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1. Blood and Sweat
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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1 Blood and Sweat [A] whole spate of crucial taboos turns upon superstitions about the nature, quantity, and powers of the bodily fluids. Perhaps it is not so much death as rather the leakage of the body that is the source of ontological anxiety. Hayden White In a July 1987 MacNeil-Lehrer news segment called “AIDS and the Arts,” Bill T. Jones explained why he had counseled Arnie Zane, his lover and dance partner, against coming out on national television as a person with AIDS. “I am more than aware of the stigma attached to this illness,” Jones said. “We had one person who was working with the company [who] said someone said to him, ‘How are you working with this group of dancers? There are so many gay people there. Don’t you sweat on each other?’”1 This remark highlights a plethora of issues that, in the late 1980s, were being projected upon the bodies of dancers in the United States. Three distinct presumptions are embedded in the statement reported by Jones: first, that some or all male dancers in Jones and Zane’s company were gay; second (and this remained unspoken though emphatically implied), that a substantial number of these dancers would therefore be infected with HIV; and third, that coming into direct contact with the sweat of these dancers could be dangerous. In the late 1980s the standard 39 At left: Bill T. Jones (left) and Arnie Zane, 1987. Photo: Frank Ockenfels. Courtesy of Robert Longo. dance-world response to these notions was to stonewall, by responding to a question with another question: What makes you think there is a higher percentage of gay men in dance than, say, in banking? The next line of defense would be to argue that AIDS is not a gay disease and that, therefore, gay men should not be presumed to be infected. On the third and final point, one could invoke current medical research, pointing out that infection by any means other than sexual contact, needle sharing, or from mother to child in the womb was virtually impossible. What more argument did anyone need? Yet beyond the reflexive rhetoric, one must acknowledge that the thoughtless speaker whose remark was reported by Jones was actually correct about two of three assumptions. In 1987 all six male dancers in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company were gay. Regarding the connection between gayness and AIDS, within two years of the MacNeil-Lehrer segment, two men in the Jones/Zane company would be dead and another would have publicly announced his HIV-positive status.2 Only the final presumption , regarding the danger of sweat, could definitively be labeled erroneous. In 1988 Dr. Sharon Lewin reassured a group of dance managers led by American Ballet Theatre’s Gary Dunning that it would take “buckets” of sweat to create even the slightest possibility of transmission.3 So what does this lone anecdote reveal about the ways in which the public regarded dance and dancers in the late 1980s? What exactly caused dancers’ bodies and their fluids to signify AIDS and death in that period? Moreover, among choreographers, audience members, and dance critics, what mechanisms of rumor, secrecy, silence, and resistance—both misguided and enlightened—helped to support these significations? Simply put, for bodies and bodiliness in the age of AIDS, dancing is ground zero. This is the place where the meanings of AIDS—the stigmas, the fears, the enduring assumptions, and, contradictorily, the explosive power of life-giving metaphors— are distilled to an elixir. From 1981, when the first cases of AIDS (then called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) were identified by the Centers for Disease Control, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS deaths in the U.S. were approaching their grisly peak, the meanings surrounding AIDS actively proliferated, attaching themselves to the dancing body 40 Blood and Sweat [3.235.154.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:53 GMT) in a perversely symbiotic relationship. More specifically, these meanings attached themselves to the male dancing body. The reasons for this are both simple and complex. By historical coincidence AIDS was, from the time of the first recorded cases in the United States, associated with gay men and their sexual practices , including anal sex. Meanwhile, as the dance scholar John Jordan has argued, the male dancer has been associated with effeminacy and homosexuality at least since the 1750s, when William Hogarth published his Analysis...