A nude woman walks by, wearing naught but a nose ring and ponytail. Her breasts bounce as she wanders among the paintings and sculptures within the Art Gallery of NSW on a crisp Thursday morning. She struts in the buff while people stare, conspicuously overdressed in their skinny jeans and sneakers.
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Six brave souls are butt-naked for this undressed dress rehearsal of Nude Live, a celebration of the unclothed human body. There are no modesty patches or pouches as they go about in the raw, revealing something of their religion, grooming habits and low body-fat percentage.
One has a birthmark on her left cheek. One man has a pierced left nipple and low-cut tan line. Dancer Dave Mack, 35, has a tattooed doodle down below his navel. "I love being naked," he says.
"Not feeling like I should be embarrassed, not feeling there is something that has to be covered or that I am ashamed of."
The Sydney Festival show is a collaboration between the Sydney Dance Company and the art gallery as part of their exhibition Nude: art from the Tate collection. During the rehearsal disrobed dancers move among the artworks, their fit young bodies in harmony with paintings by Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud and Henri Matisse.
In a room titled The private nude, dancer Fiona Jopp, 30, twists and turns her taut skin by a Pierre Bonnard painting of his wife in a bath.
"It was nice when people turned around and saw my face and didn't just look at my tits," she says later, after slipping into a light summer dress.
The thought of being nude in public is worse than actually getting your kit off, she adds. "While I am doing it I don't really feel embarrassed or out of place, there is no sense of being judged. But then I go home and see myself naked in the mirror and go 'My legs are hairy' and 'I have cellulite' and 'Did I pull my stomach in?'"
The 18 evening performances, from January 7, are recommended for people aged 16 and older. At one special sold-out show for adults-only, arranged at the request of a naturist group, the audience will be nude too.
The crowd at this week's dress rehearsal was warned "don't touch the art unless the art touches you". It's hard to know where to look first. Modigliani's Seated Nude with Necklace? Or the pair of lithe women intertwined on a bench nearby?
After the first blush of full-frontal nudity, the dancers seem to meld with the other artworks on show. Jopp leads me by the hand to a room where dancers are in flux before a Francis Bacon triptych. Despite all that jiggling flesh and perfectly tended pubic hair, it's not meant to titillate – oddly enough, they'd be more alluring in their undies.
"The human body is pretty weird, really," Mack says. "Sometimes as a man you are quite happy for people to see your penis but other days, or in other temperatures, you are not OK. But we have no control over what people are looking at."
Choreographer Rafael Bonachela says the naked body is beautiful, raw, sensual and confronting. "Everyone's curious about what you don't see," he says. "We tend to associate how someone dresses with who they may or may not be.
"By taking away the designer clothes and the designer bags, you realise it doesn't really matter. We are all naked and we are all human beings. We become a blank canvas."
