Bare necessity
Dandelion Dancetheater gets undressed.

By Sima Belmar

DANCED BY A completely naked cast of 14, Eric Kupers's Undressed, which premiered at ODC Theater last Thursday, inspires layers of questions. What is being hidden in a dance of naked bodies? Does the dance confront or restate the myth of the natural body? Would the dance be successful if the dancers had clothes on? Pondering these questions is half the fun of watching Undressed.

The "foreword" to Undressed is the wickedly funny Illusive, in which the lights go up on a naked and crouching Kupers. As he performs his signature style of dancing – low-flying, acrobatic, swirl-prone, and released – Kimiko Guthrie enters in a conservative blue suit, black pumps, a long black wig, and glasses. Guthrie warns us "not to be fooled by appearances." She says the man before us is not a dancer because he does not possess a dancer's physique, and proceeds to ruthlessly dissect and denounce Kupers's body. Kupers tugs on his belly, jiggles his midsection, and pulls on his penis, all in "flagrant disregard for aesthetics." Exposing his body and the dance world's narrow view of beauty, he's ballsy in every sense of the word.

Where Illusive is all black humor, Undressed mostly plays it straight. The dancers shine flashlights on their genitals, slap one another's skin, tug on one another's bellies, breasts, and butt cheeks. They perform naked aerials, battements, and leaps. We learn that a blush can cover a whole body and that everyone jiggles. A workshop performance I saw on March 29 at Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts featured an all-naked all-the-time cast. At ODC, Kupers has dancer Frances Sedayao sit clothed in the audience and then walk on stage, look around her, strip down to her birthday suit, and dance with wild abandon, as if she were at a '60s psychedelic love-in.

The decision to include even this briefest of stripping sequences sends a message that contradicts the rest of the piece. Here we have naked versus clothed, with nakedness emerging as victorious – the cliché of nakedness as liberation. In the dance's earlier version, nakedness was an undisputed costume choice; the earlier version invited us to look at dancing and performance differently, surpassing any surface take on naked truth.

Undressed revives some stale modern dance movement and phrasing. Kupers's focus on butts and bellies as opposed to limbs and lines reveals how much the center motivates movement, not as a technique-class idea but as an actuality. The body emerges as pure form: line, curve, light, and shadow. When Ching Chi Yu, Dawn Frank, and Hilary Bryan lie on top of one another and slowly shift position, it's like watching a flip book of Rodin sculptures.

Kupers's Start Adrift, Part 2 tests the positions of homosexual sex as dance material. Dressed in summer suits, Kupers, Manuelito Biag, Manfred Schaechtle, Oscar Trujillo, and Mazdak Mazarei use Kupers's keen partnering sense to transition between multiple crotch grabs, sniffs, and rubs. Kupers is not abstracting sex here; the images are quite literal, yet they are danced toward, through, and from. As in Undressed, Kupers does not appear to be interested in shocking us, which is a blessing. Rather, he is risking self-exposure in constantly shifting ways.

The piece falters in its textual elements, however. Kupers creates a world through movement only to disrupt it with flat humor. Schaechtle becomes a man taking part in a video personal, then morphs into a talk show host, interviewing Trujillo and Kupers, two bachelors looking for love and sex. The sequence elicits some laughs but feels like a retreat from more difficult emotions. I prefer the pathos; it feels riskier. And I trust the lonely, longing dancing more than anyone telling me in words that they don't want to be alone.

Guthrie, Dandelion Dancetheater's matriarch, is also no stranger to risk. Her piece Strange Hole does not involve eroticism or nudity but rather accepts another challenge: to trust an associative consciousness to provide logic. The surrealists did this, and though Guthrie has more reverence for narrative than they did, she shares in their sense of play.

Guthrie showed excerpts from Strange Hole at the Julia Morgan Theatre in February, and though the piece has been extended and refined, it still feels unfinished. The blackouts between sections disrupt an almost seamless series of vignettes about loss and the voids that people incessantly try to fill. One strong section involves Guthrie and Kupers: it captures light sparring and camaraderie in old age, youth, and drunkenness. Guthrie and Kupers are without rival in the partnering context. They move fluidly and with rhythmic precision and, in spite of size differences, lift and lower each other with equal grace. The vignette closes with the duo center stage performing a riveting slow-motion sequence of circular hip-over-hip lifts.

Dandelion Dancetheater performs through Sat/4. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., S.F. $15-$17. (415) 863-9834.