Art in Time of AIDS
UCLA Magazine
Winter 2004
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Art in the Time of AIDS
By Roberta G. Wax
ART, WROTE THE AIDS ACTIVIST AND CRITIC DOUGLAS CRIMP, HAS THE POWER TO SAVE LIVES. BUT TO
RECOGNIZE, FOSTER AND SUPPORT THIS POWER, “WE WILL HAVE TO ABANDON THE IDEALISTIC CONCEPTION
OF ART. WE DON’T NEED A CULTURAL RENAISSANCE; WE NEED CULTURAL PRACTICES ACTIVELY
PARTICIPATING IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST AIDS.”
Enter David Gere, an associate professor of dance studies in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC). For Gere,
Crimp’s words, written in 1987, clearly define the purpose of his own work. He is not interested in entertaining art, in flowery art,
in purely aesthetic art. His goal is art with a powerful, fundamental purpose — to inform, to educate and, most importantly in this
time of AIDS, to prevent.
“What I am trying to do in my work is to cut down to the bone,” he says. “In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, many artists
felt that the best thing they could do was to show a dance, sell some tickets, make some money and give it to an AIDS
organization. But that wasn’t enough, not then and not now.”
It is Gere’s hope that artists, whether visual or performance, will abandon the notion of themselves merely as fund-raisers and
instead come to see themselves as true activists who focus their efforts not on trying to transcend AIDS, but on bringing an end
to the epidemic around the world.
Gere’s awareness of art as a powerful weapon in the global war on AIDS began in the 1980s when he lived in San Francisco and
wrote as an arts critic for such papers as the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and The New
York Times. “I saw what was happening with dances that were being produced during that period that played a role in slowing
and controlling the epidemic in the U.S.,” he says. “And I began to think that those same tactics that were effective here in the
United States could be used elsewhere, in places like India, for example. Some things don’t translate well across cultural
boundaries, but some do, and from my viewpoint, the scroll painter in Calcutta is a close cousin to Bill T. Jones making dance in
the United States.”
FOR SIX MONTHS THIS PAST YEAR Gere lived in India. Supported by a Fulbright grant and a $50,000 Global Impact
Research Grant from the UCLA International Institute, he spent time with artists whose work deals directly with HIV/AIDS
awareness, education and prevention. The trip culminated in July with Make Art/Stop AIDS, a four-day workshop in Kolkata (the
city formerly known as Calcutta), followed by a daylong program in New Delhi that brought together a diverse international group
of 65 artists and activists. Participants included an artist who features doctors and nurses instead of the usual mythical figures in
her songs and “pats,” traditional scroll paintings; a puppeteer who humorously uses the exploits of a lascivious king to discuss
condom use; street-theater groups who educate through skits and songs; a poet who adds AIDS-prevention lyrics to folk tunes
hummed by village women; and a science teacher who created a shrine to an invented deity, AIDS-Amma, with educational
messages on the icon.
In a country like India, where 43 percent of the adult population is illiterate and, according to the most conservative estimates of
the World Health Organization and other international agencies, 4.5 million people are believed to be infected with HIV (a number
that is second only to South Africa), utilizing theater, song and the folk arts may well be the best hope for raising awareness and
getting a handle on the crisis.
“Art is the perfect way to get a message across to anyone, from the most educated person to the most illiterate,” says Gere. “You
don’t need a lot of education to watch a puppet play or see a dance. Things that happen non-verbally can be very powerful. Artists
are masters of communication. There’s power in performance.”
Power indeed.
Gere recalls observing a show performed at dusk in a village in the area of Chennai (formerly Madras) by a theater group called
Nalamdana — a Tamil word meaning “Are you well?” “The performance was about a young couple, a bit like an American
sitcom, with some broad humor and a lot of fun,” he says. “People are laughing right away, but as the play progresses, the humor
turns more serious when it is discovered the wife, who is pregnant, is HIV positive.” Shock and distress soon take over when the
wife is blamed for being unfaithful. Eventually, however, a doctor explains that she contracted HIV through a blood transfusion.
