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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Weinstein, “Acts: Live Boys.” 2. I transcribed this text from the videotape of Live Boys, performed in April 1981 at Hallwalls performance space in Buffalo, New York. I want to thank Tim Miller for providing me with a copy of the tape. Glen Johnson, professor of media studies at Catholic University in Washington , D.C., is preparing a transcript of the videotaped performance of Live Boys; he plans to include the transcript in his book of texts by Tim Miller, A Tim Miller Reader, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. 3. A portfolio of related material published in the PWA Coalition Newsline from June 1985 to November 1987, and from Surviving and Thriving with AIDS: Hints for the Newly Diagnosed, both texts edited by Michael Callen, is reprinted as “PWA Coalition Portfolio,” in Crimp, AIDS, 147–68. 4. The “victim” appellation was also commonly applied to those with diseases such as cancer, which at one time had been stigmatized nearly as strongly as AIDS. See Sontag, Illness and Metaphor; and AIDS and Its Metaphors. 5. Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse,” in Crimp, AIDS, 31–70. This essay is reprinted in Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 11–41. 6. For a standard notion of choreography see Lincoln Kirstein, who writes: “Choreography is a map of movement—patterns for action” (Movement and Metaphor, 4). 7. For a history of this period see Banes, Democracy’s Body. 8. Johnston, Marmalade Me, 189. 9. Denby, Dance Writings, 548–56. 269 10. Foster, Corporealities, xi. 11. The notion of bodies as being “constructed” is not meant to deny their biological formation but rather to reveal the ways in which knowledge shapes their discursive formation. This formation may take physical shape, for example, in bodily practices such as body building that literally transform the body’s physiology, its physical facts. But it may also take the shape of beliefs about the body and its meanings. The concept of the discursive formation of the body, building upon feminist readings of the construction of gender, has been explored to great effect by a group of scholars working on the historical construction of the body in the West. One fine example is the collection edited by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. In its introduction Gallagher summarizes the impetus for her project in a way that could easily apply to gay male bodies in the time of AIDS: Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. (vii) These are the phenomena that I explore in this book. 12. Sedgwick, Between Men. 13. Jones, Untitled. 14. Another student in the class thought that Untitled was about AIDS for a different reason: because the penultimate section of the piece is accompanied by an aria that she associated with Tom Hanks’s operatic scene in the AIDS film Philadelphia (1993). 15. A possible exception is Anna Halprin’s Positive Motion: Dancing with Life on the Line, which features a mixed cast of men and women, gay and straight, infected and uninfected. Still, since it was impossible to distinguish HIV-negative and -positive women from one another in performance, all tended to signify as HIV negative. The same was true of the men, but they all tended to signify as HIV positive, at least for this viewer. 16. Parks, “Passion’s Progress,” 55–56. 17. Kisselgoff, “Dance: Lubovitch Troupe.” 18. Ibid. 19. Goldstein speaks of the “noble neuter” in Hollywood films of the 1990s that allow homosexual characters to take starring roles but only on the condition that they have no sex lives (“No Sex, Please, We’re Gay,” 51). 270 Notes to Pages 11-15 20. Kisselgoff’s interpretations are echoed in a review of the company’s November 1986 season by an openly gay man, the Village Voice writer Burt Supree. He too writes of the adagio’s unintimidating quality, describing it as “chaste and tender, with that open-hearted spirit” (“Bright Spirits,” Village Voice [9 December 1986]). 21. Berman, “An Evening of Commitment to ‘Life...