Cecilia Bengolea.

Cecilia Bengolea, left, and François Chaignaud in

 “Pâquerette.”Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Thirty-four years ago, many must have felt that the big battles about naked bodies onstage had already been fought and won. In 1965 the dancer-choreographer Anna Halprin made “Parades and Changes,” in which a group of people, standing equidistant from one another, slowly removed their clothes. “Indecent exposure!” cried the old guard. “The liberation of the body!” cried others. Further liberation followed. Nudity was a famous component of the late-1960s musicals “Hair” and “Oh! Calcutta!”

Recently, though, several instances of nakedness have extended the frontiers of liberation; the majority of the more advanced examples have featured men. How do you think you would react to the following showings? In 2010, I watched a work by Christopher Williams called “Gobbledygook” at Dance New Amsterdam in which the dancer Adam H. Weinert — nude while other performers remained clad — stood with his back to the audience and bent over, enabling (or obliging) the audience to observe the crack between his buttocks and a rear view of his genitalia.

At the end of “Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal, or trauma....),” a 2009-10 solo show by the performance artist Keith Hennessy, he sat naked but with his groin covered in lard. He gathered us, the audience, around him onstage. Pushing a needle with blood-red thread through scars in his own flesh, he sewed the thread through the clothing of the three people in the audience seated nearest him. He then gave lingeringly searching gazes into our eyes.

This June, at the climactic moment of “Pâquerette,” an hourlong duet at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn (part of the Queer New York Festival), Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, after removing what few garments they had been wearing, inserted dildos up their backsides and kept them there for perhaps 10 minutes. The only dance moment of note occurred when, side by side, each held a balance on one foot while using the sole of the raised foot to hold the dildo in place.

Even for those of us who have now seen a great many naked bodies onstage, the bent-over rear view of Mr. Weinert in “Gobbledygook” was something new. It was not, however, a problem. Though I didn’t much admire the work as a whole, that use of nakedness made Mr. Weinert memorably vulnerable.