“Then comes the information — what should she do? What medicines should she take? Should she breast-feed?” Watching the
audience during the play, Gere says, “I could see the depth of connection the artists are making. Faces that had been joyful turned
very serious. Their delight turned to intense focus. It was an amazing experience to watch.”
Afterwards, audience members are invited to ask questions, and those who do are praised and given prizes for having the courage
to speak up. Even when the show is done and the stage dismantled, Nalamdana is not through. “The cast members go door-to-
door in the villages talking to people, educating them. The fulsomeness of the approach is what’s so extraordinary,” Gere says.
MAKE ART/STOP AIDS created “a successful ripple all over India,” says Nandita Palchoudhuri, a curator-designer of Indian folk
art in Kolkata and a participant in the Make Art/Stop AIDS conference. Palchoudhuri, who uses ancient storytelling techniques to
communicate HIV information in Bengali rural areas, says the conference provided not only information on how to effectively use
art to educate but it inspired the artists and “renewed flagging spirits.”
Gere agrees with that assessment. He recalls one particularly revelatory moment that seemed to galvanize participants. During the
first day of the conference, Gere recounts, some of the artists wondered why there were no HIV-positive people in attendance.
“I said, ‘But they are here,’ ” Gere recalls. “That was part of the point, to show that people infected with HIV come in all shapes
and sizes, that they look like your neighbor, that the disease shows no discrimination.”
A bit later, one of the participants ran back to his room and grabbed a T-shirt on which was printed: “HIV Positive.” He shared
with the group how wearing the shirt helped to dispel some of the stigma surrounding HIV in the town in South Africa where he
lives.
The story electrified the group. Soon everyone, from artists to activists to the American consul general and Gere’s two adopted
children were marching down the streets of Kolkata wearing T-shirts proclaiming “HIV Positive” in bold black and red letters.
“We got a lovely reaction. People asked questions, including where to be tested. “They shook our hands,” Gere marvels. “It was
another turning point for the HIV positives in the group, to learn that risk can be taken and the effects can be positive; to learn that
humanity is shared. It is incredibly life-changing to be in the midst of that, to learn how it feels to be supported that way.”
Gere’s work is exactly the type of innovative research that UCLA’s International Institute is designed to support, says Geoffrey
Garrett, vice provost and dean of the institute. This research “will influence how things are taught in the classroom as well as
policy debates in the United States and other countries,” he says. “David’s Make Art/Stop AIDS project perfectly fits the bill. He
brings immense energy, incredible commitment, and unfailing good humor and grace to everything he touches. In David’s case
the cliché is true; he really is making the world a better place.”
Mani has tuberculosis and HIV, which she got from her husband.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Gere has found his worlds colliding in serendipitous ways. But to understand his path, it’s easiest to
start with his roots. He grew up in North Syracuse, N.Y., the fourth of five children. His parents loved to sing and dance and all
five Gere children — his older brother is actor Richard Gere — participated.
“I’ve been dancing my whole life,” says Gere. “My parents were social dancers. They’d take us to local restaurants, and we’d
dance to everything. We all had a love of the arts, and everyone pursued art in some way.”
Sushila, whose husband was a heroine user, is HIV positive, but has not yet tested her four daughters
As a teen, he wanted to be a musician and majored in piano perfor-mance at Oberlin College. “I took piano very seriously until
junior year, when I got tired of sitting in the studio with 100 other pianists, all better than me.” Gere switched majors and
graduated with a degree in religion.
But before leaving school, he enrolled in a modern dance class and fell in love with the joy of movement. He studied ballet in
Edinburgh during his senior year abroad, and after graduation he moved to New York.
While taking dance composition classes at the Erick Hawkins Studio, Gere gravitated towards more complicated rhythmic dances.
His teacher, Lucia Dlugoszewski, encouraged him to study Indian dance and culture. While pondering this idea, Gere received
postcards from a friend who was teaching in Madurai, India. She told him of an opening at the neighboring American College, and
“the next thing I knew, I was learning Tamil and heading off to India.”
