A long tradition of dancing nude exists in the theater, and a diverse group of artists performed completely naked at the Electric Lodge Theatre in Santa Monica for three performances on June 19-21, 2004.
What made this 14-person dance ensemble unique is the performers were not just the typical pencil-thin dancers one might have expected. The body types came in all shapes and sizes, colors, sexualities, and the age range also spread across several decades.
The play came to the Los Angeles area after three years of evolution at the San Francisco Dandelion Dance Theatre. The show performed to sold-out houses at the Mondavi Center at U.C. Davis in May. All three Los Angeles performances were also sold out.
According to the playbill, Night Marsh is “an intricately choreographed journey through a world of naked bodies. Beginning with an investigation of our culture's attitudes towards body diversity and nudity, the piece then looks deeper at fears of the body as it is and their relationship to fears of death and dying. The show uses nudity as a tool for uncovering the often forgotten place of humans in the wide spectrum of animals and the natural world.”
Some of the vignettes worked better than others with seamless contact duets that breathe in arcs and spirals.
One particularly moving numbers, “Recollections of a Hapa Cowgirl,” choreographed by the fantastically expressive Kimiko Guthrie is a riveting ride, presenting the All-American family and its dark secrets showed bodies stacked in heaps, bearing a striking resemblance to the recent prisoner atrocities reported in Iraq. Other dance numbers and acting vignettes ran the gamut from sublimely soft-lighted to an absurdly improvisational butt-wiggling chorus and a breast-flapping solo.
Choreographer Eric Kupers, himself one of the performers, said he encountered "incredible shame and aversion" during auditions. "There is a tyranny of slenderness among dancers," he said. "So many people interviewed felt they were too fat, too hairy, too old or too wrinkled. I knew dancers had many issues blocking body acceptance but I hadn't expected those feeling to be so strongly entrenched." Eventualy he was able to find a group willing to accept the need to perform naked and let the dimples and warts be where they may.
Kupers said he was drawn to the challenge of designing a dance performance without clothes because "so many of the traditional movements of modern dance look artificial on naked bodies. I found the nudity opened up wonderfully new choreographic possibilities."
The title Night Marsh came from Kuper's idea of meshing the normal with what might first be judged as messy and gross. "The body can be a real mixed bag and in my mind that is what ultimately connects us to nature. I believe a lot of our culture's aversion to and obsession with the body is rooted in a fear of our mortality, our impermanence. I also believe a lot of our fears about death are rooted in discomfort with the body. Night Marsh is in essence a story of birth to death, permeated with unanswered questions about what comes after."
Certainly the popularity of the show and the enthusiasm of the critics indicates Kuper may be on to something. Night Marsh is a liberating reminder of the simple beauty of the human figure, regardless of shape. That alone makee the experience worthwhile.
