Stage Struck

Done in thebest possible taste, assures PETER CRAWLEY

PREPARE TO be shocked.

The Absolut Fringe, due to return to Dublin in September, has put out a “help wanted” ad looking for “50 Women needed to dance onstage (naked)”.

This appeal for assistance with Trilogy, a huge success last year in Edinburgh, seems designed to assuage different sensitivities. Women of all ages, shapes and sizes are asked – with gentle reassurances about the political credentials of the production, the empowerment of the gesture and the fun times to be had – to participate in a dance "celebrating the female form".

Such softly-softly appeals can be as revealing as a freshly dispensed bathrobe. Nic Green’s production needs the participation of women who are not prudes nor, one suspects, exhibitionists. The ideal candidate must want to do it, but not too much, and such a candidate mustn’t be ideal.

“I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American,” the actress Shelley Long once said. “But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.”

For something so unadorned, onstage nudity has had a number of guises. It began gratuitously, of course, when Roman pantomimes had female performers undress onstage for no better reason than prurience.

When Christianity arrived it was duly scandalised by nakedness and theatre itself. Ever since, nudity has been a pawn in the confrontation between prudes and progressives.

By the time of the counter- culture, the exposed body had become a tactical weapon: the 1968 rock musical Hairwas infamous for full-frontal nudity, variously celebrated and banned, but by all accounts its disrobing was a much more coy affair than imagination suggests.

Just as the alternative is always co-opted by the mainstream, so nudity has become something less political than commercial. No production, no matter how excruciating, has failed to marshal a certain audience (often dressed in raincoats) with the disingenuous warning “Contains nudity”.

More recently, it has acquired a celebrity cachet. Katherine Turner in The Graduate, Nicole Kidman in The Blue Roomand Daniel Radcliffe in Equushave all stripped off onstage in the name of art, only for promoters to tout the fact in the name of box-office.

If that means that nudity no longer shocks us, it's almost a shame. In Equus, for instance, coming at a point of high distress, the nudity should be shocking, and not just to reactionaries. But in a culture keen to dismantle taboos while not reverting to prurience, nudity is now shorn of effect: neither shocking nor titillating. You might as well wear a duffle coat.

If the number of women who turned out for this year's Dip in the Nip for the Irish Cancer Society, or the hundreds of people who were photographed for Spencer Tunick's mass nude portraits in Dublin and Cork, are anything to go by, the recruiters for Trilogy's dance sequence may have little to worry about.

Once this was a society founded on repression, secrets and shame. These days, it seems, we have nothing left to hide.