His nakedness made Adam H.

His nakedness made Adam H. Weinert memorably vulnerable in Christopher Williams’s

 “Gobbledygook,” performed at Dance New Amsterdam.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Men in some roles — the title role of Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son” is a famous example — have appeared bare-chested and bare-legged. The effect, though, has always been to establish their mortality rather than any ideal qualities.

In the last 20 years, however, there has been a trend for women to expose more skin surface too. In a popular recent ballet, Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain” (2005), danced by New York City Ballet and other companies, the ballerina, her hair loose, wears only leotard and ballet slippers. The French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, during her period as a star of the Royal Ballet in the 1990s and earlier this century, even began to perform parts of her established repertory (notably Act Three of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon”) without tights. Such a look emphasizes the individual muscles of thigh and calf.

Is this a big deal? A few paragraphs ago, I was talking about dancers showing us the cracks between their buttocks or deconstructing anal sex. So isn’t it trivial to talk of a ballerina merely baring her thighs and calves? Well, no.

When tights are removed from ballet, the art itself is changed. Ballet, the genre that once recaptured the ideal quality of nudity, becomes instead, in these modern examples, the art of nakedness. This could prove a valuable new departure, but it’s worth considering its implications. The look of the bare leg drastically changes the entire aesthetics of the form. Muscular details of thigh, knee, calf become suddenly distracting. The leg becomes real, the arabesque not.

Ballet, however, is principally a musical form of dancing. It was the former ballet star Robert Helpmann who famously observed the problem with dancing naked: when you stop on the music, not all parts of your anatomy stop at the same time.

In dance, therefore, stage nakedness is likely to remain the domain of experimental modern dance. In particular, it suits slow motion, and those expressive masters of snail-like slowness, the performance duo Eiko and Koma, have often appeared naked (though never in the shows I have attended). Fascinatingly, where it is well deployed, the drama beneath the surface feels far from slow. For now, let’s note that the current extensive use of exposed flesh in dance is opening up new areas of thou