[Nudity] only makes everyone involved uncomfortable [and] leaves many offended. Overall, I think that directors are feeling the need to be “edgy” and “new” in a traditionally classical field—I see it more as disrespectful to the audience and performers as well as uncreative. I’ve seen it happen in many of the performing arts, and I am so hesitant about performing professionally because of it. —Laura Snow, soprano
Being an artist is not a normal 9-5 type of job, and most artists are, or should be, open minded to various things that might be asked. Opera is an art form open to varying opinions and, while you may or may not agree with all forms of art or an individual’s interpretation of how certain art forms may be presented, you are an artist and chose to be so. If you truly have moral obligations to not being nude on stage, then by all means stand by them. There is always someone next in line who will do what you won’t.
—Chris Dickerson, bass-baritone
I approve of nudity on stage only if it truly serves the story. One of my dream roles is Salome, and I would want to be in a production that required the Full Monty, because the plot calls for it. Salome is much more than just the nudity or the dance. Both the role and the opera are rich with nuance and possibilities for interpretation. Strauss was composing in a time when the “artful” was in full swing—and, with it, a tacit understanding that there were far deeper layers of meaning hidden within the artifice. Salome’s story is treacherous in the interpretive sense, and I think the nudity is important to that interpretation.
But there’s a fine line—and it’s sometimes blurry—between artistic integrity and just plain vulgarity. Too much direction is done for shock value these days, at the expense of the story or the original work. In many cases, it seems to be a matter of playing the “cheap card” because a director otherwise has limited ideas. There’s no subtlety or nuance in just being nude for nudity’s sake.
—Rebekkah Hilgraves, soprano
I will never do a role that requires any nudity. Why do we feel that we need nudity on stage? The entire premise of theater has always included imagination. Just as we knew that there wasn’t really a fountain dug into the stage during last year’s “Lucia” at the Met, Rodolfo’s flat is not on the ground floor in Bohème, and Amina was not “walking the plank” in Sonnambula, we can use our imagination to see that the character is meant to be naked. The story and the acting are not lost with a body suit that suggests the same thing.
With the exception perhaps of the Greeks and Romans, until the twentieth century, public nudity was not an accepted form of legitimate entertainment. Opera, being generally associated with educated, upper-class audiences, would hardly have been the place for such practices, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I know many operas have sexual themes and can be raw in their presentations, but there is a line separating artistic portrayal and vulgarity that we should be mindful of. Even in visual art, a nude painting or sculpture is merely a portrayal of the real thing—no one looking for true art goes to an exhibit of nude bodies.
By the way, do shows that contain nudity warn the audience ahead of time? I would be very offended if I attended a show not knowing that there is nudity—especially if children were in the audience.
—Abigail Corbett, lyric soprano
Let’s leave nudity to the professionals. Opera is about expression, not vulgarity. The old adage that “pornography is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it” applies to what is going on all too often in opera. Cheap shots lessen the value of the art. As a composer, if someone stages my opera without understanding the music, it shows and it makes me angry. I bet Puccini is hot under the collar about now. Suggestion, flirtation, and sensuality are wonderful tools in expression—exploitation is not.
—Jordan Corbin Wentworth, soprano
This nonsense of “art” is garbage. I could always be a porn star or exotic dancer if I wanted to. I want to sing.
—Lisa Elliott, soprano
As long as the nudity is part of the plot or contributes to a deeper, yet honest, understanding of the work, I’m fine with it. If it has nothing to do with what is intended by the creators of the work and is only inserted to create “buzz” or scandal, it is completely inappropriate.
—Michael York, baritone
I am deeply disturbed by what I would call “porn on stage.” I watch in wonder as some directors turn our nation into a valueless group of people who salivate over bodies, but not the music we once called uplifting or inspired. I know this is done for money and to drive an audience, but it is done for all the wrong reasons and not for art. It tears down all the value systems I believe in. It will destroy the people who do it and eventually those who see it.
I am also weary of the oft repeated phrase that one is prudish if one has values and chooses to maintain them, that actors are mindless and will do whatever the director dictates, or that Europe is less prudish than America. We could also say that countries that choose to show nudity are decadent and have a corresponding loss of morals, values, and idealism.
What is most important is that we are a people who can use our minds, wills, and character to make good choices. These choices can affect future generations and lead us to the highest ideals of artistic beauty or down to the slums and degradation of prostituting ourselves and the next generation.
—Dana Slabaugh, lyric coloratura and teacher
Opera is an art form in which life should be captured and represented genuinely and truthfully. Sometimes discomfort is a necessary end to the display of authenticity and honesty in an artistic work.
—Jessica Abel, soprano
I would not turn it [a role that required nudity] down. I would actually applaud the director for having the courage to do something risky.
—Alvaro Rodriguez, tenor
Any serious singer with an active career has been asked to do things onstage that make them feel uncomfortable or present them with an ethical dilemma. Unless you share the same ethical values as every character you portray and every stage director you work with, this will come up.
