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. As we now know, a 1981 outbreak of Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions and other aberrations of the skin among gay men provided the first indication that something was amiss with their immune systems; a brief report in the 3 July 1981 edition of the New York Times marked the moment. A year later, in July 1982, the Centers for Disease Control declared the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. In 1982 Bernd pondered a possible AIDS diagnosis, and his breakup with Miller, in Surviving Love and Death, arguably the first performance to address the epidemic in the first person. And then on 28 August 1988, John Bernd died of AIDS-related complications, at the age of 35. Given the direct line leading from Live Boys to the announcement of the AIDS epidemic to Surviving Love and Death and to Bernd's actual death, the monologue in Live Boys takes on a significance beyond what Bernd and Miller might have intended. Nonetheless, the documentation of the piece remains slim. Were it not for the videotape Miller has kept all these years, along with Miller's memories of the piece and some sketchy descriptions in journalistic reviews, Bernd's monologue might have been completely lost to us. Just think: Without this record of Live Boys and Bernd's contributions to it, historians might not have known what Bernd was experiencing at the time and, as a result, could only have inadequately and incompletely assessed the ways in which choreographers in the United States have been affected by HIV/AIDS. And how, without this documentation, could we understand what choreographers were doing to help shift the public's responses to the disease?

This is a survey of choreography and choreographers in the AIDS era, focusing on activity in three cities: New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. But instead of the tabulations associated with any survey, this work is an attempt to render the disappearing traces of an era visible, to unearth the remainders—the remains, if you will—of this particularly fraught chapter in American dance. In the late 1980s, AIDS activist and cultural commentator Paula Treichler reminded us that AIDS is an epidemic of signification—of pregnant and unwanted meanings—as well as virus. When it comes to AIDS, Treichler explains, meanings attach themselves to people and phenomena in ways that follow no internal or scientific logic, and they proliferate. Thus, for no logical reason, the fearsome aspects of AIDS, including its apparent lethal qualities and its ability to open the body to attack from multiple fronts, attached themselves to dance from the earliest part of the epidemic. And then these associations proliferated until dance itself became metaphorically infected with the disease. This survey, then, is built on the assertion that dance has served as a key site for the performance of memorialization, for grieving, for activism, and for social change, and that to know these dances and the artists who made them is to know a great deal about the ways in which AIDS has affected the United States.

Communities of Choreographic Concern

Work on this survey began in 1998 as an offshoot of the long-term concerns of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a project operated under the auspices of the New York-based Alliance for the Arts. The Estate Project, launched in 1991, originally placed its attention on visual artists, highlighting the need for painters, sculptors, and others working in visual media to make conscious choices about the disposition of their artistic legacies. Perhaps the most important achievement of the project has been the establishment of a virtual art gallery on the internet where digital representations of original artworks remain on display, not to mention the impact of the project's sage estate-planning advice, distributed in Future Safe: Estate Planning for Artists in a Time of AIDS (1992), a free publication. By the mid-1990s, the Estate Project, led by director Patrick Moore, realized that its concerns were applicable to other art forms as well, including film, activist video, theater, music, and dance. As part of the Project's expanded initiative, a preliminary survey of choreographers in two cities, New York and Los Angeles, was inaugurated with funding by National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundaiton, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Snowdon Foundation and Patricia Tarr to determine, as far as possible, the choreographers whose lives have been directly affected by HIV/AIDS, and to find out what had happened to their work.

