Edinburgh Fringe Festival Features Feast of Nude Performances

Hannah Jane Parkinson, a pop culture columnist for the Guardian newspaper, spent three days at the famed Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a month-long extravaganza that has been an annual event in Edinburgh, Scotland, since 1947. The festival bills itself as “the single biggest celebration of arts and culture on the planet,” and last year featured “53,232 performances of 3,398 shows in 300 venues.” But Parkinson was there for one reason—to see live nudity. The Fringe has been known for performers who “get their kit off,” as the Britishism goes, at least since 1963 when 18-year-old Anna Kesselaar was “was wheeled in a trolley [i.e. a shopping cart] across the balcony of a city hall while wearing nothing but a smile,”  as part of an avant-garde “happening,” as The Scotsman newspaper recounted in a 2012 profile of Kesselaar who was by then a 68-year-old grandmother. Kesselaar’s nude performance art piece caused a moral scandal and landed her in court—but also rang in a new era of nude shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, a tradition of au naturel theater that continues to this day—including the debut of the enduringly popular Puppetry of the Penis, which went on to tour 35 countries and be performed in five languages, as well as the universal language of nudity. “At the fringe, where it is incredibly expensive to put on shows, it remains true that sex sells. Even when the nudity involved has nothing to do with sex,” Parkinson wrote in her Guardian article. “The nakedness I see in a fleshy three days spans from profoundly moving to cheeky, mindbending, gratuitous, unnerving, hilarious and disarming.” The performances witnessed by Parkinson included Dep, in which she was “met by six, lit-up nude performers,” who performed a frantic dance routine choreographed by Dam Van Hunyh and inspired by Vietnamese family death rituals. Later the same evening, Parkinson took in the Bubble Show For Adults Only in which she watches “a woman scream ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’ while a dude pops giant bubbles overhead, splashing her with the soapy liquid.” Parkinson also attended a late-night tradition of the Edinburgh Fringe festival, Spank! “in which a member of the audience strips off on stage in exchange for one minute of promoting whatever they want.” Some of the volunteers have promoted their own shows, other promote charities, still others plug their hometowns—and so on. After three days of watching total strangers get naked in front of her for art's sake, Parkinson concluded that the experience was anything but erotic. “Perhaps in times past, the raunch element was ramped up, when getting your bits out was risque,” she wrote, summing up her impressions of the naked extravaganza. “But mainstream audiences are more mature now. The shows I see utilize nakedness as a character or prop in itself; part of the medium of the message.” The Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs through August 27. https://www.edfringe.com Photo by Greatal386 / Wikimedia Commons