The Confronting New HIV Story That Had To Be Told

"Back in the ‘80s you could say that having AIDS was fashionable; and it was,” says Phillip Adams provocatively. “There was a period when it became magazine glitzed. It was everywhere. You just couldn’t get it out of vogue.” A statement like this might shock some people but understood in its proper context it’s a reflection on both historical and contemporary perceptions of HIV/AIDS. As the Artistic Director of BalletLab and co-creator of Live With It (We All Have HIV), Adams not only lived through the ‘gay disease’ scare of the 1980s but has survived to witness the apparent mellowing of community concern about the virus. His response, alongside renowned visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel and 50 other participants, has been to create a deeply personal, multi-platform work that examines the impact the virus has had on Australians.

Timed to coincide with the AIDS 2014 conference, Live With It brings together people from urban and regional communities across Victoria to share intimate, uncensored stories and reflections on death, disease, stigma and survival. Adams and Hazewinkel’s task has been to coax and shape these stories into a ‘show’. “The way that we’ve approached it is not to deal with it as a collective issue but rather as a collection of intimate and microscopic experiences within a social aggregate,” Hazewinkel explains. “The art-making is in the telling of the individual experience rather than presenting a billboard. So rather than it being this three-letter word in the sky we’ve tried to make it everyday, and that’s kinda what it is.”

As an example, choreographer Phillip Adams worked one on one with participants. They would start with the raw story and then, through the use of personal and significant objects and mementos, structure a short performance piece. As Adams says, “We begin with a series of articulations, gestural and physical, and from there it is experimental. Things happen. They’re instinctive and we come from gut.” He recounts the example of a woman who reads from her late brother’s will and then encourages audience members to join her in the reading. “It took a lot for her to come to that point, but before we got there we danced to ABBA and got naked together and went, ‘What do we really wanna do here?’”

Indeed, it is this individual mosaic approach that marks Live With It as much more than soapbox theatre. Of the show’s participants, Hazewinkel observes, “It’s interesting to reflect on who has responded to the open call to be part of this project and I can’t find a pattern [but] they have all chosen a way to reveal a story that is frightening to themselves and in some ways challenging to the audience.”

The ‘elephant’ question is why? Adams argues, “The people who survived that epidemic and the wrath of AIDS were working in parallel globally, whether it was in New York or Melbourne, whether we were acting up in the street or dying the street; and that story needs to be told.“