The Static Nude: A Genealogy of the Body Drifting Beyond the Picture Frame (1930s-1970s)

The Static Nude: A Genealogy of the Body Drifting Beyond the Picture Frame (1930s-1970s)

The "frame shows" that became the talk of the town in a corner of Tokyo in the 1970s were more than just striptease. Behind this was not only the cultural experimentation of postwar Japan, but also a lineage of performing arts that originated more than 30 years earlier, in England during World War II. The origins of the frame show can be traced back to the Windmill Theater in Soho, London in the 1930s. Here, "tableau vivant" (living pictures) were performed as wartime entertainment, with women standing on stage as "motionless nudes. What the audience sees is a still nude body, as if it were a painting in a museum. In an era of strict censorship, moving nudes were considered obscene, while standing still was considered art. The staging, devised by the British showman Laura Henderson and manager Vivienne Van Damme, was also an invention that exploited a gap in the law, which held that "motionless nudity is art.

The film "Mrs. Henderson's Gift" (2005, directed by Stephen Frears), a true story of this stage production, vividly recreates the social context of the time. Mrs. Henderson, played by Judi Dench, lit up London's darkest days when, after an offensive battle with the censors, she achieved "the performance of nudity on condition of stillness. The watchword of the theater was "We Never Closed. It is said that the theater never closed even in the midst of bombing, giving the citizens of the war-torn city the energy to live. The format of the show--nude figures fixed in picture frames--was later transformed in Japan into the "picture frame show.

This "art of standing still" from England was reinterpreted in 1970s Japan. The frame show, put on by a theater company called Tokyo Hollies, set up a huge frame on the stage, controlled the audience's gaze, and transformed nudity into something to be "watched" rather than "seen. There, the body, the object of sensuality, is sublimed into art through light and composition. Just as Juro Karajuro's Situation Theater and Shuji Terayama's Ceiling Plank blurred the boundaries between reality and the stage, the everyday and the otherworldly, the frame shows also questioned the boundaries between the visual and the spatial. The show was also a form of expression that could slip past the censors under the mask of "art.

Meanwhile, a new trend was emerging in the world of striptease. Star Emma Sugimoto advocated a "strip without taking off one's clothes" and created a stage that combined theatrical performances and singing. Asakusa Rockza and other theaters tried new staging that incorporated theatricality, moving in the direction of showing nudity not as consumption but as expression. In other words, the Japanese frame show was a reworking of the philosophy emanating from Windmill's "The Art of Standing Still" in England, in the spirit of underground theater.

This unique cultural fusion did not last long, however, as the 1980s saw the emergence of new adult entertainment trends, such as no-pants cafes, and the adult entertainment industry was gradually swallowed up by a wave of excess and tighter regulations. The frame show quietly came to an end amid the changing times. Nevertheless, the idea has left traces in the staging of small theaters and nightclubs, and even in contemporary art performances. The idea of manipulating the audience's gaze and the challenge of rethinking the position of the "seen body" still live at the heart of the performing arts.

From London in the 1930s to Tokyo in the 1970s, the frame shows were not mere sexual entertainment, but a "history of physical expression" that oscillated between censorship and art, ethics and freedom. From London in the 1930s to Tokyo in the 1970s, the static nudity of the naked body continued to live between art and desire, transcending time and national borders. What lay beyond the frames was not the beauty of the body, but the question of the act of "seeing" itself.