From the beginning, it was clear that any attempt to list the names of choreographers who are living with HIV/AIDS or who had died of AIDS-related causes would not only be difficult—owing to the absence of any central repository on AIDS and dance—but that it would ultimately be an untenable and possibly scurrilous enterprise as well. From the moment in 1982 when the AIDS epidemic was identified by the Centers for Disease Control, the most noteworthy theme played out in the dance world has been the stigma associated with same-sex desire and the ways in which AIDS heightens anxieties about the male body on display. This stigma is, of course, wholly irrational. AIDS is not—as we have so often been reminded, especially given the heterosexual epidemiology of AIDS transmission in Sub-Saharan Africa—a gay disease. Nor is dance by definition a gay profession. And yet a chain of associations from male dancer to homosexuality to AIDS had coalesced in the United States by the mid-1980s, such that denial became the standard way of dealing with the disease. In a report published in 1992 by Dance/USA, the national service organization, writer and critic Wendell Ricketts found that numerous major dance companies across the country flatly denied that any of their members or staff were infected with HIV. From a decade's remove, and following upon the confirmation that the deaths of such major dance-world figures as Alvin Ailey, Robert Joffrey, and Rudolf Nureyev were AIDS-related, we now know without a doubt that the spokespeople for these dance companies were obfuscating, if not outright lying. And there is only one reason to lie: the expectation that AIDS would reflect badly on the reputations and fundability of these artists and on the companies they represent.

In the context of the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS, the Estate Project dance committee decided from the outset that any list of choreographers with HIV/AIDS could be misused, and that it would in fact be impossible to compile such a list since the cause of many deaths remained unknown, often attributed in obituaries to unidentified "long illnesses." Nonetheless, the problems inherent in compiling such a list also opened up the possibility of a new way of thinking about the epidemic and its impact on the dance field. What if, instead of a list of choreographers with HIV/AIDS, the survey were to aspire to an assessment of the entire field of contemporary choreography, to identify any and all theatrical dance works created as acts of protest or grief, anger or memorialization? Such a list would still include choreographers who have lived with, and in some cases died of, HIV-related causes, some of whom never directly addressed AIDS in their work. But it would also include choreography by artists not infected with the virus who nevertheless considered themselves changed by its effects. Thus was born the concept of "communities of choreographic concern," a concept that has defined the scope and intentions of this survey from its inception. Yes, the works of Ailey, Joffrey, and Nureyev would be included in such a survey, along with works by artists who have openly acknowledged their HIV-positive status, such as Bill T. Jones, Neil Greenberg, and Gary Bates. But the survey would also include works by artists who have never indicated their HIV-status publicly, even though they have made works on the subject, such as Susan Marshall, David Rousseve, and Lar Lubovitch. It is hoped that the resulting survey is far richer for having considered the full range of choreography, without the need to certify the HIV-status of its creator. Such an approach allows the dance field, standing together, to absorb and transform the stigma traditionally associated with the disease. In an echo of the performance artist Diamanda Galas, whose brother, Philip, died of AIDS, members of the dance field can join in saying, "We all have AIDS."

Unfortunately, this notion of a unified dance field also points out a shortcoming of the survey: Where are the dancers, as distinguished from the choreographers, who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, not to mention the critics, administrators, and othes who work in production? Eventually the scope of the survey ought to be widened, but for now such a task was simply too huge to undertake. The current survey gestures in the direction of the dancers by including those, such as Demian Acquavella and Jim Blanc, who choreographed only a little, or who contributed directly to the choreography of others, but there might be more than a thousand additional names in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco alone, were the categories to be broadened. Ironically, given the particular scope of this survey, some artists may be surprised to find themselves represented here at all, if, for example, they did not set out to make works on AIDS and did not intend their work to be seen in his light. Nonetheless, given the enigmatic ways in which audiences make meaning of what they see, some works have taken on AIDS associations for viewers, regardless of the choreographers' intentions. Emblematic of this phenomenon is Nacho Duato's Remanso, which was identified by several critics following its premiere as a homoerotic work, not as one explicitly concerned with AIDS. Still, as noted in Duato's entry, for some viewers this homoeroticism, coupled with images that could evoke a modern hospital, confinement, illness, and possibly death, is capable of signifying AIDS. The ways in which viewers make meaning of what they see is hardly scientific, and certainly not predictable. But that subset of linguistics known as semiotics tells us that historical and cultural frames influence the ways in which we interpret what we see. Thus some dances that might in other times and in other places have seemed merely homoerotic might, during the final two decades of the twentieth century and extending into the twenty-first, read as AIDS dances. Undeniable and in some ways inscrutable, this phenomenon is amply evidenced in this survey.

