The naked body provides liberty for the dancers’ movement. However, despite avoiding any physical impediments caused by the stage costume, until very recent times its appearance on stage has entailed much more. Prejudices and moral considerations for a long time have been far more decisive than aesthetics in limiting, censoring and even prohibiting specific outfits in front of the audience, both with regard to the dancer as well as the spectator. Even so, the dancing naked body is today just one more choice among all the options that any choreographer and costume designer have in mind when it comes to the overall project of their work. Moreover, the public’s reaction to the vision of more or less centimetres of bare skin has also influenced the evolution of stage dancing.
When the narrow border between dancers and actresses was defined and as soon as women jumped onto the stage, the first nude dancers appeared; mainly female bodies, of course, since both the main choreographers and the most prominent names sitting in the audience –the King and the high aristocrats– were men. The male nude in dance took centuries to be interesting to the eyes of the audience.1 In 1661, at the Château de Vaux-le- Vicomte, the dancer Madeleine Béjart appeared more than light of clothing in Les Fâcheux,2 comédie-ballet that Molière had written to entertain Louis XIV; the beautiful Béjart presented the performance standing on a shell, representing a beautiful naiad. She was –or seemed to be–completely naked, holding a light shawl. Only her necklace and pearl bracelets broke the uniformity of her skin; even today, as then, one doubts whether the dancer was really naked,3 and whether it was the mother –Madeleine, 43 years old at the time– who emerged from the shell before the King, or what seems most likely, her daughter Armande, barely eighteen years old. The effect was the same: benevolent courtiers and women offended by the sight of a beautiful woman who scarcely danced, who just needed to move slightly to impress the audience with her beauty.4 At a time when transvestism was common on stage, the attributes built by cotton that allowed dancers to become ‘naked’ nymphs were less scandalous, but of course, they were less credible and above all, not captivating at all.5 Also pretending nudity, Didelot appeared in 1791 in flesh-coloured tights, as a combination of long stockings and skin-fitted knickers under a transparent tunic.6
3.1 - Armande Béjart as La Naïade in Les Fâcheux. Sanguine portrait by Sébastien Bourdon, 1661.
Professional dancers after La Camargo7 were subjected to the most extreme surveillance, no longer in terms of the length of their skirts –that was specifically the great audaciousness of La Camargo, and what made possible for her to develop the foot technique that would make her famous– but of the almost invisible clothes that they had to wear under their skirts and panniers. An incident happened around 1754 at l’Opéra Comique in Paris that would change the customs on stage: a dancer fell while executing a very complicated enchaînement and uncovered something more than her legs, with the consequent scandal in the audience.8 Concerned that some of the spectators might be watching with their binoculars the intimate parts of the dancers –who did not use underwear, like most women of the time under their street clothes– decided to prohibit from entering the stage any dancer who resisted wearing the so-called caleçon de précaution.9 However, we can assume that La Camargo, who at that time was already retired from stage, would probably have belonged to the group of ‘irresponsible’ dancers; otherwise, between the pannier, the shoes and the bloomers, it would have been difficult for her to perform the famous jetés battus that made a celebrity of her.
It is easy to suppose, anyway, that with those safety bloomers no dancer would be able to perform any step which involved crossing of the legs, perhaps not even to keep them together in a 5th position of the feet with the knees fully stretched;10 we must guess, in the case of those modest and virtuous dancers, that those light battus were performed almost touching one foot with the other, and not at all the way these steps are done today, when the dancer is asked to cross the whole leg from the thigh to the ankle. On the other hand, we know that women in England and France –where La Camargo spent most of her career– were not accustomed to using underwear under their street clothes until well into the 19th century.11 Let’s add, as a curiosity, some verses by Soame Jenyns, from his poem The Art of Dancing, 1729, as explicit as:
“[…] Let each fair Nymph, that fears to be disgrac’d,
Ever be sure to tie her Garters fast,
Lest the loos’d string, amidst the publick Ball,
A wish’d-for Prize to some proud Fop shou’d fall,
Who the rich Treasure shall triumphant show,
And make her Checks with burning Blushes glow.”12
Out of London or Paris, moral authorities were no more permissive regarding the use of safety pants; in Spain, there was a fine of two coronas for any dancer showing her panties, and in the Netherlands a 1768 law imposed up to six weeks’ imprisonment for dancers who scandalized the public by showing their most intimate parts. In Rome, by a papal order, all the dancers had to wear black velvet panties.13 To conclude the anecdotes, the famous Casanova reported that in 1750 he saw, with his friend Claude-Pierre Patu, La Camargo dancing in Paris a year before her retirement from the stage; Patu told him that the dancer did not wear bloomers under her dresses. She, however, would assert categorically from her retirement that she always wore that garment.14 Avoiding these frivolities, it still seems unlikely that La Camargo could perform her entrechats wearing such clothing, so we suppose a Camargo that we could describe as unlawful and shameless… because of the fear from moral authorities that the dancer would show something more than her ankles under the skirt. To compensate for so much freedom in the lower half of her body, and bearing in mind that women’s fashion was about to enter into the dictatorship of bras and corsets, we can imagine La Camargo with her waist oppressed by a strapless bodice under her beautiful dresses:15 nothing interesting to show at the moment in her upper part, since the focus of attention was mainly on her huge pannier while the public tried to guess of what was happening under her skirts.
3.2 - The Graces of 1794. Satirical print by Isaac Cruikshank. Hand-coloured, 1794.
Other dancers, however, flirted with necklines: Mlle Auretti exhibited part, if not all, of her cleavage on stage wearing dresses that lowered the neckline much further than what any demure woman should wear. It is surprising that the authorities, so concerned about the use of safety bloomers, approved a neckline that most likely would let the dancer show more than the upper part of her breasts as soon as she started jumping. The truth is that by the end of the 18th century, once the pannier of the women’s wardrobe had disappeared, the total exhibition of the breasts –which now remained outside the neckline– would become habitual, perhaps as a consequence of the fact that breastfeeding babies became ‘fashionable’. An engraving from British Museum in London,16 the parodying the custom of the moment, illustrates Judith Chazin- Bennhaum’s The Lure of Perfection…. She quotes, in the words of Isaac Cruikshank: “It’s the watch fob that grabs the eye. Feminine dress of the present fashion is perhaps the most indecent ever worn within this country. The breast is altogether displayed; the whole drapery is made to cling to the figure. Well may it be necessary to veil the face.”17
3.3 - Reine des Abeilles. Design by Paul Lormier for Marie Taglioni, 1852.
A few decades earlier the neckline cut was already being lowered; something that, as seen in the portrait of Mlle Auretti, could be used to highlight the uninhibited character of the dancer. Some designers will use it again in the next century: Paul Lormier’s design from 1852 for the character of The Queen of the Bees in the opera Le Juif errant, by Halévy –in whose Act III Marie Taglioni