The naked performer is a familiar presence on Berlin’s stages. But one wonders: was this always the case? In the city’s dance, theatre and performance scene, nudity appears so frequently that audiences are rarely shocked. The appearance of an unclothed performer carries a particular tension. But is it still a tension between artistic freedom, vulnerability and spectacle? Or is it whether nudity on stage is still radical at all?
The topic comes to mind following Kysy Fischer and ABA NAIA’s restaging of Super Superficial at Hebbel am Ufer and the opening of Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition by Marina Abramović. In the past few years, I’ve also encountered it in works such as André Uerba’s Æffective Choreography, Jefta van Dinther’s Dark Field Analysis and Eddie Peake’s Portent. Then there are the large-scale productions of Florentina Holzinger, which frequently feature predominantly unclothed performers.
Holzinger said in an interview with Numéro Berlin in 2023, “I’ve always been more interested in what’s underneath, what’s happening ‘behind closed curtains’. I’ve found it somehow liberating to show the body at work and not just in anything private or sexualised.” In her work, a naked figure becomes less an object of desire than a theatrical instrument. Nudity is stripped of conventional erotic meaning and instead becomes a tool. When twenty or more naked performers occupy the stage, nudity begins to feel almost obsolete, less an individual revelation than a kind of collective costume. Still, such a scale of visibility is relatively recent.
Before moving to Berlin, I lived in London for 16 years and worked as a performer within the cabaret, performance and fringe theatre scenes. In the early 2000s, full nudity on stage was rare outside of extreme performance art contexts. Artists such as Lee Adams, Marisa Carnesky, Ursula Martinez and Mouse certainly explored its boundaries within their work, but even then, nudity remained an anomaly rather than a common theatrical device. Large ensembles of naked performers were almost inconceivable.
What once appeared radical in experimental performance art has gradually filtered into contemporary theatre and dance.
Berlin, however, appears to absorb the unclothed body with ease. The ethos spills beyond theatre into other cultural events. Drag performer Pansy’s event Naked People Reading invites participants to step on stage and read aloud entirely unclothed, transforming public nudity into something beyond the flesh onstage. Outside formal performance spaces, the phenomenon becomes even more casual at Naked Karaoke, Monster Ronson’s long-running night hosted by the performer BLEACH.
Germany’s historical relationship with nudity provides some context here. The tradition of Freikörperkultur (FKK), or ‘free body culture’, dates back more than a century and promotes social nudity as a form of health, freedom and equality. Within this framework, the naked body is not necessarily eroticised but normalised, a philosophy that arguably makes German audiences particularly receptive to the unclothed performer on stage. Yet the presence of nudity in Berlin’s performance scene raises an important question: is it truly widespread or does it remain largely confined to specific artistic circles?
A glance across the city’s stages suggests the latter. While independent venues, experimental dance and queer performance regularly explore naked bodies as artistic material, major institutions tend to approach the subject more cautiously. Nudity may appear occasionally, but it is rarely central to the work itself. The naked stage body thrives most visibly in spaces where artistic risk is expected; performers themselves often come from communities invested in challenging norms around gender, sexuality and representation.
What once appeared radical in experimental performance art has gradually filtered into contemporary theatre and dance. In that sense, nudity on stage may say less about provocation than about authorship. Who decides to show their naked body? Under what conditions? And for whom? If nudity becomes routine, its ability to shock begins to fade. Perhaps the real question now is not why performers take their clothes off, but what we expect their naked bodies to reveal. It’s in this revelation that the image of the naked performer retains its power.
