Student: Maria Pisiou

Academic Writing for the Lecture: Bodies in Dissent

The body as an onion.

Searching for nakedness and approaching it as truthfulness.

When all leaves are shed the core brings out,

the naked flesh of onion.

The body is covered by plenty of things such as bra, knickers, trousers, jacket, shoes,
jewelries, hair tie, thoughts, expressions, state of standing. All these things are layers
or leaves which when we take them off the core is appeared.

In this essay by reflecting on my own experience of nakedness as a

performer and by studying some of La Ribot’s performances I will
investigate the notion of nakedness in relation to visibility. Having
difficulties to expose my body naked in the context of performances, I
want to search for the inner reasons that this is happening and in the same
time to examine the way La Ribot uses her naked body. Approaching the
body as an onion consisting of layers, and nakedness as truthfulness I will
search the process which is needed in order for truthfulness to be
revealed. The method that I will follow is self-reflective based on my
personal experience as performer and as such highlighting the difficulties
from this perspective.

There is a separation between the word naked and the nude. Based on
English language, quoted by Clark Kenneth:
 ‘To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies
some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The
word “nude”, on the other hand, carries in educated usage, no
uncomfortable overtone.’(Clark, 1987,3)

In this essay I will use only the word naked as I mainly focus on the
sense the performer has while being naked. I perceive that the word
nudity is more connected with the gaze of the spectator who watches a
naked body. As Karl Toepfer argues:

‘Nudity in performance refers to the exposure of the most

erotically exciting and excitable sexual identifiers of the body,
being the most complete “proof” of the body’s vulnerability to
desire and the appropriating gaze of the Other.’ (Clark, 1987, 76)

Nudity approaches the performer’s body through the spectator’s gaze. I

will examine two cases of me performing naked using the term
nakedness.

In the beginning of 2019, I created a video dance where I was naked in

collaboration with a musician. The displayed image of the video depicted
my body semi-naked as a filter was applied in editing. Watching the
outcome, I realized that I had difficulties to make it public. The control of
my body went away from me through the process of editing and in the
context of its dissemination.

During the context of the performances for Public Restitution as guided

by VestandPage (2019), I presented a performance where I was naked
using different materials and a big glass window. The performance
happened in a cellar and the audience was all around and close to me.
Taking into account, the experience of the previous performance, I used
two methods, the window and the speech, in order to have the control of
the way my body is exposed. I could guide the audience in space through
speech and create a distance from them as I was standing in a corner
behind the glass window. Having these strategies made me think why I
needed them and whether I could get rid of them.

Looking at La Ribot’s performances, I noticed that she doesn’t need any

method to control the way her body is perceived by the audience. In her
series “Panoramix (2003), spectators are free to move around in the
performance space and view each part of her performance from their own
preferred perspective. The vulnerability of her nakedness is transferred to
the audience. As she analyzes:

‘You don’t have the same relationship with the audience when they
face you in a limited space as when they are next to you or all
around you (…) Sometimes I get scared. There are certain looks,
thrilling things. There is a contradiction because I think that I
escape or that they do not threaten me because I am naked. It
means that my being naked, which is utterly violent to them makes
me untouchable. It saves my life.’(Luc, 2003)

The possible vulnerability which nakedness entails is transformed into

something powerful for the performer while she is challenging the way
the audience is used to watch a female naked body. Being naked, the
performer brings out and makes visible how people are used to look at
bodies, at women and at other people.

The naked body is the base of La Ribot’s performances. Every

performance she has presented, starts from the naked body and based on
that she builds her concept. As she argues,

‘The naked body is central to my performance. It comes without

predetermined meanings. It’s neutral.’(Selsdon, 2019)
Being naked La Ribot draws the body at the center of research, at the
center of performance. It seems that nakedness is one more material that
she can work with while she is prevailing her own perception of the body
and bringing out all the possibilities and identities which naked body
entails; political, neutral, minimalistic, simple, natural, complicated.

Looking at my own experience I understand that I have grown up with

specific images and perceptions about naked female body. Born in
Greece in 1990s nakedness was usually connected with sexuality and was
visible only in very specific circumstances. There was this culturally
constructed image where the woman was exposing her body naked for the
man’s desire. When nakedness was happening out of the context of
approaching other’s sexuality then it was faced as abnormal and ashamed.

