Talks, Events Mark AIDS Toll on Artistic Community

AIDS has become as familiar to ballet as sweat and sore toes. While dancers can’t avoid the elbow grease, some teens here learned Thursday, they can avoid the disease.

About 100 Rancho Alamitos High School saw performances by the Coast Ballet Theatre troupe, between which was a frank talk about AIDS. The event at the Newport Harbor Art Museum was one of several staged locally for Day Without Art, an annual observance drawing attention to the many artists felled by the epidemic.

Lawrence Rosenberg, who co-directs the San Clemente troupe, discussed the virus that has claimed ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, actor Rock Hudson and rocker Freddie Mercury.

“What’s really tragic about it, is that it is avoidable,” Rosenberg said. While condoms aren’t fail-safe protection against the “death sentence,” he said, sexual abstinence can be.

“I know it’s easy for me to stand up here and say ‘Don’t have sex,’ ” said the long-married father of three. “Just stay aware and stay healthy.”

Thursday’s sixth annual Day Without Art was one of Orange County’s busiest such commemorations. UC Irvine’s School of Fine Arts mounted a half-dozen AIDS-related activities, and 10 major arts organizations, all volunteering their time, collaborated on a music, dance and theater performance at the Irvine Barclay Theater.

Although organizers had hoped to fill the 750-seat Barclay theater, the event attracted about 400.

But Timothy B. Dunn, an organizer, said: “The point of the evening is a commemoration of our artists, our colleagues and our friends, not just numbers.”

Day Without Art was launched in 1989 by Visual AIDS, a New York activist group, to coincide with the United Nation’s annual World AIDS Day. Worldwide, some 6,200 arts institutions were expected to take part Thursday, either through special exhibits or shows or by draping sculptures or dimming gallery lights, gestures meant to symbolize the irrevocable void that AIDS has left.

To date, more than 3,500 county residents have contracted AIDS and 2,071 of them have died, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency. Worldwide, 18 million people are HIV positive and every 24 hours, 6,000 more people are added to that list, said Jay Fournier, the Laguna Beach Community Clinic’s social and community services coordinator.

“I believe the Orange County arts community has become more involved in Day Without Art,” said Fournier, representing one of 10 AIDS service organizations collecting donations at the Barclay theater.