THEATRE REVIEW: The Most Naked
13.06.2023 Q Theatre, Auckland
I am a woman who is terrified of her body. I am terrified that it feels borrowed; as though it might never quite be mine. Every look or touch that lingers is a reminder of this. I dream of having a man’s body in the sense that I want to exist without being watched, without having an audience speculate what my flesh looks like.
Hannah Tasker-Poland’s, The Most Naked is a fantastically chilling exploration of the politics of women’s bodies. She manipulates the female form from erotic to sexless to terrifying and back again. Aware of the power dynamic between looking and being looked at, she disrupts the idea of cabaret by teasing our notions of nudity, of expectation, of voyeurism. By the end of the show, I wondered: who had the power here?
The show opens as a traditional, almost Prohibition-style, cabaret. A curtain hangs center stage and I expect someone to be behind the curtain, performatively naked, waiting to be seen. Two dancers, moving freely to the jazz music suddenly remove the curtain to reveal a figure shrouded in black; an unexpected beginning to a cabaret. Walking the line between violent and sexual, the figure peels off layers of this black fabric with a sense of aggression. The faceless, formless reveal reminds me of Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One:
“While her body finds itself thus eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the "subject," her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.”
We expect body, nudity, flesh, and yet we are given a void of nothingness. The figure slowly reveals herself to us and there are these chilling moments of shock and fear as she sees her skin for the first time. In just these opening moments, Tasker-Poland forces us to consider the logical contradiction of women’s existence: They are to be seen and not seen all at the same time.
There’s an absurdity to this introduction too - with the disco ball sparkling, the deep red curtains, the piano to the side, and the Under the Skin figure standing before us. I love the idea that this performance is titled The Most Naked and yet we are introduced to our performer at her most covered up, forcing us to reconcile with the ideas of modesty and immodesty. We know this figure is a woman. We can still see the curves of a woman’s body beneath this black fabric. There’s a tongue-in-cheek performativity here, a joke waiting to happen. But when Tasker-Poland fully reveals herself, we realize she is never the punchline in this joke.
“There’s a viscerality in the way Tasker-Poland explores the history of women’s bodies: She actively manifests history and society on stage. In becoming these stereotypes, she is able to undo them”
I enjoyed how the show was divided into distinct sections. I felt as though there was a split between each female persona Tasker-Poland embodies on stage - from the whore/madonna to the Cronenberg ‘other’, she finds alterity and discomfort in every female identity she explores. The occultist epilogue was one of my personal favourite moments. There is this distressed look in Tasker-Poland’s eyes as she relives the pain and torture of women convicted as witches. And then she becomes the witch. It was as though I was bearing witness to the rise of Mother Suspiriorum. Performers, Lucy Lynch and Holly Finch truly brought the energy of a coven, reclaiming hysteria as a form of strength. There’s a viscerality in the way Tasker-Poland explores the history of women’s bodies: She actively manifests history and society on stage. In becoming these stereotypes, she is able to undo them.
The stage presence of Tasker-Poland is equal parts inviting and uncanny. She glides across the stage with an alluring grace and then, within a split second, contorts her body beyond expectation. I love the way she plays with the idea of curve, concave, and convex - the idea that concave is sexy but convex is repulsive. The female monster in horror movies crawls with her back convexed; the tempting mistress crawls with her back concaved. How the line of a woman’s body can define sex is explored deeply in The Most Naked. Tasker-Poland understands shape and shadow to such an extraordinary degree that the lines of her body can change the tone of a song in just moments. From cabaret performer draped across the piano to inhuman sci-fi monster, only Tasker-Poland could pull this off.
The topology of discomfort is the show’s specialty though. Tasker-Poland uses her body to elicit the awkward titters and laughs that I heard all night. I loved how she explored the contradictions of women’s expectations, particularly the idea that women should simultaneously infantile and sexual. There’s this chilling moment where her body, in performing a doe-eyed cabaret dance, becomes stuck as though in an automotive malfunction. She repeats the movements again and again, trying to break out of this error. A simple lick of the finger glitches repeatedly until it is a grossly exaggerated, foreign movement, absent of its original sexual connotations. Suddenly, we are watching Tasker-Poland insert her whole fist into her mouth, consuming her own body for the audience. I was paralyzed, aware that my position as an audience member had also made me a consumer: we were all here to see - to consume - a female body. The Most Naked excavates these critical conversations through movement. Tasker-Poland moves with such an awareness of muscle and bone that each step is an argument. It’s fantastic.
The music - a mix between industrial noise, ambience, and experimental jazz - was the beating heart of the show. Subverting traditional ideas of the cabaret musician, Lucien Johnson’s live saxophone and piano added a haunting accompaniment to the movements on stage. There’s a deliberate dissonance, a chaos, in a lot of the musical score, something that I felt added a layer of intensity to the performance. Johnson and Tasker-Poland work in symbiosis, using movement and music to constantly increase that sense of discomfort. The atmosphere and landscape of this performance is brought to life by the music. Brynne Tasker-Poland’s lighting design is also extraordinary, working with the music to destabilize our senses.
“Subverting traditional ideas of the cabaret musician, Lucien Johnson’s live saxophone and piano added a haunting accompaniment to the movements on stage.”
It was difficult to write this review because The Most Naked is first and foremost an experience. This is a performance about performance. The idea of the woman is performance, and as such, Tasker-Poland creates a terrifying recursion. The Most Naked explores everything and nothing all at once. It’s the history of nudity, women’s bodies, sex, and yet it is also the hollow absurdity of these artificial concepts - clothes are just “human contraptions” as Tasker-Poland so aptly puts it. The Most Naked is cathartic, it is terrifying, and it articulates a perspective that is often left unsaid. Tasker-Poland dives headfirst into taboo and we watch her manipulate the limbs of her body as though stuck in a nightmare.
Tasker-Poland becomes your sleep paralysis demon. And I’m not complaining.
Producer, Creator, and Performer: Hannah Tasker-Poland
Composer and Musician: Lucien Johnson
Performers: Lucy Lynch and Holly Finch
Lighting Designer and Operator: Brynne Tasker-Poland
Presented by: projectMUSE