The first time I saw a naked body was my mother’s. She took a shower
and forgot to take her towel with her. So, she passed by naked in front of
me and my brother trying to cover her body with her hands. She quickly
went to her room to dress herself. This reaction of my mother made me
feel embarrassed for looking at her body. It was an emotion which was
disseminated in the room. Her naked body was something that it caused
shame and embarrassment. Patrick Cambell and Helen Spackman argues,

‘There is no “naked,” “natural” body; the body is prescribed by

culture.’(Campbell and Spackman, 1998, 57)

The notion of the naked body as private, personal and exposed only in
specific circumstances was constructed through this experience. Pavlos
Kountouriotis argues, the clothes function

‘is to hide the internal, the private, the self and to distance or expel
the external, the public, the other’. (Kountouriotis, 2009, 4)
The subject creates a distance from the Other through clothedness.
Clothes consist one more layer which construct and strengthen the “I”.
However, looking back to my experience in the performance Public
Restitution guided by VestandPage I realized that the “I” can still exist
even through nakedness. As a performer, nakedness didn’t appear to me
as a form, connected with unclothedness. Nakedness got appeared when I
exposed some truth, some private stories. In this performance there was a
repetition of a specific physical action for two hours. The exhaustion
arrived gradually in the body and in combination with repetition and
duration of action contributed to the denudation of the “theatrical body”.
Through that I, as the performer, started to spit out thoughts and stories in
order to make them visible and share with the Other the reason for being
there. Repeating a specific action, the one of cleaning and making dirty
for two hours, leaded to the gradual appearance of exhaustion and
boredom. Eirini Kartsaki argues:

‘Repetition draws attention to each word, each phrase, each

separate moment, as if language is stuck on a sandy hill, sinking.
And in that moment of sinking, we may discover something new,
some uncharted territory that is playful, exciting, familiar, and
difficult all at once’(Kartsaki, 2017, 30)

It is the moment that repetition makes the things simple. Focusing on one
specific action, there isn’t another choice except for digging into this
simple thing which is repeated. Through this process new qualities and
truths come in the surface which are both intimate and unfamiliar for the
subject. Giving the promise that things have to be continued even if the
performer is exhausted, and as Malone, (the hero of Samuel Becketts’s
play “Malone dies”), repeatedly insists ‘In order not to die, you must
come and go’,(Beckett, 1959, 232)the time and space is created for
denuding the subject of additional and unnecessary layers. Then, a naked
subject beyond its physical form is delineated. The exhaustion which was
caused by repetition contributed to parrhesia of words. Based on Michel
Foucault,

‘Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his per-

sonal relationship to truth (…). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his
freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead
of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and secu-
rity, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-in-
terest and moral apathy.’(Foucault, 1999)

In my performance, the frankness and truthfulness of speech was brought

out through the physical exhaustion and the nakedness. Approaching my
body as an onion, consisting of different layers I need to clean, to take off
the layers of it in order to approach the core. The first layer was taken off
through the choice of exposing myself naked. The second layer became
through repetition which caused exhaustion and, accordingly a relief of
needless thoughts. The third layer shed after sharing personal stories and
truths with a frankness and truthful way. Finally,

‘To see a body naked means to perceive its pure knowability

beyond every secret, beyond or before its objective predicates’
(Agamben, 2011)

as Giorgio Agamben argues. Every subject has some stories which define
the construction of everyone’s personality. The core of the subject
becomes visible when all these invisible threads, or in other words,
stories are exposed. Giorgio Agamben says that in truth

‘there is only baring, only the infinite gesticulations that remove

clothing and grace from the body.’ (Agamben, 2011)
The truthfulness is applied in La Ribot’s performance “Panoramix”
through the way she reclaims her body, her relation to the audience and in
the space. In the piece “Number 26” of “Panoramix” series (2003), she is
naked and paints her body while moving to the rhythm of Belmonte
(Catalan composer CarlesSantes). A truthful body appears. Her body
functions as a blank, neutral canvas where it becomes the inscription of
the indexical traces of the movement of the artist’s body. She brings out
the playfulness aspect of the body while deconstructing the dominant
white Western severe image of it. Through the action she does, she
vanishes the division between female and male image of the body
revealing a neutral body. Based on this truthful body, La Ribot imprints
new experiences on her body without previous connotations. Concerning
the audience, she denudes their thoughts and their impulse to look and
desire to gaze, placing them in the position of what in other
circumstances would be voyeuristic.

