At Chapman College, No Nudes is Bad News to Some

In a promotional slogan, Chapman College in Orange calls itself “A College as Individual as You Are.” But it seems that Chapman isn’t as individual as Joel Moffett, a student who wrote a performance piece called “The Colored Box” that culminates with two students, one male and one female, standing naked on stage.

Declaring the scene off color, school officials have decided to prohibit performances of the work as written--and, in fact, a Chapman administrator said Tuesday, to forbid nudity in all student theater on campus.

“We didn’t want to make an edict of it, but that is the principle here,” said Jay Moseley, vice president for academic affairs. Would the ban against nudity extend to art on display at Chapman’s Guggenheim Art Gallery? Would art students still be able to draw live models naked? Where is he drawing the line?

Only theater will be affected, Moseley said: “I think that a theatrical production is a social event in a way that a work of art is not. And I think that students in a life-drawing class are involved in a private experience. That is not a public experience. It doesn’t represent the college.”

The college is having a very public experience over the five-minute scene: Students supporting Moffett plan to demonstrate Monday in favor of having the entire work performed at Chapman’s Waltmar Theatre May 18-20, as scheduled.

“We are expecting a big crowd on Monday, definitely at least 50,” Moffett said. “Faculty members are announcing the march in classes. I think we’re going on the front page of the student newspaper. All the student organizations have been contacted already.”

Moffett is a blond, blue-eyed Chapman senior who has won a reputation for creativity and determination. “This is Joel’s fifth play as an undergraduate,” said Gregory D. Hobson, his student adviser in the department of communications. “That’s very unusual. His other work has been staged, and it has been very thoughtful and very popular.”

Actually, Moffett doesn’t write plays, exactly. He and Hobson consider the piece to be performance art, a long-established but an aesthetically gray zone that falls between art and theater.

“The Colored Box” is not “a story in the traditional sense,” Hobson said. “There is a lot of silhouetted lighting and expressionistic symbolism and also verbalizing. It is about five characters and how they learn to become individuals. The point is, at the end, the stripping away of societal influences and the rebirth of the individual.”

That stripping away is literal at the end of the 75-minute piece. Nudity has never been part of a production at the school, a private institution with 2,100 students that was founded in 1861 by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

“My feeling is that students have a right to educate themselves, and we’re paying one of the highest prices in the state here to educate ourselves,” said Moffett, 21. “The administration is afraid of how past graduates and trustees and supporters of the college would react.”

It would violate the character of the school to have “people standing there making a point of their nudity, in this case full frontal nudity of both sexes,” Moseley countered. “It is not as if they were saying something with their nudity. They are saying, ‘This is nudity.’ ”

Does he think that Moffett is trying to produce an erotic piece? “No, I don’t think he’s trying to be erotic. It’s not pornography.”

But at the same time, Moseley added: “I think that (permitting the scene) would suggest to many people that this college is not a value-centered community. We are value-centered. . . . There are classic Judeo-Christian religious values and American civil values, and our blend of them is sensitive.”

Moffett, Moseley said, “has to realize that creativity will always push against creative restraints.”

Moffett said he realized that he might be facing those restraints as long ago as last fall and asked to address the faculty of the communications department about the scene and the problems it might raise. Hobson said about 12 members of the faculty attended the meeting and agreed to let the play be scheduled. But, he said, that didn’t signal the department’s official approval.

One problem is that performance art does not fall clearly under the jurisdiction of the communications faculty or the art department. So Moffett two years ago helped organize a campus group called Chapman Representatives of Artistic Freedom and Talent (CRAFT) to stage and promote performance art on campus.

“My aim here was not to provoke conflict,” Moffett said. “My aim was to express myself as an artist. I wasn’t trying create something erotic. I don’t think it should be a problem.”