We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.

She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.

The Artist was completely at ease, her bare legs crossed yoga style, her palms pressed together in front of her breasts. It was the audience that was disturbed: little rustlings, as people crossed and uncrossed legs or fiddled with zippers. Explosions of whispered laughter.

Behind the woman, photographs of body art appeared on a series of screens: a field of lilies grew out of a vagina, with the flowers blooming across the breasts. A face painted like a tiger, magnified so that each whisker, each stripe around the muzzle, was visible. The tiger was replaced by a jungle scene that covered the back: elephants trumpeted on the shoulder blades, a giraffe straddled the spinal column. The jungle was followed by a giant blue eye, lid lowered, on an abdomen, seeming to wink at the vulva below.

The slides changed in time to a sound track of Middle Eastern music. At the front of the stage, two figures clad in burkas gyrated in time to the music. I hadn’t noticed them at first, but the burkas somehow exaggerated the eroticism of the dancers’ movements and made them almost as disturbing as the body art itself.

I was as uncomfortable as the rest of the audience. The spotlight on the Artist’s breasts, the sense that this was a mannequin sitting there, not a woman, was both arousing and unpleasant, and I resented my body for responding to what my mind rejected. Jake Thibaut shifted away from me involuntarily, while Mr. Contreras said in a loud whisper, “This ain’t right. It just ain’t right!”