• INTRODUCTION by David Gere
• INDEX OF CHOREOGRAPHERS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Estate Project of the Alliance for the Arts has identified choreographers with AIDS, living and deceased, in the dance centers of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The catalogue also identifies dance works created in response to the AIDS crisis, documents work created by choreographers with AIDS and makes recommendations for preservation. Biographical and contact information for these choreographers is included.

The Estate Project developed the Dance Archive in collaboration with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Additional funding for the Estate Project's dance preservation work has been provided by the George Balanchine Trust, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Howard Gilman Foundation and Jerome Robbins Foundation. David Gere, a dance scholar in the Department of World Arts and Culture at the University of California—Los Angeles, is the director of this project.

INTRODUCTION
by David Gere

In 1980, John Bernd and Tim Miller inaugurated a series of dance-based performances called Live Boys, a multimedia chronicle of their evolving gay relationship. In the April 1981 installment of the piece, performed at Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, Bernd offered what must at the time have seemed a distantly metaphoric narrative.

"When I met Tim, I had all these things wrong with my skin," Bernd monotoned, kneeling at center stage and shrugging shirtsleeves up his lanky forearms. "About a week before I met him, I had a fungus on my skin, I had psoriasis where the fungus was, I had psoriasis on my scalp, I got poison ivy, and I was very depressed...I had to walk around with bandages on my wrists. And I looked like I had tried to kill myself."

When Tim Miller unearthed the video documentation for Live Boys and viewed it again recently, after nearly twenty years, he was understandably taken aback by Bernd's prescient monologue, a monologue that, in retrospect, sharply foreshadows the AIDS epidemic.