Many of the artists in this survey remain relatively unknown, except to a close circle of friends, family, and associates. Even after detailed searching, some are only sketchily rendered here. The paucity of information on some choreographers could be viewed as history's judgment, that only the best choreography endures. It is often said that the masterpiece is the work that lives fifty years after its creator's death. But it could also be said that every piece tells us something about the sensibility of an era, about the central concerns and the struggles of those who animate it. Thus, every time an unknown choreographer is included in one of these entries, and every time that choreographer's work can be traced to a relative or friend or surviving lover who has kept a box of materials under the bed waiting for someone to ask for it, a kind of symbolic triumph has occurred. Every one of these artists is valued, and every one of these artists deserves to have his or her life and work held up to examination. Many of the works documented here will have nothing to do with AIDS, and yet, by virtue of their having been made by an artist who has lived with or died from AIDS, they have everything to do with AIDS. It is in that spirit that all are included.

How This Survey was Conducted

This survey must be considered woefully incomplete. It remains highly unlikely that every choreographer touched by HIV/AIDS in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco will ever be counted. Furthermore, even those who are counted may remain obscure, their work either having been destroyed or lost to the public. Because people of color and artists working outside the media of ballet and modern dance are less likely to have access to feature, review, and obituary space in national newspapers, their numbers are surely underreported. And yet, there are a number of sources of information, many of them now widely accessible via the internet, that have expanded the horizons of this research. These sources are listed here, to demonstrate the methods used in compiling the survey:

• To begin, the authority file of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library—the largest and most comprehensive U.S. repository of documents on dance—was sorted to identify choreographers who have died of AIDS, in cases where the cause of death was included in library cataloging. In addition, the subject category "AIDS" revealed articles, books, titles of choreographies, and oral histories completed under the auspices of the AIDS Oral History Project of the New York Public Library.
• The most complete obituary listings for dance are contained in the pages of the monthly Dance Magazine. These pages were searched from 1982 to the present, with all AIDS deaths noted and all early deaths noted where no specific or immediately credible cause of death was given. Other publications searched for obituaries 1982-present, via Lexis/Nexis search engines, included the New York Times, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. The editors of Dance/USA Journal kindly photocopied all obituaries in their publication during this period and sent them to the author.
• Especially in Los Angeles, where no central library repository exists and where obituaries are not comprehensive, interviews were conducted to broaden the reach of the survey. Interviewees included administrators of the Dance Resource Center of Los Angeles, a key Hollywood choreography agent, the editor of the Los Angeles-based Dance+Fitness magazine, and the executive director of the Academy of Dance on Film, a major repository for media choreography.
• To increase visibility for the project in Los Angeles and to encourage direct information sharing, articles on the survey were written by the author and placed in two publications: Dance-zine, the newsletter of the Dance Resource Center, and Dance+Fitness. Direct responses were solicited.
• Materials previously gathered for the author's dissertation on dance and AIDS were culled, especially files on San Francisco artists.
• Information was solicited informally among members of the national dance community by word of mouth.

• Internet search engines—especially Lexis/Nexis—were used to gather bibliographic citations (primarily journalistic features and reviews) for choreographers and specific works.
• The cataloging of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, accessed via internet, was especially helpful in tracking down documentation of dances on video and in print while, in Los Angeles, the files of the Academy of Dance on Film revealed primary source material on Los Angeles media-oriented choreography.
• Survivors listed in obituaries were sought via internet searches and telephone information. Many cold calls proved to be fruitless, while others led directly to friends and relatives. The boundaries of the survey were vetted at this point. In one case, it was determined that a choreographer who had died young, and who was widely believed to have died of AIDS-related causes, had in fact succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. In another instance, a choreographer thought to have died of AIDS turned out to have had a longterm heart malady. These examples provide yet another compelling reason why this survey should not be taken as an indication of who is and is not infected with HIV.
• In San Francisco, the major repository is the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (SFPALM), whose holdings were searched.
• Where possible, phone interviews were conducted with survivors and with living artists in order to determine the current status of all documentation. Further leads were pursued by phone and email communication.
• Cross-comparison was made with the holdings of the Movement Notation Bureau.
• In many cases, final entries were read, vetted, and edited directly by the concerned artists or executors themselves.

