Through performance, words and images, Still With Us artfully examines the legacy of HIV/AIDS.
By David Lennam | Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet
When federal funding evaporated on a planned touring exhibition about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Canada’s dance community in the 1980s and ’90s, a pair of local arts leaders reinvented the project as a homegrown affair.
Stephen White, who ran Dance Victoria for 22 years, and Kegan McFadden, executive director of the Victoria Arts Council, present the sprawling Still With Us: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts, an exhibition that comprises live performance, visual art, film and even a book launch. It’s a one-time event that will be presented through early December at a number of local venues, with hopes of touring it around Canada next year.
Originally, it was Dance Collection Danse, a Toronto-based national archives, publisher and research centre dedicated to Canadian dance history, that planned to tour Still With Us, including a stop in Victoria. When they were forced to back out, White and McFadden had already done the legwork to confirm donors and participants.
“That was in February,” explains White, “and we had progressed to such a point where we didn’t want to put the brakes on it. We said to Toronto, ‘Well, we’re going to go ahead on our own.’ ”
What amazed both organizers was the way the local arts community embraced their idea without hesitation.
“In my experience, over many years in Victoria, I can’t recall a time when you got the Belfry Theatre, the opera, Dance Victoria, Intrepid Theatre, the library, the Gettin’ Higher Choir … all in the same room supporting the same project,” says White. “They all shared this vision.”
The cross-discipline series combines art with education and reflection as both remembrance and a call to action for a disease that’s having a global resurgence.
Highlights include: Saying Goodbye to My Brother, the remount of a dance choreographed in 1988 by Lynda Raino, but only performed once; a pocket opera by HIV-positive playwright Rick Waines; and the serendipitous visual art show honouring the 40th anniversary of AVI Health and Community Services (formerly AIDS Vancouver Island).
For White and McFadden, producing Still With Us has meant telling stories of grief and contemplating a grim legacy and its generational impact. Yet they believe it’s necessary to tell those stories, to celebrate the fallen and maintain the hope that such an epidemic is never revisited.
“There’s still stigma around it,” says McFadden. “I think it’s particularly touchy for men of a certain generation to talk about, while others are still traumatized by the grief they had to endure.”
White is worried that what happened, and just how big it was, is slipping from public memory. “The impetus, for me, is we’ve got to tell this story. It’s being lost. There’s a generation who don’t know about it.”
That became apparent a couple of years ago around the Thanksgiving dinner table, as conversation turned to HIV/AIDS and how the epidemic devastated the gay community four decades ago. White and his partner Bill were shocked to discover that his nephew’s teenage boys had never heard of it.
“It had been such a big part of our lives, losing friends and lovers and countless people,” says White.
A week after that conversation, he received word from the dance archives about the pending exhibition, which is now Victoria’s exhibition.
Still With Us Highlights
Art exhibition
Still With Us: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts
Until December 1, The Bay Centre
Reading
The Wines of Tuscany
November 1, the Belfry Theatre
Staged reading of the 1997 play by Conrad Alexandrowicz, with a performance by Victoria’s Gettin’ Higher Choir.
Performance
Saying Goodbye to My Brother
November 21 to 22, the Baumann Centre
Dance duet choreographed by Lynda Raino and an excerpt of an opera by librettist Rick Waines, both performed by Dancers 4 Life. Also: The Viral Monologues, commissioned by Intrepid Theatre.
Book launch
Still With Us
November 29 2pm, The Bay Centre
Featuring writings based on actual letters between Emerthe Nakabonye and Peggy Frank.
Screening
Day With(out) Art
December 1 (World AIDS Day), The Bay Centre
Films by HIV-positive filmmakers.
