The Topless Cellist: Was Charlotte Moorman the first performer to be charged with indecent exposure?
One of the many myths surrounding the Dionysion figure of Jim Morrison is his arrest for indecent public exposure while performing at a 1969 concert in Miami.
Though the true story of what went down on stage that night has been lost to legend and to time, whether Morrison actually did or did or did not expose himself to the crowd that night is immaterial. He was arrested, tried, and convicted for having done so regardless, and though he didn’t live long enough to carry out his sentence, the night has gone down in music history folklore.
His arrest during the Miami show was not the first time that the cops had cut a Doors show short, with Morrison also having been arrested during a show two years earlier, when he had become the first rock performer to be booked to perform and then booked by the police mid-song. While Morrison may or may not have bared more than his soul to the audience that night, whatever happened doesn’t seem to have been pre-planned. Over the course of the last few years, he had begun to unravel, and over the course of the evening in question, he had become more and more inebriated and angry. Taking his frustration out on the audience and then later on the police in attendance, he stopped singing and began to rant about authority.
And though he may have been the first rock musician to have been picked up by the police while onstage, he wasn’t the first musician to find themselves in such a situation, or for such a crime.
Morrison’s on-stage exposure was almost certainly not pre-planned, but there would have been plenty of hard work, planning, preparation and forethought that went into the night, which catapulted Cellist Charlotte Moorman to notoriety, and led to her own on-stage arrest for indecent exposure.
With a master’s degree in Cello received following her studies at The Juilliard School, Mooman was well-prepped for an illustrious career in classical concert hall performances, but her innovative playing, penchant for the experimental and taste in the far-out art pieces by the likes of Yoko Ono and John Cage led her into an entirely new musical realm.
By 1963, Moorman had founded the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and was keen to explore the connection between musical exploration with the unorthodox adventures in physical and visual art that were taking place at the time, as well. It was at the second annual festival that she encountered and began to work with the foundational video artist Nam June Paik.
Through late 1967 and early into the next year, the pair were preparing to work together on the now infamous performance art piece Opera Sextronique. To be staged at invitation-only performances at The Film-Maker’s Cinematheque in New York, starting from February 9th, 1967, Moorman was to perform four solo cello movements throughout the show, with each movement seeing her playing her instrument with various items in place of the traditional bow, including a bouquet of flowers, and in increasing states of undress. Starting the show relatively covered up, Moorman would play the second piece topless, the third bottomless, and finally, by the fourth, would be fully nude.
On the opening night, Moorman performed the first movement, playing Massenet’s ‘Elegy’, in the dark while wearing a bra adorned with flashing lights. For the second movement, she played Max Matthews’ ‘Lullaby’ without the bra or lights and was unable to proceed any further beyond that, as three plainclothes police officers stepped out of the crowd, onto the stage, and busted Charlotte Moorman mid-performance.
Paik had perhaps predicted what was to come, having written in the program for the performance that “The purge of sex under the excuse of being ‘serious’ exactly undermines the so-called ‘seriousness’ of music as a classical art, ranking with literature and painting. Music history needs its DH Lawrence, its Sigmund Freud”.
Following her arrest during the only performance of Opera Sextronique, Moorman was charged with indecent exposure, though the charges were later dropped. Moorman was dubbed “The Topless Cellist” by the press, and as a result of her newfound notoriety, was dropped from her position with the American Symphony Orchestra.
In a cruel twist of fate, considering the exposure that defined her career and the “topless cellist” sobriquet that followed her forevermore, Moorman was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1970s and had to undergo a mastectomy. She continued to perform, to innovate and push boundaries for the rest of her life until her untimely death in 1991.
