Stark?...Yes. Raving?...No.

So for me, last night was passed in the company of Daniel Léveillé Danse, as they performed Amour, acide et noix in the Space Upstairs in Project. Setting itself the challenge of presenting nudity as the only true alternative to the reading of the body, and asking whether the skin is not the one true body costume, the performers (three men and one woman) selected to express Léveille’s vision, took to the stage naked.

Yet however freed they were from the constraints of clothing, this work seemed encumbered by a tense, weighty quality. Duets and solos were burdened by stomp, thud and thump; all motion staccatoed by the eruptive, interruptive standing, marching and gesturing that appeared throughout. None of which need necessarily be bad, if the impulse, vision or concept that led Léveillé to create Amour, acide et noix was something I could engage with. Sadly, I failed to apprehend the ‘outlook on life [taking] refuge behind the strange white skin’ that this show purports to reveal.

A post-show discussion, moderated by Finola Cronin, held out some hope. But talk of nudity accentuating muscular action to the point of conveying an illusion of effort; of jumping as analogous with life; of a stripped body's workings of organ, sinew and joint as interesting; of the need for a piece’s text to be simple, functional and clean...did nothing to dispel the sense of a concern solely with the exterior. This is not to say the dancers and choreographer are not sincere and daring in their own fashion. Nor is it to suggest there’s no underlying structure or a certain complexity – Léveillé mentioned in passing a quaternary aspect to the work, with four dancers, four sections, four solos, four duets, squares. (Hmmm...maybe I just needed some kinda quintessence to win me over...)

Ultimately, however, there’s the simple fact that I can’t get on board with the starting premise of the skin as ‘the one true body costume’ or of nudity as automatically 'frank and free of false modesty.' And I'd also argue any fair consideration of clothing would have to admit that it is something that both veils...and reveals. It’s not all about sparing our blushes.

What we wear, and how, tells of us, tells on us and is one way we stake our claim to this world and to being who we are – or are we to believe these expressions are necessarily untrue or deceitful at all times?

In contrast, the power of the naked form lies in intimating what lies beyond the everyday world and self. It’s a threshold. A threshold between being and non-being, one most of us only approach by either a lover’s bed or a deathbed. Perhaps that’s what last night’s show, in its emotionless rigidity and expressionless heaviness, for me most lacked – an apocalyptic intimacy, and a fragility only born of intimating truths no spoken word can say, but that dance - and dance alone - can hope to express.

But hey. C'mon. Far be it for me to keep you from making your own mind up. Don’t take my word for it. Go, get a ticket, see it.

And feel free to come back here and let me know what you thought...