But then, in the late 90s, it started falling out of favour, “becoming boring because at one point, it was more shocking if there were clothes on”, says Anouk van Dijk, director of Chunky Move, a view echoed by Australian Dance Theatre’s Garry Stewart, who says works such as Dubois’s 2012 piece Tragedie — featuring 18 nude performers — emerged after a bare-flesh hiatus because “it was starting to become depoliticised and disempowered through commonplace use of it”.

But of late there’s been something of a resurgence, says Melbourne-based director Lucy Guerin. Prominent works include French-Canadian provocateur Dave St-Pierre’s Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!, a celebration of simulated sex, spit and frottage that caused a storm at Sadler’s Wells in 2011 (a dance critic was urged to sue after being “assaulted” by a penis during a performance, among other things), John Jasperse’s Fort Blossom Revisited, Belgian bad boy’s Fabre’s highly explicit 24-hour-long Mount Olympus, Lloyd Newson’s John, Ann Liv Young’s Elektra and Mette Ingvartsen’s 7 Pleasures, which “disrupts stereotypes and cliches of nudity and sexuality”, according to Guerin.

Van Dijk sees it as part of a wider sociocultural phenomenon: “the dancing body coming back in nude works [as] building on this celebration of everyone being equal — I think in Europe, over recent years, you see people try to celebrate against all odds, against all the tensions in society, the move to the right wing, they want to show that we take our clothes off and we’re all the same”.

With the return of bare flesh come questions that have accompanied nudity at every turn across the decades: what is its purpose and what does it add to the art? Is it there to lure bums to seats — sex sells, even in high art — or as an essential part of the artistic message? When is a flash justified? Is it too easily tapped as a lazy way to add edginess to work? At what point does it become exploitative of the dancers? How often is it simply responding to fashionable trends and audience expectations in a highly sexualised culture?

These questions are complicated by the fact that nudity in dance comes on a sliding scale, ranging from elegant toplessness in Jiri Kylian’s celebrated Bella Figura to onstage urination, dildos, olives in orifices, simulated sex acts and spurts of bodily fluid in the works of Fabre, Bel, Clark and others.

For Bonachela, context is king here: “the whole thing is always about the why”. It has to be clearly about “what effect and image the choreographer is trying to achieve”, agrees Queensland Ballet’s Li Cunxin. “It has to be about movements of the body to say something, to tell the story, to speak the unspoken word, to project meaning.” If not, “the body becomes the story … and it can be distracting, taking away from what the intention was”.

In dance “it’s beautiful when it’s done well, but it’s really hard to do well”, says van Dijk. It has to be used particularly sparingly in this medium because its presence is far more confronting to audiences than in the visual arts or film due to its unmediated nature, says Stewart.

He adds that it can be used by some uninspired or commercially minded dancemakers — “but not artists of weight” — as a cheap way to try to amplify the street cred and artistic weight of a work. It can also too easily become gratuitous in the wrong hands, says dance historian Michelle Potter, citing a topless duet that sparked a “nipplegate” debate in dance during the Russian National Ballet’s tour of Romeo and Juliet to Australia in 2005.

Aesthetically and practically, it can prove a handicap: critic Deborah Jowitt once quipped that “you can’t choreograph a penis”, while ballet legend Robert Helpmann famously observed that “the trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music stops”.

The powerfully transformative nature of nudity was also a drawcard for French dancemaker Xavier Le Roy. He tells Review that his 2015 work Temporary Title and 1998 solo Self Unfinished dealt “with notions of transformation and questioned what human bodies can [do] and the construction of our perceptions of them”. To Le Roy, nudity is not there “to shock but because it comes as a necessity for the artistic project”. In Temporary Title, for example, it was so the human body could “become something else than human, sometimes closer to animal or to vegetable or to machine”.

To Stewart, who has choreographed nudity in ADT’s Habitus and Devolution, naked flesh can powerfully “remind us of death, of life, of biological processes … it decontextualises people from the cultural and places them in a frame that is more primal. It reveals something essential about being human.”

Nudity in dance — particularly in the works of European contemporary dance figures such as Bel — “is also part of a project of politically stripping dance down from its artifice of performativity and entertainment into a sort of essentialism of the human experience”.

“There is so much inscribed on to the human body in terms of self and identity. For example, when Rodin spoke about The Thinker, he was interested in how thinking could be corporealised, so the gesture of The Thinker, his brow is knitted, he has his chin resting on his hand and so on ... is that whole bodily expression of an internal state, and I think that’s really most evident with the naked body rather than the clothed body,” Stewart says.

To veteran dancer Amy Hollingsworth, who still vividly recalls a performance she gave in Michael Clark Company’s Mmm, dancing to Barbra Streisand’s Send in the Clowns dressed only in a giant brown skater’s muff (in the second part, featuring Clark’s response to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, she was topless in giant knickers and sporting a Hitler moustache), it can be particularly potent in certain roles such as the Chosen Maiden in The Rite of Spring, “because of this role’s sense of sacrifice and literally being given up by your people”.

Then there’s the nude body’s continued power as a political object, even in today’s sexualised culture: van Dijk says it can even “be very political to show that you are very at ease with your body because most people aren’t — so you can say that touches on social codes and morals in society and political systems”.

But where is the line drawn? The cultural goalposts have moved dramatically in this aspect. In a 1970 showing at Sadler’s Wells, van Manen and Tetley’s relatively tame nude scenes proved so scandalous that security guards were brought in to protect the dancers after itching powder and crushed glass were found on stage.

Fast forward to the works of Fabre and others that van Dijk says “really explore the wildness of the body in very sexualised images, and because the performers have more reference to early Marina Abramovic works and things like that, they dare to go further now than they did in 1970s, be far more extreme”.

In Fabre’s The Crying Body, dancers urinate and masturbate on stage. In Christopher Williams’s Gobbledygook, male dancers offer close-ups of anuses, while in Keith Hennessy’s Crotch, the performance artist sat naked with a lard-covered groin, sewing his own flesh.

The boundaries around taste and artistic merit are often hazy; as The New York Times’s dance critic Alistair Macaulay notes, there’s “always been a huge overlap between [art and pornography]; you can see scenes of copulation on Greek vases and Indian temples”.

Yet, for a dancer the naked body is far from titillating, as Javier de Frutos well knows (“Dancing naked is the least sexy thing I’ve ever done,” he has said). Choreographer Mark Morris noted Frutos’s response in Cargo, in which he eschewed nudity, despite using it in his earlier 1986 work Striptease.

In ballet, nudity is fleeting, formal and restrained, corresponding to Kenneth Clark’s definitions of “pure”, classical nudity as opposed to “primal” nakedness in his 1956 book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (though Potter says ballet isn’t as free from salaciousness as you think — “the word tutu, for example, comes from French slang for bum”).

In some cases ballet could do with more nakedness rather than less, says The Australian’s dance critic Deborah Jones: “Sometimes it can look very odd, when you have a very erotic pas de deux with 17 layers of tulle swaying between them.”

Bare flesh does make an appearance in works as diverse as Flemming Flindt’s The Triumph of Death for the Royal Danish Ballet (where a nude Flindt was hosed with liquid detergent), to Mats Ek’s Giselle with a briefly nude Albrecht to Alexander Ekman’s Triptych — A Study Of Entertainment.

But perhaps its best-known appearance is in Kylian’s Bella Figura, featuring male and female dancers naked except for long red silk skirts. To the Australian Ballet’s artistic director David McAllister, there is no gratuitousness: “in fact, there is a beautiful sense of it almost desexualising people”.