Underneath The Skin at Dixon Place

Underneath The Skin is a solo dance theatre work based on the life of Samuel Steward (1909-1993), a gay novelist and scholar who abandoned his post as university professor to reinvent himself as a writer of erotic fiction (as Phil Andros), and one of the 20th centuries most accomplished and influential tattoo artists (as Philip Sparrow). Stewart also attracted the friendship of the writer Gertrude Stein, was lovers with the playwright Thornton Wilder and became an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in the 1950s.