I am standing backstage in a theatre in south London with 34 other women. Through the black cloth, we can hear muffled sounds of the audience arriving. They have come to see Trilogy, a piece of theatre described in the press as "a skinny-dip into feminism". We all embrace each other, because our cue is rapidly approaching and we are nervous. Last week, we were all strangers. Now we are all friends. This is largely because we are all naked. The music starts. I can feel sweat pouring down my body.
I'm marching on alongside Sanchia, a 37-year-old secondary-school teacher, and Felicity, a 38-year-old researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry. Sanchia tosses back her long hair and grins over a tattooed shoulder. The moment is upon us and we prance through the curtains. Felicity is bouncing away behind me, and behind her is bouncing Louisa, whose cup size rivals Jordan's. What does it take to volunteer to strip off everything and dance naked on stage in front of a paying audience?
Trilogy's director, Nic Green, says the idea for the show was born last year after she did some dance work with young girls who, she was horrified to discover, at the tender age of eight were already dissatisfied with their physique. "I thought, there is a crisis happening here," she says. "Then I realised that maybe I wasn't comfortable with my own body, and felt threatened by it - and, furthermore, that I felt threatened by other women's bodies. I think every single woman looks at other women's bodies and wishes they were like them. So I tried to transfer that feeling into something good. Because I think human beings are absolutely beautiful in their natural form."
Her big idea for Trilogy was to have a moment where a whole gang of naked women dance in a choreographed, "non-sexualised" manner. So, no striptease or pole dancing. It's more like leaping around in a "Hey! We're naked!" way. "Well, presumably you can hide behind someone else," my husband said reassuringly. Not likely. This dance shows it all off, every particle of cellulite, wrinkle, hair and flab. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is left to the imagination. We have to jump around, waggle our bellies, flash our bottoms, flaunt our breasts, open our legs, wave our hands, kick our feet and essentially go into a sort of ecstatic state. While hoping not to bump into each other. "But if you do," Nic says, "just embrace each other and say hello!"
Our road to total nudity was a reasonably gentle one. Our first rehearsal was in "clothed" territory. We sat around in a giant circle. Everyone was doing a lot of smiling and nodding. I was furiously imagining what everyone else would look like in the nudy-rudy. I suspect everyone else was, too. Everyone, that is, except Laura, a 24-year-old MA student, who had not realised she'd be naked, and thought she was volunteering for a bit of fem-drama. "It was awful," she says later. "Finding out we were all going to be on stage nude. But I don't think I'd have signed up if I'd known beforehand."
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"I'm here because I'm an exhibitionist," said Becky, a burlesque dancer. "But I have a terrible body image, and I thought this would make me more confident." "Just you wait until you've had children," another woman said. "My whole body has just descended." "Just you wait until you hit 60," another said. "Then you won't give a damn." A few of the older women explained that they were keen to revisit their inner feminist; a lot of the younger women said they weren't quite sure what feminism was, but were interested in finding out.
"I suspect most women here don't see the show as a feminist production at all," Felicity told me. Having been involved in feminist politics as a student at Oxford in the late 1980s, she was fascinated to gauge the level of awareness of feminist issues in our group. "Most of the women here don't have any relation to feminism, unless as a historical project," she observed. "Politics we thought were radical, such as the right to choose, have now been relegated to market forces and consumerism."
On day two, the lights went down and Green invited us to take off as much as we felt like. Even in the dark, you could scan underwear levels and see the way the mood was going. I quickly realised it was all or nothing. Or, to put it another way, nothing at all. "At first, I wanted to keep my knickers on," whispered Jenny, a theatre director and Kate Moss lookalike. Her body-image anxieties should have been practically nil. Apparently not. "When everyone took theirs off, I sort of felt I should, too."
By day three, hiding in the darkness was not an option. The lights went down, we took all our clothes off, the lights went up. "It's like stripping the plaster off," Green said. "Ladies, you are all absolutely beautiful!" I felt as if white noise was going on in my brain. All my new friends had disappeared and been replaced by things bearing naked breasts and bottoms. Come the break, however, we were all standing around the flapjack table, as friendly as you like. And there was no changing-room coyness. When there are 35 sets of nipples jiggling around, it's quite instructive to indulge in an objective examination of the female form. "You just never see other naked women, do you?" Becky said. "I mean, normal women. Women who aren't models, or size zero. Or in porn."
My dance partner, another Jenny, was simply astounded by it all. "I've never been among so many other naked women," she said. "I thought taking my clothes off would be terrifying, but it's not. I've just had a conversation about colouring your pubic hair. How often does that happen?" For Jenny, 30, a charity worker, stripping in public was something of a personal mountain. Bullied for being overweight when she was a child, and assaulted when an adult, she had such an aversion to her body that at one point she would not even wear shorts. I notice that her torso and arms bear dozens of small white scars. Yet she and I danced the length of the hall together, laughing like crazy, in our birthday suits. "It sounds cheesy, but I really feel as if I've reclaimed my body," she grinned.
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By the first night, although we were nervous, nobody had backed out. Doing it in something akin to a nudist colony makes it much, much easier. And it appeared that everyone had arrived at a new place, bodily speaking. "I took a look at myself in the mirror this morning," Becky said as we casually undressed. "And I was much less critical than I usually am." Meanwhile, an epiphany for Laura, the woman who wasn't expecting to get undressed at all. "This has made me see that there is no such thing as a normal body," she said. "And I hope this is going to make me stop being so judgmental. Even when I dieted madly and lost a stone, I still thought I was fat [she is about a size 10]. All of my friends have hang-ups about the way they look. I wish they could all be in this show."
Well, you can. We crazy dancers are on stage for only six minutes, but at the end of the show, Green invites the audience to strip off and come on stage. Most nights, she's joined by about 30 people - although the current weather conditions might put some people off.
The show itself? Well, I suspect the advent of a horde of naked women is the most surprising moment in the piece. Anyone over 30 might find the feminist politics overly familiar; but maybe feminist politics has retreated to such an extent that younger women feel it is ripe for recapturing. As for the on-stage experience, I took comfort that a) I think all my fellow naked lot are great, b) six minutes is not long, and c) if people are keen to spot wobbly bits, there are quite a few there to choose from. As I jived and jumped about, I felt a distinct urge to laugh hysterically, and delighted in doing something utterly unforgettable.
My family, however, are not going to be seeing my baptism of naked fire. Mr Millard is taking the baby-sitting option, and our children who are old enough to see the show are so horribly embarrassed about their mother letting it all hang out, they would run a mile, even if it was tempered with an offer of a pizza afterwards.
Trilogy, Barbican, EC2, Fri, Sat