I got nude with 150 others at the art gallery, and it's something I'll never forget

"Don't touch the artwork unless the artwork touches you," Sydney Dance Company's artistic director, Rafael Bonachela, says with a smile. I'm at the Art Gallery of NSW with around 150 other guests. We're getting ready to see Nude Live, a delicious mix of art and modern dance, as part of Sydney Festival.

This evening's performance of Nude Live is a little different, however. Like the six SDC performers who will dance naked, we – the audience – will be naked, too. 

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We're given paper bags for our clothing and asked to disrobe. Some guests remove their outfits in one swift go, others strip slowly, layer by layer. The room is full of nervous energy. 

As we prepare to enter the exhibit, Nude: art from the Tate collections, I ask a group of young men behind me why they chose to be part of the naked viewing.

"Any excuse to take my clothes off," one of them laughs, before adding that he liked the idea of there being "nothing between me and the art".

"I just hope the aircon's not too low," I hear another man joke.

I'm surprised at just how quickly the nerves disappear – how comfortable and relaxed the group has become as we seek out the dancers and view the artwork. 

Nudists may have arranged the event, but there's a sense that many of us are attending simply because it's something we'd never normally do.

A young couple - one of several couples braving the evening together - share my own sentiments: "When else will we have the chance to do something like this?"

SDC's artistic director, Rafael, who choreographed Nude Live, is also naked - and for a very similar reason. "There are not many opportunities that come to any of us, to get naked," he tells me with a laugh. "You have to go to a nudist beach, or some saunas. Otherwise we are so self-conscious and so focused on hiding certain bits of our bodies."

But there's no hiding here tonight.  As the audience we become part of the performance - part of the canvas. The dancers slide between us, getting lost amongst the nudity. One cheekily kisses an audience member on the hand, another is embraced in a tender slow dance. A guest mimics a dancer, lifts his hands above his head in a wonky fifth position - and the room erupts with laughter.

A performer leads me across to a bench in the middle of the room. She seats me there and at once I am front and centre, looking out at a semicircle of naked bodies. Any self-consciousness I might have been harbouring has now vanished. It's overwhelming, liberating, in the most exquisite way.

"This is surreal," I whisper to the curly-haired woman who has been placed next to me on the bench. She nods and we share a smile. There's no other word to describe it – no other experience to compare it to.

At times it's hard to know where to look. There are tan lines, and tattoos, stretch marks and dimples. The oldest couple at the gallery are well into their seventies, and there are bodies of all shapes and sizes. It's all so human and real and raw.  

The dancers are sexy and cheeky, strong and vulnerable. They jiggle their bits, squeeze one another playfully, pull and poke at their eyelids and nostrils. 

In one memorable duet, two women perform with mesmerising abandon. "They're empowered and proud of their bits," Rafael says of this sequence. "Nothing to hide and nothing that makes a woman less than any man by any stretch of the imagination."

In a moment of still, I look at a series of photographs by Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra. There are three women, new mothers, captured one hour, one week and one day after giving birth. They are beautiful, vulnerable, shocked. One is pictured with a trickle of blood curling down her inner thigh, while another bears a scar from her C-Section.

I stand, naked in my own skin, my hand instinctively resting on the belly that sheltered my own son, and my eyes fill with tears. I'm right there with those women. It's an incredibly moving experience.

There's a buzz in the air as we leave the exhibition – and a collective sense of disappointment that we have to put our clothes back on. After an hour of nudity, of only the airconditioning and marble floor against our skin, it feels decidedly odd.

Back in our gear and still on a high, a small group of us (old friends by now), ponder whether being naked removed the sense of voyeurism - or as one man suggested, "of it being a bit pervy".

Undoubtedly it did. With everyone naked, it was often hard to tell just who were the performers and who were the viewers. We were the art, too. We were both the watchers and the watched.

"We managed to make something really human and really powerful," Rafael says of Nude Live. He also hopes they've managed to break a few barriers when it comes to letting go of our "hang-ups" around nudity.

"We're all human," he says. "We're all people. In the crazy world we live in, I've had a few moments in that gallery, thinking about humanity and what makes us all the same and brings us all together. We're all the same under our clothes."