La Ribot simulates the performance space to “white cube”, which is made

“useful”: ‘a layer of brown cardboard renders the floor, a friendly surface
for both the audience and the performer.’, as quoted in her web site. The
space is denuded by its formal usage. Based on the “naked” space, there
is an invitation to the audience to redefine the way they move in space
while observing the performance. As Andre Lepecki says,

‘The space’s horizontal and vertical planes are re-activated in a

new relationship; (..)The “vertical-representational” plane that is
traditionally privileged in Western high-cultural productions is
dethroned, and the “lowly” floor – traditionally associated with
base physicality, animality and dirt – is given a new status and
value.’ (Laribot.com, 2018)
La Ribot removes the roles, which usually exist for the relation between
spectator and the audience. Deconstructing the domain usage of it, the
roles of participants are needed to be redefined. There are limits in how
spectators are used to move in space and how the performer allows
herself to come closer to the audience either through clothedness or
through physical distance. There are limits which the performer
transgresses and in the same time invites the audience to do the same.
Foucault explains, quoted by Chris Jenks,

‘Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical

world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary
world). Transgression announces limitation and its obverse’ (Jenks,
2003, 92)

The limit which is overcome in “Number 26” performance is positioned

in the distance between the performer and the audience. The subject is
usually close to a naked body in very specific circumstances which
connotate other meanings and interactions with the naked body. In this
performance, La Ribot invites the audience to read this distance with a
naked body with a different way.

Looking at my own experience performing Public Restitutions, the

transgression didn’t happen through the distance with the audience but
through the overcome of the limits which construct my personality.
Exposing my body naked is a way of existing, relating and interacting
with the Other which doesn’t happen in everyday life. For George
Bataille, quoted by Susan Suleiman,

“Transgression was an ‘inner experience’ in which an individual –

or, in the case of certain ritualized transgressions such as sacrifice
or collective celebration, a community – exceeds the bounds of
 rational, everyday behavior, which is constrained by the
considerations of profit, productivity or self-preservation. The
experience of transgression is indissociable from the consciousness
of the constraint or prohibition it violates; indeed, it is precisely by
and through its transgression that the force of a prohibition
becomes fully realized. “ (Suleiman, 1995, 316-317)

I shared with the audience my personal stories and truths, which

contributed to one more layer of myself to shed and, accordingly, to let
myself be “more” naked. All these things contributed to exceed the limits
of private, personal, internal aspect of myself and to redefine a new
relationship with the audience which is based on nakedness, on
truthfulness and on the blurriness of the limits of myself.

Nakedness comes through truthfulness. Different layers need to be shed

in order for a naked subject to be delineated. The body is hidden by
makeup, clothes but above all ‘it is hidden by movements’ (Agamben,
2011), as Giorgio Agamben argues. In order to approach the nakedness,
except for exposing personal truths and stories, it is necessary that the
subject redefines the way she moves, interacts and defines her relation
and interaction with the other.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 Agamben, G. (2011). Nudities. 1st ed. Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, pp.55-90.
 Beckett, S. (1959). Molloy ; Malone dies ; The unnamable.
1st ed. Paris: Olympia Press, p.232.
 Campbell, P. and Spackman, H. (1998). With/out An-
aesthetic: The Terrible Beauty of Franko B. TDR/The Drama
Review, 42(4), pp.56-74
 Clark, K. (1987). The nude. New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
 Foucault, M. (1999). The Meaning and Evolution of the Word
"Parrhesia". [online] Michel Foucault, Info. Available at:
https://foucault.info/parrhesia/foucault.DT1.wordParrhesia.en
/ [Accessed 17 Mar. 2019].
 Jenks, C. (2003). Transgression. London: Routledge.
 Kartsaki, E. (2017). Repetition in performance. 1st ed. United
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"still difficult spectator"', Movement Research Performance
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 Selsdon, E. (2019). Come play with me. [online] The
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