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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Given that my work on this book has spanned nearly my entire adult life—a scary realization—it is no wonder that I have so many people to thank. I’d like to start with the San Francisco Bay Area choreographers and activists whose theatrical dances, sitespeci fic works, films, movement meditations, and political protests first inspired me to think about the relationship between choreography and AIDS. I am grateful to have spent almost a decade participating as a dance critic in such a lively, iconoclastic , activist arts community. Though I moved to Los Angeles ten years ago and have kept loose ties to New York, the Bay Area remains my first dance home. I also want to thank my dear friends and colleagues there, who helped me begin thinking about what it means to be a gay man making (or watching) dances in a time of great emotional, physical , and political turmoil, particularly my friend Daniel Goldstein , who was my willing sidekick during the years 1985–93 at both performances and protests, as well as Ellen Webb, Stephen Cobbett Steinberg, Bill Huck, Joah Lowe, Diana Vest Goodman, Danny Sauro, Janice Ross, Elizabeth Zimmer, Gay Morris, Tom O’Connor, Joe Goode, Djola Branner, Rachel Kaplan, and a hundred others whose love and support have meant so much to me. You know who you are. In addition, I must thank the editors of the publications that I wrote for during that time—especially Rob Hurwitt at the East Bay Express and a long string of supportive editors at the Oakland Tribune—for sending me out to see many of the works that are now the focus of this book. I also thank them for teaching me to write at the intersection of sophisticated ideas xi and straightforward communication, a value I remind myself of every time I sit down at the computer. This book began as a dissertation at the University of California , Riverside, where I had the good fortune to work with Susan Leigh Foster, a gracious and indomitable force in the field of dance studies and a warm and dedicated mentor to me. I can’t thank her enough. At Riverside, in what seems in retrospect to have been a golden age, I also had the opportunity to learn from an extraordinary array of scholars in allied fields, including Philip Brett, Sue-Ellen Case, George Haggerty, Marta Savigliano, Linda Tomko, and, when he was a visiting professor at nearby UCLA, Douglas Crimp. I am particularly indebted to David Román, of the University of Southern California, for initiating me into the study of AIDS cultural analysis. My fellow graduate students at Riverside continue to exert a huge influence on my work, and for that and for the levity and friendship they have brought into my life as a scholar, I blow kisses to ringleader Maura Keefe and to John Beynon, Jens Giersdorf, John Jordan, Janet O’Shea, Rebecca Rugg, and Karen Schaffman. I am also grateful to many far-flung friends and colleagues who sustained me through these years and, in some cases, collaborated in organizing conference presentations and lectures, or in commissioning essays for publication, especially Ann Cooper Albright, Bill Bissell, Suzanne Carbonneau, Ananya Chatterjea, Thomas F. DeFrantz , Deborah Jowitt, Alan M. Kriegsman, Sali Ann Kriegsman , Susan Manning, Allen F. Roberts, Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts , Robert Sember, Marcia B. Siegel, Radhika Subramaniam, Lan-Lan Wang, and Tricia Henry Young. I began teaching as a visiting professor at UCLA at the invitation of Judy Mitoma, the visionary founder of the new Department of World Arts and Cultures. Since that time a string of department chairs has supported me in this project, including Christopher Waterman (now dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture), Peter Nabokov, and David Roussève, not to mention my wonderful colleagues in WAC. The university itself has contributed substantially to my work through yearly research and travel grants offered through the Academic Senate ’s Congress on Research. Membership in the Interdisciplinary Queer Studies group of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, organized by Robyn Wiegman, gave me a big xii Acknowledgments boost when I was just beginning the process of revising the dissertation into a book. Wiegman and colleagues Madelyn Detloff, Carla Freccero, George Haggerty, Eithne Luibheid, Lisa Rofel, Sandy Stone, and especially Nayan Shah, pressed me to think of my work in terms larger than dance studies...