AIDS and the Dance Community

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

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day in all five boroughs and part of New Jersey. Each meal is hand-delivered by a volunteer. All of the AIDS organizations rely heavily on volunteers. We have fifteen hundred volunteers throughout our system" (Stein 12). New York City Ballet dancers have also participated in fund-raising events that cash in on their celebrity status. In 1990 Watts and Soto were asked to help chair an auction at Southeby's to benefit God's Love. They also support Housing Works, an organization which finds housing for people with AIDS who are homeless. Watts and Soto continue to get calls for help all the time. "Once you get a reputation, everyone calls you," Watts has said. She goes on to say that "This is what matters to me now. I think it would be horrible if all I thought about was myself and my little pointe shoes and my little arabesque. You do have time. I found that if I spent a couple of hours on Mondays doing something that wasn't just about myself, I felt better all week. I think we have to start helping each other more" (Stein 12). In April of 1993, the leading dance companies in Texas joined together for an unprecedented festival of performances benefitting AIDS Services of Austin. The festival was the first major dan

Category: Medical - A