—Benjamin Warschawski, tenor
As an opera producer and stage director, I have been involved with casting and staging productions where some degree of nudity might be a possibility. As a producer, it becomes an interesting responsibility to represent opera as a complete work of art, not to put a fig leaf on it when it starts to get provocative. It still amazes me how prudish opera sometimes is—the same audience that is accustomed to nudity in film, on TV, and in visual art somehow becomes very Victorian in the opera house.
Anyone accepting the role of Susannah should ask about her frolicking naked in her creek. In producing Salome, it is always difficult to find an artist who can sing the role, look like a teenager, and not fear working through the Dance of the Seven Veils to a degree that would provide an appropriate degree of provocation for Herod. The audience needs to see this and feel it, or the situation is ludicrous. When auditioning for this opera, the handling of that scene needs to be discussed frankly and honestly, either at the audition or before contracts are signed. I believe Don Giovanni needs more spice than it often gets. The bacchanale in Samson et Dalila is another scene that needs a degree of orgiastic provocation to make sense.
Singing-actors need to learn to make the distinction between personal values and morals and those of the character being portrayed. Definitely get all the information you can about production aesthetics, styles, and tastes of directors and designers before you accept an engagement, and do keep an open mind to possibilities that can be aesthetically supported.
—Robert Swedberg, opera director and associate professor of music at the University of Michigan
We are contributing to high art, and we can illustrate a scene without revealing all. Leave something to the imagination. I am very guarded because of religious beliefs and the love of my husband and family. There is enough that a husband has to endure with a wife on stage without her being naked for the world to see. I take great steps to do the research about the role, opera, and director before I accept a role. If you have reservations about being asked to “bare all,” you need to be clear from the start.
—Jennifer Youngs, soprano
It is a desecration of the body to flaunt it on a stage. Opera is about music; nudity would shift the focus and make it trashy.
—Elisabeth Weagel, soprano
Opera’s driving force has always centered around the “Ethos”—the beauty of the voice combined with the emotional connection to the psyche via sophisticated and specialized training—and showcasing singers who are capable of delivering the demands of this intense vocal style. Societies change, so it’s an issue of how one chooses to yield to those demands. As a result, nudity plays a perplexing role in allowing us supposed greater expressive freedom. But there are numerous alternative and progressive creative methods for delivering a message, an emotion, or a concept, especially when the voice and music are the primary avenues of that expression. We need to remain faithful to the power of the voice within opera—not the body. Clothing, many times, can create a more alluring and sensual effect than nudity. To be progressive and in sync with the times does not necessitate the act of disrobing.
—Beverley Hissam, soprano
Much in the same way musical theatre has become “bolder” in its stage direction to make situations and plot lines seem more real and identifiable for the audience, opera benefits from this as well. After all, much of opera deals with love and expression of love. For this reason, I do not think it is a surprise that singers who not only look the part but also embody the characters they are playing use showing skin to fit the contemporary mantra “sex sells.” Contracts should specify this since many singers are uncomfortable with not only their bodies but also physicality.
—Gregory M. Spock, tenor
I don’t feel that nudity has anything to do with enhancing our art form, but is instead a producer’s/director’s attempt to create shock value and increase the number of bodies in the theater. It all comes down to selling tickets, and sex sells. Hollywood knows this, musical theatre has learned this, and now opera is, sad to say, following the trends. But we as artists should change these trends because we are selling these productions, and exploitation should never be a part of the equation.
—Raymond Jordan, tenor
I am a high school/near-college vocal student very concerned about the plunging moral standards on the operatic stage. I have been disgusted and offended by productions from the Metropolitan Opera, broadcast on PBS, which have contained sex on stage, and I am now very cautious to turn on their productions at all. I am moved by the beauty of much operatic music, but I am not going to pursue an operatic career because it seems certain that the stage directing will only become more immoral. The professional singers of today are not doing my generation any favors in allowing themselves to be persuaded to keep lowering the standards.
If a stage director and a singer collaboratively wish to include such content in a production, and their audience wishes to see it, that is their choice and their business, and I do not deny it. Some of them would complain that I want to “impose my own standards” on them. But I am objecting precisely because, when sexual behavior and nudity on stage become expected, they are imposing their standards on me. If I were pursuing opera, I would like a choice, and I would not like to be jobless because of it. With the great competition for jobs, saying “no” very likely means one will be replaced by someone who is willing to meet demands.
—Sylvia R. Smith, soprano
There are really only three places that I feel nudity is appropriate: the home, the doctor’s office/hospital, and the artist’s studio. Covering the human body in public acknowledges its dignity as the house of the human soul. We already give away so much of ourselves as performers on stage—to give away the truth of our bodies to a group of strangers is like letting the world read our diaries or see our inner thoughts projected on a screen. When nothing in our lives is private anymore, I think our sense of self is irreparably damaged.
—Allison Armerding, soprano
If the nudity serves to illustrate a specific dramatic point, to emphasize fragility or vulnerability rather than purely for titillation, why not? If audiences find this uncomfortable, this is done for a reason. One should not go to the theater expecting to be comfortable. Is there something special about opera which should forbid it from enjoying the same freedoms as other forms of theater? I do not believe so; there is nothing intrinsically noble or high about our art.
—Russell Matthews, bass
