be a unique experience - a once in a lifetime opportunity. When and where else can people be part of something like this, with so many amazing works of art? I think it will be quite unique and special, but there's also a sense of the unknown. I can try and imagine what it will feel like to be that exposed in that space, but until we're there, it is impossible to guess."

"When you lose those layers, you're left as you were born, and in a way, that makes us all equal."

The naked body has been the muse of visual artists for millennia, as evidenced in the impressive scope of the AGNSW's Nude: Art From The Tate Collection exhibition. The more than 100 pieces on show include works by a who's-who of art world heavyweights, including Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Henry Matisse and, as its centrepiece, Auguste Rodin's erotically charged ode to love, The Kiss. In live performance however, nudity still has the power to scandalise, even in our world of twerking tweens, sexualised pop starlets and pseudo-soft porn Instagram selfies.

That's not to say naked performers are absent from the stage. Sydney has hosted two shows heavily featuring nudity over the past 12 months, in productions by Xavier Le Roy and Olivier Dubois, both at Carriageworks. In Europe, nakedness is even more commonplace, to the point of being considered cliche amongst those in the avant-garde milieu. However, there is still a seemingly indestructible current of controversy when performers dare to bare in front of a paying crowd.

Despite the ubiquity of sexual references in contemporary culture, Bonachela believes it's our unwillingness to acknowledge the erotic or sensual in public that has preserved nudity's enduring shock value. "As long as it's painted or in the form of a sculpture - as long as it is not alive - the human body is not confronting. When a body is moving, the association with sex is more obvious. How people deal with that changes from country to country; there are places where nudity appears on stage regularly, but there are also some parts of the world where it is illegal. For some reason, there is something about nudity and the naked body that has the power to scare people or even make them feel ashamed."

When performers go au naturale, it innately toes the line between artistic credibility and gratuitous gimmickry, but for Bonachela, who has never used nudity in his work before, costumes were never an option for Nude Live. "The work is not placed on a stage where it could be dressed or undressed - it's surrounded by more than 200 years' worth of art entirely focused on the idea of the naked body and its many aspects. If the performers were not wearing much - were only almost nude - it would have felt like a missed opportunity. For us, to bring these nude bodies into this exhibition is going full circle," Bonachela explains. "These dancers are people who have dedicated their lives to training their bodies, making their bodies intelligent, honing every little muscle for the explicit purpose of communicating with an audience. In this case, for this performance the nudity was essential for me. If someone had challenged that - which was not the case - I doubt I would have bothered. It makes absolute sense to present the body as unclothed."

Sydney Dance Company and the Art Gallery of New South Wales present Nude Live, at the AGNSW 7 — 23 Jan, part of the Sydney Festival.