In dance, the Japanese-born American dancer Maurine Fleming will perform her hour-long show "After Eros" on Oct. 25-26 completely in the nude. On Oct. 27-29 at the Teowol Theater in the Seoul Arts Center, France’s Ballet Prejocaj performs "Rite of Spring," in which a female dancer performs naked. At the Hanjeon Artspool Center, the musical "The Full Monty" ends with a strip show of workers at a steel factory.

Nudity is no longer shocking at arts performances. Disputes of "art or obscenity" are now old-fashioned. Nevertheless, this "nude trend" is somewhat different from the past. As nudity surpasses commercialism, the bare body is being used as a form of art to portray the work's theme more clearly. And the level of nudity has become more daring. Before, scenes that would have caused arguments of prurience or indecency are now being accepted by audiences as perfectly natural.

Although "Rigoletto" was a foreign work, it was the first opera to be staged on the peninsula with fully nude perfomers. The work contains a scene in which a completely naked couple and six women with their breasts bared have a "party" for 10 minutes. The portrayal of the male sexual organ was predicted to be rather shocking for a domestic opera productions - the Seoul Arts Center worried whether this opera would be swept up in disputes for obscenity. But audiences were quite calm.

“In an arts performance, nudity must be understood as art," said an official at the arts center. "In the Broadway musical "Oh! Calcutta!" which ran for 16 years since 1989 and "Women of Troy" performed at the 1997 Seoul International Theater Festival, there are many nude performances that are considered high level works of art. To view these as strange is what is strange.”

The opera director Cho Sung-jin said, “On the stage, the ‘body’ is a channel that sends artistic language and messages through images. Nudity depends on how it is portrayed in the performance and should not be frowned on in itself.”

The Seoul Arts Center performance business director Ahn Ho-sang says, “Before, it would have been very hard for works such as "Rigoletto" to be performed in Korea. However, the audiences accepted it very naturally, as part of the plot.”

The nude trend in movies, visual arts and with celebrities seems to have worked as the foundation for bolder nude performances. A music critic, Han Sang-woo, says, “In foreign countries, there are performances that are 'more' than 'Rigoletto.' Seeing that the performance was staged with no mishaps, it seems that our attitude in accepting culture has become more mature.

A dance choreographer, Ahn Ae-sun, said, “In dance, shedding clothes represents freedom. There should be more discussions of the body in dance. Just focusing on nudity may pull down the quality of the dance and cause misunderstandings.”

There are also criticisms that this popularity of nudity in performances may lean toward stimulating sexual curiosity. The Arts Center's performance planning director Koh Hee-kyung said, “We must guard ourselves against attempts to incite unnecessary lasciviousness, such as what you would see at some back-alley stages of the past." (Kim Ryong-woon, proarte@chosun.com )