Love, romance, courtship, sexual hunting – the sentimental and unsentimental modes of sexuality had dominated popular music and theatre for a long time. But these themes underwent dramatic changes in the first decades of the XX century, as individuals changed their actual sexual practice and men and women found themselves involved in a sexual revolution, especially after WWI.
In those same years, the Weimar Republic lifted the censorship, so that performers and troupes could present and explore themes about sexuality more freely. This made for a more prurient display of nudity for sure, but it also allowed more engaged artists to explore the dynamics of intergenre relationship as well as touching on subjects that had previously seldom reached a theatre stage, and certainly not so honestly: prostitutions, homosexuality, lesbianism.
This doesn’t mean they had a total freedom. The police still monitored performances and called out shows deemed to be outrageous, but their scant resources and staff did allow theatres and cabarets considerable freedom, especially in the first part of the 1920s.

The Ballet Celly de Rheidt and the nude show

Nudity in particular gained an unprecedented free range in the first years of the 1920s. Nudity meant ‘female’ nudity, though also male bodies were sometimes seen naked on stage. Nude shows became extremely popular. These were shows – sometimes invitation-only – where women would dance for several minutes naked or almost naked on stage or in among the audience. It’s easy to surmise that it was more about nudity than about arts because these women didn’t have any dance training and what they performed was a mere sequence of movements that only had the purpose to show their bodies.

The Ballet Celly de Rheidt is particularly interesting in this regard not only because it became extremely popular right after WWI, but also because it was involved in a huge court trial in 1921 that left its mark on the entire subject of nudity on stage.

Alfred Seweloh, a demobilised first lieutenant, started organising performances by his wife Cäcilie Funk in 1919. ‘Celly’ and other women in various states of undress, executed what were in essence short pantomimes, lasting several minutes at most, on a variety of themes. Although they claimed the shows were inspire by classical arts, and meant to lift the spirits of a prostate nation, the price of the ticket was so high it made it highly unlikely that common people could afford it. The price rose as did the popularity of the show, which was attended by a predominantly – but not exclusively – male audience.
They got away with it for a couple of years, because – given the current standards of morality – some officers and public prosecutors didn’t consider the performances obscene enough to guarantee a conviction. As it remained unchallenged, the success of the troupe inspired other groups to follow in they footsteps. But in 1921 the Ballet Celly de Rheidt was involved in a court trial triggered not by the show in itself, but rather by the commercialisation of the image of naked women through short films and photographic postcards. The troupe was found guilty of obscenity and forced to cover their women, at least their pelvises and breasts. The sentence was then enforced on all troupes involved in naktdances (an enforcement that became particularly strict with the ban of 1924) and which ultimately limited the allure of this kind of show greatly.

Nakedness and Nudes

This trial is interesting more for the reasons behind the sentence than for the sentence itself. It sustained that the show might have been more artistic in the context of a traditionally theatrical setting, where the darken audience and spotlighted stage would create a distance between the audience and the performers with allowed an aesthetic appreciation. The proximity of the cabaret, where dancers performed in among the tables where people drank, ate and smoked negated the possibility of any aesthetic distance between performers and spectators. By drawing that distinction, the judges made clear that the cabaret was by nature more suspicious and less artistic that more conventional stages.
It wasn’t the only ‘line’ which this sentence drew. Artistic nude had been greatly appreciated throughout the XIX century, though paintings and sculpures needed to be ‘finished’ and their subject matter had or be located in a mythologcially or historically distant past, or in a geographically distant and ‘exotic’ country. Apparently, proximity already meant ‘dirtiness’.
Still, even acceptable nude became unacceptable when the audience changed. Classic nudes were mostly accessible to the higher classes in museums and ateliers, but at the beginning of the XX century, photographic reproduction turned postcards and prints into mass-market products and made these works accessible to a far larger public. The authorities started to fear the more affordable pictures of nudes might fall into the hands of ‘uneducated’ youth or equally ‘uneducated’ poor who did not have the proper aesthetic training to view such pictures in a ‘disinterested’ – that is, nonsexual – manner. Basically it was assumed that while the middle class man could control his sexual urges, the youth or the worker could not.

The way in which the image of female naked bodies was handled is also very interesting. The sentence ruled that “Women dancers must cover completely their posterior, private parts and navel with opaque fabrics, so that during dance movements these body parts cannot be revealed in a naked state. Furthermore, the breasts must be covered at least to the extent that the nipples cannot be seen during dance movements.”
These direction applied to women in motion, so it remained possible for shows to offer nudity, if the performers didn’t perform at all but just stood motionless. It was still possible to arranged naked women in ‘artful’ tableaux, where their bodies appeared like parts of oversized flowers, jewels or feathered fans. This was in essence a reinforcement of a traditional pattern of objectification. The naked woman was compelled by law to remain totally passive, to become the object of observation. As soon as she moved, she was required to cover her erogenous zones – which were, again, defined by law. In many ways, this likened the shifting (moving) role of women to something to be sanction and her acceptance to stay unmoving to the requirements of law.

RESOURCES

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993