Empowering or exposing: what's the point of nudity on stage?

15 years since stripping off for Nic Green's Trilogy, Natasha Tripney considers the politics of the naked body in British and in European theatre

Goodbye Lindita. Photo: Theofilos Tsimas

By Natasha Tripney

It’s January 2010, and I’m crouching in the wings of the Barbican Theatre in London waiting to go on stage. I am completely naked. This is not an anxiety dream, quite the opposite. I’m surrounded by 100 other women, also completely naked, and the mood is electric. We’re about to participate in the central section of Nic Green’s Trilogy, a group dance sequence performed not by professional dancers but a group of women who had answered a call-out to participate in the piece.

Reviewing the show in Edinburgh in 2009, Lyn Gardner described Trilogy in The Guardian as “a strenuously choreographed, three-part, three-hour piece of participatory theatre that examines and celebrates what it means to be a woman in the 21st century.” It is the kind of show, she said, “that makes you want to fling off your clothes and dance.” By the time it reached London the word-of-mouth buzz around the show was considerable.

When I saw an announcement that Trilogy would play the Barbican and that Green was looking for volunteer participants, I signed up. I’m not one of life’s performers – but that was precisely what made me want to take part, to do something I found frightening, and to do it in the company of other women. Everyone had their own reason for being there. There were women there of all different ages and body types, tattooed bodies, bodies with scars, people there whose relationship with their bodies had shifted due to motherhood, menopause and illness. I was definitely at a point in my life where I didn’t like my body very much. That’s part of the reason I wanted to take part, that plus a desire – as someone who regularly writes about performance but finds the idea of actually getting on stage terrifying – to know what it feels like to stand in front of an audience. Why not do it naked?