First and foremost, the survey was designed to identify extant documentation of each artist's life and work, focusing specifically, where applicable, on choreography that deals with HIV/AIDS. Among dance scholars, the exigencies of reconstruction have fomented a great deal of argument. Is a videotape shot from the back of the house sufficient to recreate an "authentic" version of a dance, or is a knowledgeable human being needed in order to replicate the intentions of the choreographer? Can a notational system convey the heart of a dance work, or is it necessary to research a choreographer's milieu through his or her personal papers? This survey takes no position on the precedence of one philosophy of documentation over another. Rather, the design of the entries seeks to elicit the range of documentation available, leaving it to researchers and others to draw upon these materials as they see fit.

The types of documentation range from human repositories with firsthand knowledge of the artist and the choreographic work—preferably dancers or rehearsal directors—to videotape and film in all formats, photographs, movement notation (including idiosyncratic personal notation systems), ancillary production materials, oral histories, personal papers, including newspaper clippings, printed programs, press releases, notes, files, and diaries, and published bibliographic citations. Some types of documentation are more common than others, in no particular pattern, except that a careful reader will note a dearth of movement notation and oral history in these entries. Only one entry, for Bill T. Jones, makes mention of new motion-capture technologies. In many cases, the documentation is described here in general terms, courtesy the friend or executor who remains in possession of it.

At the penultimate position in each entry comes a list of choreographic works, which in the case of choreographers who are living with HIV or who have died of HIV/AIDS-related causes is of particular importance. And yet in many cases, even where documentation is unearthed, it has been impossible to compile such a list. A list of works functions as a kind of timeline, a spine for the artist's life. It also provides clues for further searching, allowing disjointed shards of documentary evidence to be contextualized. But short of finding a curriculum vitae in the artist's own hand, it can prove extremely difficult to reconstruct such a list, if only because doing so requires a person—generally a friend of family member—to dig through boxes of clippings and videotapes. In part, this is a problem of time. These close associates have their own jobs, their own responsibilities. But just as significantly such a task presents a problem of will, for to open a dusty box stored in the basement or under the bed or in the closet can be to open a Pandora's Box of memory and grief. Thus, a large number of executors holding materials at home, best intentions aside, find it impossible to cull through these materials to create a list of works or a more accurate accounting of the documentation being held. Materials held at home function as fetishes of memory, but they are with rare exception of little or no use to researchers or to those who desire to reconstruct the work, if only because the energy required to counteract inertia is so great.

Recommendations

It is for this reason that the first of this final set of recommendations regards the importance of encouraging executors and others in possession of documentary materials to redirect these artifacts to key U.S. repositories for dance. In New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco those repositories most readily accessible are, respectively, the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the Academy of Dance on Film, and the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. Materials deposited in these three locations are fully catalogued. The holdings of the Dance Collection and SFPALM may be searched using internet search engines, while materials kept at the smaller Academy of Dance on Film may be identified by phone, email, or personal inspection. A system for connecting dance materials held at these and other repositories, for example, within university libraries, must be developed so that a single search will uncover materials at other sites. Otherwise, with no cohesive strategy, materials at outlying sites will remain virtually unknown and unused. But the first step must include archival and even emotional assistance to encourage those holding materials under their beds or in home storage to pass them over to established repositories. This survey demonstrates what a difficult task this could be.

