Event Write Up- Fall Dance Show

The event I went to was the Fall Dance Show. The dance, as we have all heard, featured a dance/performance which included nudity. Thus, I had a bit of trouble even getting into the show. I went to the final performance on Sunday, November 23. The show was a matinee and I had been out the night before and was slightly stressed out, which certainly affected the way I watched the performance.
There were several particularly interesting facets of this event. First, I found it interesting that (probably) because the show contained nudity, the performances were sold out each night. I assume that this is partially because people love all things controversial. Partially, though, sex sells. I think everyone who went, to at least a degree, wanted to see what this Naked Dance was all about.
Dance Shows, to an extent, are always displays of bodies, usually primarily female ones. The distinction between bodies displayed for art and bodies displayed for baser pleasures seems to be a fuzzy one to me. It was interesting, then, to see a dance performance which was explicitly displaying nude bodies in a way that wasn't supposed to be focused on the sexuality of those bodies. I think the dance was done in such a way which pointed out this problem. Why is it that nudity is always sexualized in our society? I don't know now, nor did I know before seeing the dance performance but it certainly made me think more about it. It was mentioned in the piece that there is power/vulnerability involved in nudity. Since nudity is generally closely tied to sexuality, that would imply that power/vulnerability are important aspects of our sexuality as well. In this particular piece, the relationships of power and vulnerability seemed very clear to me. The performers are students at a small college. Their peers, families, and professors were in the audience. Their willingness to stand in front of that group of people nude certainly put them in a position of vulnerability. Thus there was a level of trust involved. The performers had to trust the audience to treat them with respect, which in my opinion happened. It also, though, put the audience in a position of vulnerability, in that they were required to face something with which they were not necessarily comfortable. We don't really live in a society where nudity is a norm.
Another interesting aspect of the dance was that it featured almost entirely white female bodies. I would assume that the ratio didn't match up with that of Macalester as a whole. I'm not sure why this was the way it was. Maybe to an extent because women are more used to having their bodies be displayed, and thus more females were comfortable being in that position. I'm not sure and not entirely willing to speculate because while it is easy to speculate about the motives of society as a whole, there is a whole new level of awkwardness when the motives are those of one's immediate peers.
Finally, I found it quite interesting that few of the dancers featured in other pieces were also in the Naked Dance.