Chewing the Fat about AIDS - Arts Today with Chris Dohse Let me out myself first thing; I tested HIV-positive in 1987. I admit to being a sourpuss about it. I am acutely critical of, or let’s say sensitive about, dance that addresses "my" disease. Secretly I know there is a "right" framing device for AIDS dances, a right way to educate, to mourn, to rage; the ways closest to mine, of course. As a freelance dance writer, I don’t get to choose the artists I review. If assigned an AIDS-related piece, I try not to let my snooty bias interfere with my critical faculties. I try to evaluate each work on its own terms. Sometimes it’s hard to summon up an open mind. If I sniff insincerity, the dancers onstage might flit to the moon on gossamer wings but I’ll only be aware of my ass on the chair. Sometimes I project AIDS metaphors onto work that might not be about the virus at all. It depends on my mood, whether nostalgia has conjured memories of a particular dear departed that day or I’m anticipating the results of my recent bloodwork. William Forsythe’s "Eidos: Telos" at BAM last December, for instance, aroused the suspicion that the new, AIDS wonder-treatments might not be the godsend we’d hope for, a subtext Forsythe probably never intended. Ben Munisteri’s "Late-Night Sugar Flight" (at P.S. 122 in New York, last year) is ostensibly a droll, pop-inflected concoction. But it resonated with courage because I knew it was Munisteri’s first evening-length project following his partner’s final illness. Two other favorites from the past few seasons in New York that might or might not have been about AIDS are Stephen Petronio’s solo "#4" (at Summerstage in 1996), with its regiment of batwinged boys, and Terry Creach’s ravishing "Study for a Resurrection" (Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, in October 1997.) Neither dance overtly referenced the virus, yet both offered eloquent and elegant reveries for our crushed hopes that protease inhibitors might end this pandemic. I am a choreographer, too, albeit a lazy one. I’m guilty of creating a dance-drama about sero-conversion for my company in Baltimore, in 1991. In this embarrassingly self-revelatory, over-long opus called (after Burroughs) "Anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death," I tried to say everything I was put on Earth to say, in case I died before doing any other work. The result was undoubtedly excruciating for the handful who sat through it. "Frying pan" proves my susceptibility to the need to memorialize one’s position within the anonymity of AIDS, to erect a fortress against amnesia. Isn’t that, after all, what an artist does? Communicate his ideological location within the world, with an eye to posterity? In the "Frying pans" a character announces that: "You’re afraid people will treat you with kid gloves...but part of you wants them to." A similar conflict drives any choreographer whose work engages his sero-status. I trust I’m not revealing anyone’s dirty laundry here, but I believe that most choreographers hope for a response from their audience that is akin to being mommied. Yet carrying HIV brands one as a probable buttfuckee or junkie--poisonous identities in most of this spavined USA. Without irrevocably damning oneself as a public pariah, how do you make art that authentically engages one’s experience and reveals one’s hidden places in a way that nourishes the artist and the audience? Even in sympathetic eyes, autobiographical material can elicit pity or the charitable ovation. Two commonly acknowledged milestones of AIDS dance are Lar Lubovitch’s "Concerto Six Twenty-Two" (1987) and Neil Greenberg’s "Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994)." Bill T. Jones’s "Still/Here" (1994), however, will likely be remembered as the poster child of the genre, due to Jones’s charisma, the piece’s ambitious premise, the "survival workshops" with fatally ill, non-dancers who helped to shape it, and the controversy that greeted its New York run. Brief recap: when "Still/Here" premiered at BAM, "New Yorker" dance critic Arlene Croce refused to see the show but wrote about it anyway. She condemned the work’s use of real dying people really dying as "intolerably voyeuristic," "unintelligible as theatre" and "beyond the reach of criticism." (If what she wrote isn’t criticism, I’m not sure what is.) Judson visionary Robert Ellis Dunn always instructed his students, "Watch the dance you’re watching." In other words, if a dance’s initial mise en scene smacks of the familiar, its ending isn’t necessarily going to be similarly ho-hum, Smarty Pants. During the late 80s and early 90s, a subgenre of AIDS dance I call the "eulogy-solo" enjoyed a heyday in Washington, DC, where I was living at the time. Dunn's admonition frequently echoed in my head as I watched these drearily similar compositions. It seemed that every dancer who’d ever shaken hands with an AIDS casualty felt compelled to immortalize this connection. Entire programs were glutted with such smarmy vehicles. The eulogy-solo is still a popular compositional device, but less frequently deployed now by "mature" artists (which means that you’ll probably have to pay more than 15 bucks to see them. Since dance is lauded as the most ephemeral of art forms, allow me to imagine a macro-frame for dances about AIDS. Perhaps dance’s fleetingness makes it the perfect evocation of human transience. Good dance, regardless of micro-style, can evade language and linearity to contain, in a single gesture, radiant hootenanny happiness and absolute absence, exactly like our memories of lost compañeros. When it does less, the critic in me has little patience. Chris Dohse's journalism and criticism have been published in "The Village Voice", "The Washington Review", "The Baltimore City Paper", "Dance Magazine", and "Backstage". He is currently completing an MA in Performance Studies at NYU. The symposium "panelists'" - Chris Dohse, Stephen Holden, Eileen Myles, and Nancy Princenthal.