How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS

Epilogue

Epilogue A live performance of Mark Dendy’s Dream Analysis at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City has catapulted to its conclusion , and the audience is in a decidedly giddy mood. This dancetheater show is a comedy, after all, a thinking person’s comedy peopled with multiple Martha Grahams and Vaslav Nijinskys, and it leaves one feeling lighthearted, buoyant, free. But then, even before the applause has died down, Dendy saunters to the edge of the stage in his skimpy “faun” costume and makes this plaintive appeal: Dancers with HIV and AIDS are in need of support during this time of continuing crisis. Won’t you please give a donation to Dancers Responding to AIDS? Depending on your point of view, this postperformance oration is either annoying (must he spoil a lovely evening?) or gracious (somebody ought to thank this guy for caring). And therein lies the split that has grown in the arts—and particularly in contemporary dance—as we speed toward the official twenty-fifth year of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Nobody would argue with the proposition that AIDS has been with us too long already. A feeling of exhaustion seems inevitable. Denial too. But at the same time “it ain’t over,” as the choreographer Bill T. Jones intoned repeatedly from the stage of the Brooklyn Academy as part of a recent pitch for Dancers Responding to AIDS. The AIDS epidemic can’t be over when you hear anecdotal reports of those who don’t respond to the new drugs or can’t afford them. Or 263 At left: Felipe Barrueto Cabello and Vong Phrommala (left) with Joe Goode in Goode’s Deeply There, 1998. Photo: © Terrence McCarthy. when you contemplate the estimated 750,000 to one million Americans living with the knowledge that the virus is still active, perhaps replicating, in their bodies. Or when you read that new cases, especially among young people and women, continue unabated . Or when you learn that middle-aged white men, the same white men who in the 1980s had heeded calls for safer sex and survived, are now seroconverting in rising numbers. Indeed, if the activism and efforts to raise money stop now, history will surely berate us for quitting too soon. What’s more, even if the epidemic were over, its crucial artistic effects would remain. For even while HIV knows no particular target, it has had an undeniably devastating effect on the performing arts in general and dance in particular, contributing, for example, to ancillary debates regarding the question of whether most male dancers are gay, and casting a pall of mourning over much of the creative work of the last two decades. Whatever happens with the new advances in medical science, AIDS is a de- fining event—perhaps the defining event—of late-twentiethcentury theatrical dance. One striking bit of evidence for the omnipresent effect of AIDS is the degree to which the postperformance financial pitch and the benefit performance have evolved into vibrant art forms in their own right. One of the most distinctive AIDS events of the New York season, the Remember Project of Dancers Responding to AIDS (DRA), takes place each year on or near December 1, World AIDS Day, under the auspices of the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church. This annual dance marathon, from noon to midnight , supports DRA and its umbrella organization, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, in distributing $250,000 annually to subsidize rent and health care for dancers with HIV. About eighty companies and individuals commonly take part, and honors are given to the organization’s major fund-raisers. But whether or not more money is raised, or a cure found, it seems clear that AIDS will endure in choreography as an indelible cultural artifact, preserved in the politics and aesthetic practices of this era’s diverse dance artists. In her infamous screed in the New Yorker a decade ago, the dance critic Arlene Croce decried the rise of this sort of work, calling it “victim art.”1 I would not use that scurrilous phrase, if only because people living with AIDS make it a practice not to think of themselves as victims. 264 Epilogue Nor would I want to denigrate art that speaks directly to the issues of our time. In my view, that is exactly what art does best. But even if, owing to the cumulative...