This survey should now be converted to an ever-growing finding aid, so that newly discovered materials might be added and so that otherwise inaccessible materials are rendered trackable. As it exists at this moment, the survey represents over a thousand hours of focussed research. This investment of time and energy should not be allowed to languish, but rather should be expanded upon with coverage extended to new geographic areas—Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Chicago and Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. and environs, Boston and the Northeast. Now that a template exists, future research for this survey should become more streamlined. It is entirely possible that graduate students, under the direction of the current survey author, could tackle this project in the short-term. Eventually, it would probably make sense to attach the project to the larger cataloging projects proposed by the Dance Heritage Coalition, with new entries and updates overseen by library staff. In any case, a long-range plan is in order.

Publication of this survey on the internet, as a continually updated finding aid, would be of great use to anyone doing research on these choreographers and their works. And it would also do honor to the choreographers. With future improvements in technology, it may become possible to scan primary documentation—in video, photographic, or text-based formats—and to make this documentation completely accessible via the internet. There is value in a project that brings this work back to life, even if only as a concatenation of raw documentary information. One could think of such an ongoing survey as a kind of resurrection. One thing is clear: Internet puublication should not consist merely of dumping these entries at the Estate Project site. Rather, it must involve careful editing of text for consistency and style, with provisions for regular updates monitored by a scholar or research librarian.

In addition to internet publication of the survey, there is a great need for expanded opportunities to revivify/reconstruct works so that they may be seen live. Currently, the New York-based Dancers Responding to AIDS, under the direction of Hernando Cortez, is overseeing such projects, often tied to benefit performances. But more such projects ought to be attempted. The range and depth of the work uncovered in this survey demands that more of it be seen live.

This survey reveals that ongoing videotaping and archiving projects at such sites as Dance Theater Workshop and P.S. 122 have played an extraordinary role in documenting dances that might otherwise have been completely lost. At an interim meeting of the dance committee of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, it was suggested that this program be expanded to several sites in New York City and, potentially, to venues in other cities as well. Performance contracts could include a clause requiring video documentation and the deposit of video and paper materials in a major dance repository. This initiative should be pursued as the single most important source of ongoing documentation in dance.

Two publications of the Estate Project were mentioned by executors as the inspiration for their ongoing efforts in documentation and preservation. Louis Falco's sister, for example, read an Estate Project manual for visual artists—Future Safe—and embarked, with Alan Sener, upon what has become the most thorough documentation project noted among all the survey entries. Given the need for constant reminders and for refreshment, and for education of young artists just entering the field, Future Safe and A Life in Dance ought to be updated, reissued, and distributed at regular intervals.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the following individuals and institutions who have supported the completion of this survey:

Jill Nunes Jensen, a recent M.A. graduate of UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, served as head detective in the search for documentary materials in New York and Los Angeles. For her skills, patience, and enormously positive energy, I am ever grateful.

Peter Carpenter, a Ph.D student in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, expanded the survey to San Francisco. Based on my prior research and contacts, he wrote these entries and must be credited as first co-author of the San Francisco dance survey. I thank him for his elegant writing, thoroughness, and good cheer.

The following individuals offered assistance beyond the call of duty: Gary Bates, Larry Billman, Saadia Billman, Bonnie Brooks, Grover Dale, Thomas de Frantz, Deborah Jowitt, Julie McDonald, Allison O'Brien, Serena Tripi, and Elizabeth Zimmer. Thank you, all.

The staff of the following libraries and dance organizations—the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the Academy of Dance on Film in Los Angeles, San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, the Dance Notation Bureau, and Dance/USA—provided cataloging and information upon which much of the survey's research was based. Many thanks.

And last, but hardly least, Randy Bourscheidt and Patrick Moore of the Estate Project were the people who thought up the idea of this survey and remained committed to it through a very long process. Brennan Gerard took the project and ran with it. Ryan Kelly provided invaluable assistance during the final stages of the project. To them, along with the volunteer dance support committee, my heartfelt appreciation.