AIDS has been especially devastating to the dance community, both in terms of personal lives lost and talent the world will never see. Well into the second decade of the AIDS virus, we tally the losses and wonder who will be next. The roster of victims reads like a who's who of incomparable talent from the fields of musical theater to classical ballet. New AIDS help groups are formed continuously, as each field rallies in support of its own membership. Professions allied to dance, such as theater, fashion, and music, have responded by creating their own support networks for artists terminated in their most germinal years.
Promoting AIDS awareness and activism are groups such as Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and Community Health Project (CHP). They in turn have encouraged professions severely affected by AIDS to rally. Several groups have already taken steps to confront the epidemic. In the arts, the theater, fashion, and music industries have responded by creating affiliated organizations--Design Industries Foundation for AIDS (DIFFA), Broadway Cares, Actor's Equity Fights AIDS, AIDS Music Emergency Network, and Lifebeat--to raise money for AIDS as well as to disseminate information about the virus to their artists.
The dance community has been slower than some others to respond to the alarm, but the recent death of Rudolf Nureyev (who tried to hide his illness for nine years) on January 6, 1993, has made dancers acutely aware that there is no hiding from the face of AIDS.
Along with Nureyev, we have lost Jorge Donn, Ian Horvath, Michael Bennett, Edward Stierle, Burton Taylor, Clark Tippet, Tim Wengerd, Choo-San Goh, Arnie Zane, and Gregory Ismailoff, to mention only a few. The dance world is dependent upon creating an illusion of effortless grace, and this fact is at the heart of the community's reluctance to acknowledge the impact of AIDS on an art form of athleticism a...