Besides teaching and writing, Gere has long been involved in other arts movements. He co-directed an audience-enrichment
activity at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts. He has been co-director of the Talking Dance Project, a California
organization dedicated to bridging the gap among artists, critics and audience members, and he organizes a related series, Artist
Alphabets (in conjunction with UCLA Live) that helps students learn more about “the artists who help us learn how to live our
lives.”
“The Talking Dance Project set me on the road to playing a role I often play, as a mediator, someone who helps others
understand what is going on in the art form. I used to love going to the lobby after a [dance] performance and hearing people
discuss what they had just seen. I wanted to capture that feeling, to have a place where people could talk about what they had
just seen, to develop exciting conversations about our art form.”
Also dear to his heart is the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, which was started in 1991 by a New York advocacy group to
help visual artists protect their work after they died. The concept grew to include music and dance, and Gere helped survey
dance works, aided by UCLA graduate student Peter Carpenter M.F.A. ’03. The Estate Project (www.artistswithaids.org)
eventually included not only staged dance, but also other types of choreographed events, such as the early ACT UP campaigns,
which used street theater to promote AIDS awareness and to make a political statement.
According to Deborah Jowitt, dance writer for The Village Voice, it’s only been within the last two decades that dance has been
looked at in a scholarly way, and Gere has been doing his share to foster that scholarship.
In 1998, Gere was invited to be a fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute as a participant in the
Interdisciplinary Queer Studies Group, and in 2000 he was Sage Cowles Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Dance
Program. He has also written extensively about dance. He co-edited Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a
Multicultural World (Schirmer, 1995) and Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
His essays have appeared in Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (Living Out) and Dancing Desires: Choreographing
Sexualities On and Off the Stage (both University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
Gere’s latest book, How to Make Dances, has brought “a fresh perspective to the issue of dance and AIDS,” adds Jowitt, also an
author and former dancer. “The way he juggles the narrative strategies is quite brilliant. He doesn’t swathe it too heavily in theory
or erode it in personal rhetoric. His experience as a critic allows him to provide eloquent, lucid descriptions.”
Besides his writing, speaking, teaching and preaching, one of Gere’s most cherished roles is as father to his two children,
Isadora, 4, and Christopher, 5, whom he adopted with his partner of 10 years, Peter Carley, a psychotherapist. Even fatherhood
was serendipitous, Gere says. The day after he and Peter discussed the possibility of raising a child together, “we learned of a
birth mother.”
Although both David and brother Richard have strong ties to India, they usually work independently. “Luckily, it’s a big
country,” David quips. But during the Make Art project Richard attended some of David’s meetings with artists and government
officials. “I’ve always been a little coy about Richard being my brother,” David says. “But in India, our work converged, and it
was exciting having him there. He has a brilliant way of listening and then pulling together threads of ideas.”
There is another quote about the nature of art that in its way — perhaps a bit more flowery than he would like — helps to define
Gere’s viewpoint. Written by the French philosopher and novelist Rémy de Gourmont at the turn of the 20th century, it states:
“Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live. … Born of the sensibility, it sows and creates it in its turn. It is the
flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.”
So, has Gere sown enough seeds to make a difference? He is almost too modest to answer. Instead, he tells a story about a clinic
at Tambaram, near Chennai. It reportedly is the largest HIV clinic in India, where Gere says hundreds of people gather each day
waiting for chits to allow them to see a doctor. Here, he says, he can see the seeds of his work beginning to bear fruit a mere six
months after the Make Art conference.
"We don't need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS."
Gere told a doctor there about his ideas of using artists to help educate the patients. “I assumed he would have no interest, but
when I told him about the earlier experiences I had, he lit up.” A street theater group, the doctor said, could educate the waiting
crowd and prepare them for the clinic experiences. And since family members usually stay with the patient during the two weeks
or so it takes to regulate the medicine regimen, entertainers could interact with and educate the family members.
A few days later, the hospital signed a contract with Nalamdana. The speed with which this came together is practically unheard
of in India, Gere says. “I’m completely thrilled about this. Thrilled about the potential for that hospital and for the potential it has
for other hospitals.”
Now, Gere says, “the network (for educating people) exists, and that’s positive.” But still, he downplays his role. “I’m like the
host who makes a party. I just put people together.”
And like any good mediator and bridge-builder, all he really wants is “to continue to help host the party so the conversations
continue.”
And plant a few more seeds.