Nudity
This will be, to everyone’s relief, a photoless entry.
So, in the evenings I work a follow spot. Follow spotting is one of those things where you really have to concentrate on what you’re looking at. There’s just no getting round it – if the command is to track that chipmunk, then that chipmunk gets tracked. And if the command is to track that stark staring naked individual prancing across the bare stage, well then, peel those eyelids back, hunker down into the ready position and hit ‘go’.
As a decent upstanding Englishwoman, I naturally have all the usual English things about nudity. I mean, make no mistake, I don’t object to naked bodies, especially since I’ve now read large swathes of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine and have horribly vivid mental pictures of all the things that could be wrong with a body. (Swollen tongues. The bit on swollen tongues was especially ugh.) But if someone happens to be naked in front of me, then I look politely away and maybe, if there happens to be a towel nearby, hand it over with eyes averted. If I’m feeling in a particularly evil mood, I may choose the smaller of the available towels, and may chuckle as I do so, but generally speaking, the social training kicks in. Even as an audience member, when very deliberately and pointedly being asked to look at nudity – to revel in it, not as a sexual thing, but more as an expression of innocence – the instinct is to concentrate hard on faces and hands, arms and legs, anywhere, in fact, but the bits that my health studies tutor once described as ‘the swimming costume zone’.
And while mulling all this over, in between cues, I kinda fell to mulling why. Why this instinct, even as a follow spot operator, to find something to cower behind? For a start, the bodies being follow spotted are not about to find themselves on page 3 of the Handbook of Clinical Medicine, so it’s not repugnance. What else? I have no religious qualms about nudity; I am not offended by it. The ambient room temperature is a comfortable 19-24 degrees and there’s no open wounds to get horribly infected, so frankly, clothing has lost its protective guise in that sense. Then there’s sexuality. And sure, when you get down to it, nudity goes straight for sexuality. As a recent convert to swimming at my local pool, I’ve spent my fair amount of time in the women’s changing room on a crowded day and while decency is generally maintained, there’s no offense in women seeing naked women’s bodies, and while I’m in no hurry to look too particularly, neither do I feel outraged at the (naked) company of my own sex. But the idea of being naked in the men’s changing room is a big uh-uh, and that seems likely to be sexuality at work.
Again, why? In my nice, safe follow spot box, hidden behind a maze of unmarked concrete corridors, I’m definitely, definitely not the vulnerable person on stage. Society builds up all sorts of ideas about what people should look like at any given moment. In the Elizabethan era, women painted their skins lead-white because it was indicative of not having to work in the sun; a status thing. These days, the opposite – at least in British society – is true. The Tudors liked codpieces, a bit of a low point in male fashion; the Victorians believed in men’s beards and women’s waists. The things we do to bodies to make them conform to expectation are often horribly uncomfortable; the women get thinner and the men get butcher, and frankly if society could find something better to do with its time everyone would probably be a great deal happier.
But – and this could just be me – a body by itself is a remarkably unexciting thing. It’s the intelligence behind the body, the light in the corner of the eye, which makes the difference between walking meat and strutting human; and while naturally I pine for an earnest male, preferably over five foot eleven, cooks, not afraid of spiders and able to handle a decent game of chess, your toned male model with a body of bronzed, silken skin stretched over neurotically hardened muscles of steel, just isn’t going to do it for me unless there is life behind the bones. In fact, perversely, I might find the above to be a little bit unappealing, in the sense that I always feel anyone who’s spent that amount of time working on perfecting their sexuality, isn’t really going to have much time for noticing mine.
By definition, nothing is so personal as body and mind, and therefore nothing should be accorded greater respect. We’ve all agonised at some point about a spot here or a flabby leg there, about whether he finds me attractive or whether she is looking at him in a funny sort of way. Spend too much time worrying about it and it can become a bit of a burden on the mind; innocent remarks are interpreted as a comment upon weight, or hair, or teeth, whereas sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.
I suppose we come back to the notion of context being everything. Someone whose trousers have torn in a compromising way (don’t lie, we’ve all been there) – they get the averted eyes and the polite towel, and why? Because their dignity is at stake and who are we to screw around with dignity? The Geneva Convention says no, and it makes a sound point. Someone who goes to a nudist beach and lays down in the sun, well, they get conversation about the weather and how rubbish the newspapers are, because the context is relaxed chit-chat and the body itself is not really an object of note. A flasher on a street corner gets a visit from the coppers and why? Because that’s not innocent, it’s an act intended to shock and distress and considering the English climate, probably a really chilly way of doing it too. To a doctor, the body is a profession; to a dancer, a tool. Sometimes sexual, often comical, the naked human body when you get down to it is one of the last things on the planet that should cause us surprise, since by definition, we all got one, even if it is currently wrapped up in three layers of shirt and a big wooly scarf.
And there’s the funny side. And there is a funny side. In the darkened wings of the theatre, the more earnestly the dressers and stage managers behave around the, hopefully-not-too-chilly individuals on stage, the more I come to appreciate the comic aspects. Make no mistake – I would not by any stretch of the imagination call the nudity I’m follow spotting gratuitous. It makes excellent sense in the context of the play and arguably adds a huge amount of depth and meaning, and I say this as one of these people who gets really pissed off when nakedness happens on stage or screen for anything less than a decent narrative reason. (But then I get pissed off when pretty much anything happens without decent narrative reason.) As such, the earnest respect with which the entire process is treated is entirely apt and appropriate and I for one am grateful for the poker face that several years of playing Cheat endowed me with. But when the lights are down and the workers are off, when the show is over and the audience are tottering out for a quick drink and a bus home, I look in vain for just one person to laugh out loud, not at him or her or his leg or her back, not at any particular detail of anatomy, but at the whole ridiculous ritual that has been built into the backstage etiquette whereby we handle nudity. I don’t find the bodies being lit comical, not in the least – rather its the averted eyes from a technical team who frankly, let’s face it, have seen it all before and will see it all again and really, what’s the fuss? It’s the hushed earnest voices, the black-clad dressers poised in the wings, the sense of tension in the air as everyone very carefully tries not to mention anything that could be construed as in any way, whatsoever, whatsoever so help us god, even remotely personal.
How do I feel about the rituals we use to protect ourselves and each other from the traumas of nudity? Oddly hilarious.
How do I feel about my job follow spotting said naked bods on stage?
In a word: professional.
