In my early 20s, I worked as a naked dancing ghost. I was a late stand-in for a production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. A couple of evenings a week I strolled in the dark to Malmö Opera’s functionalist home, with its marble-clad columns and huge, warmly lit window surfaces.
Backstage in the dressing rooms, it was almost like the atmosphere before a lower-division football game, the guys shooting the breeze, talking rubbish, except that when they returned one by one from the cubicle where the makeup was being applied, they were naked and corpse-pale, their bodies dotted with splashes of black. Lips were chalky-white and eyes were adorned with dark rings that gave faces a startled expression.