During his two-and-a-half years at The American College Gere carved out a role as an arts presenter, reviving the film society,
Tamil choir, a theater group and other programs. He also taught ethical studies, a combination of ethics and religion. “It was
definitely a formative experience,” he says. “If not for that experience, I wouldn’t be so interested in India.”
In 1985, Gere moved to San Francisco and began writing about the arts. At a time when most dance criticism focused on
European and American dance, Gere again gravitated to other forms, and as co-chair of the International Dance Critics
Association he pushed for more coverage of non-Euro-American dance in newspapers and journals.
“David has a great appreciation for the cross-cultural aspects of dance,” says Elizabeth Zimmer, dance writer and editor at The
Village Voice. Zimmer and Gere co-chaired a Los Angeles conference that coincided with the L.A. Arts Festival and featured many
ethnic performances. It was a perfect duet for Gere.
“He was always interested in diversity,” Zimmer adds. “He wanted to train (dance) critics to deal with diverse materials and
cultures; to fight against the New York-centric attitude. In another life he might have been a minister. He’s a soother and a
community builder.”
"Art is the perfect way to get a message across to anyone, from the most educated person to the most illiterate."
Even today, Gere pushes the definition of dance to include not only action that occurs in the traditional stage setting, but also
street performances, where even protests become choreography. He addresses these themes in his book How to Make Dances in
an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
Gere earned an M.A. in music from the University of Hawaii and then a Ph.D. in dance history and theory at UC Riverside. He
first came to UCLA in 1993, invited by WAC founder Judy Mitoma ’70, M.A. ’75 to give a talk about Meredith Monk, a New
York-based choreographer and the subject of Gere’s master’s thesis. The following year Mitoma invited him back as a visiting
assistant professor. Academia, he found, was his calling.
“It was fun and exciting to be with a strong core of people focusing on dance,” he explains. And at a large university, there were
many opportunities for cross-pollinating disciplines.
“David is a gifted and generous teacher,” says Chris Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture. Gere, he says,
easily blends art with scholarship and contemporary cultural issues. “He likes to find ways to get students to take theoretical
knowledge and put it into practice.”
Gere has also been skillful at “connecting the diffuse pieces of the university, placing the arts at the center of the equation,”
Waterman continues. “That’s the real power of this idea [of Make Art/Stop AIDS]. He enjoys crossing boundaries.”
GERE’S ACTIVISM CRYSTALLIZED IN SAN FRANCISCO “when the AIDS epidemic was ramping up, and people I knew and
loved were dying.” He volunteered to help with the Names Project, which at the time featured nearly 2,000 quilt panels inscribed
with the names of those who died of AIDS. He went to Washington, D.C., where the quilt was laid out on the National Mall. Gere
helped develop the concept of having celebrities read the names of the dead.
When he first came to UCLA, he thought of putting AIDS activism behind him. After all, there is only so much death one can
handle. But later, learning of India’s HIV epidemic, “I realized that my two worlds were colliding.”
In the United States, the first storm of anti-AIDS activism came from the artistic community because that was the group most
notably affected and most vocal about the issue. But in India, he says, a different population was affected, starting with sex
workers and heterosexual truck drivers, who then brought the virus home. For a variety of reasons, including government inaction
and because many of those affected are uneducated and in rural areas, he says, prevention and treatment information was not
getting out. Artists, he thought, could help remedy that.“I wondered, ‘Can some of the lessons learned by the artists here be
applied there?’ ”
So he returned to India and created Make Art/Stop AIDS, which he recently brought to UCLA in conjunction with UCLA’s Year
of the Arts and World AIDS Day. UCLA festivities included an old-fashioned teach-in December 1 (World AIDS Day; see
“Spotlight,” page 56) with a diverse international roster of speakers, followed two days later with a daylong version of Make
Art/Stop AIDS, again joining artists, scholars and activists. Funding came from the UC Humanities Research Institute, the
International Institute, the UCLA AIDS Institute and the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations.