Most Dancers Applaud AIDS Booklet

Dancers around the country are slowly learning about Update’s AIDS guide. The response is strong in New York and in the South but weaker farther West.

New York-based choreographer Kathryn Posin says that “this glut of AIDS info--however basic as it may be--has never been compiled in one booklet for dancers before. It could prove amazingly handy and useful to companies in the boonies.”

Ivan Sygoda, director of Pentacle, a respected service organization for New York artists, said the booklet “would be especially helpful to companies outside the New York area who don’t have easy access to AIDS information and are still sticking their heads in the sand about this terrible epidemic that’s touched us all.”

In Los Angeles, two of the most respected modern-dance choreographers and company leaders--Rudy Perez and Bella Lewitzky--seem in the process of addressing the AIDS crisis.

“Bella (Lewitzky) has always been an activist regarding AIDS,” explained Darlene Neel, Lewitzky Dance Company manager, who recalls that in 1983 Lewitzky invited a speaker from AIDS Project Los Angeles to talk about safe-sex practices with dancers and staff.

“I feel that we do have an AIDS policy,” adds Neel. “Bella’s made it a policy to protect dancers’ confidentiality and health insurance when it comes to any illness. Yet, I’m convinced that Update could assist all dance companies in continuing the necessary dialogue in confronting a disease that strikes the young and healthy.”

Perez said he has never had to confront the problem of a dancer having AIDS but is well aware of colleagues whose entire companies have been decimated. “I don’t know what I would do if a dancer had such bad news,” he said. “I’ve honestly never thought about it before. It’s hard to know where to turn.” Now he feels there is a place.

L.A.-based choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg said that long before she had heard of Update’s guide, she had thought about “AIDS touching our company--how can you not these days?” and added that “because our company is like a family, we would deal with that problem in very personal terms. The booklet would provide a tool.”

Celeste Miller, an Atlanta choreographer and prominent Southern activist, was much more informed about the “devastation” of AIDS in the South and of the beneficial effects of Update’s AIDS booklet.

“All of us are still at various levels of education and denial,” Miller said. “I’m very tuned into the disease and how vulnerable artists are and the abyss that’s out there for all of us who maybe know someone battling AIDS. But I think Update could help elevate the level of discussion throughout the dance world.”

Nancy Faucett, general manager of the New Orleans City Ballet, applauds Update. “We’ve been hit hard by AIDS in our city,” she says, “yet we need as much direction and even confrontation as we can get.”

Liz Lerman, artistic director of the Washington-based Dance Exchange, believes that “we in the dance world have lived with this problem since day one,” adding that “now that the entire country is facing AIDS, it’s high time that we speak in clear terms about issues of policy and modes of behavior that point to a raised consciousness. This is all that Update provides, but it is all that we need: the equivalent of a moral reminder.”