Fighting AIDS with creativity

What good is art when people are dying?

The question harks back to Plato, who considered art to be dangerous on account of the fact -- and this is a gloss on a subtle argument -- that it was too removed from real life. But it’s a current question too, one that critics, activists and art aficionados have been asking with renewed vigor ever since the dawning of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. in the early 1980s.

Is it enough for artists to organize benefits and make cash contributions, large or small, to scientists looking for a cure? Or is there a more direct way in which artists can, and should, intervene in the epidemic?

In other words, can art itself help stop AIDS?

This last was the question foremost on my mind when, at the beginning of last year, I packed up my family for a six-month Fulbright-funded research assignment in India to find out how artists are responding to HIV/AIDS in a country where even the most conservative estimates tell us that 5 million people are already infected with HIV and where, without massive public health intervention, an additional 20 million are likely to be infected by 2010.

I had just completed a book, “How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS,” that enumerated lessons learned while I was a dance critic in San Francisco, an early epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, in the 1980s and the beginning of the ‘90s. I had closely watched the work of such artists as Tim Miller and John Bernd, whose “Live Boys” reported autobiographically on Bernd’s mysterious skin illness in 1981, before the epidemic had even been identified, as well as dances by the likes of Joe Goode and Bill T. Jones, directly confronting a society that allowed shame and stigma to circumvent compassion and care. And I had come to the conclusion that artists, especially dance artists, could do a good deal more than organize benefits.

It wasn’t that I thought choreographers capable of literally stopping the advance of HIV the biological agent -- though some, such as the Bay Area’s Anna Halprin, had audaciously tried by conceiving of choreography and performance as transformative rituals. Instead, I’d come to believe that artists had the ability to alter key aspects of the epidemic, which, as my colleague Robert Sember at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University is fond of saying, is not solely a biological phenomenon but also a social and cultural one.

What I found from my years in San Francisco, in short, was that even if artists couldn’t cure the virus, they could refuse and reconfigure stigma. They could turn grief to action. They could ruminate on matters of spirituality and love. And they could celebrate sex at a time when sex itself, especially gay sex, had become tantamount in the public consciousness to illness and death.

Moreover -- and this would take on heightened importance in India, where nearly half the population is functionally illiterate -- artists had the potential to teach the facts of HIV transmission more compellingly than any white-coat-wearing public health worker ever could. Just weigh the options: Would you rather get your AIDS information by reading a dry public health brochure or by watching a luscious piece of choreography?

I should explain that there was an additional, serendipitous reason for my sojourn in India. I had taught in a small college in southern India 20 years back, when I was a fresh-faced graduate of Oberlin College on a Shansi Memorial Fellowship. I learned to speak Tamil then and fell in love with Tamil dance and music. I had always wanted to return. In the late ‘80s, when the AIDS epidemic first surfaced in southern India, it was in Tamil Nadu, among sex workers and heterosexual truck drivers. I should have noticed this detail but was distracted, already consumed by the process of taking care of close friends who were sick and dying of AIDS complications.

A decade later, when I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized the enormity of the global AIDS epidemic, it was clear that my friends in India were vulnerable too. This year, owing to the sheer size of its population, India is poised to emerge as the country with the most HIV infections in the world. More than South Africa. Probably more than China. Even a small but effective intervention now, during the early arc of the syndrome, could result in millions of lives being saved.

And so it was that we -- my psychotherapist partner, Peter Carley, and I, along with our two young children -- set out for Bangalore, India, in January 2004. Slowly, very slowly, I was able to make contact with more than 50 artists across the length and breadth of the country, from the fields of music, photography, film, puppetry and street theater, all of whom were using artistic means to prevent AIDS. I even managed to find one contemporary dance group, Sapphire Creations, based in Calcutta, that had partnered with an organization of HIV-positive people to create a multimedia piece against AIDS discrimination. Echoing a title that had been used before in the early days of the epidemic in the U.S., it was called “Positive Lives.”

Subplots that teach

The most ambitious arts project that came to my attention was an amazing Hindi-language television program, “Jasoos Vijay,” or “Detective Vijay,” that each week reaches 100 million to 150 million people, primarily in rural areas, via Doordarshan, the PBS of India. Produced in New Delhi and translated into five regional languages, the program is a classic whodunit, a close cousin of “Murder, She Wrote” featuring a handsome detective, a beautiful sidekick and elaborate plot twists that obscure the identities of the perpetrators.

Interwoven are rich subplots that create opportunities for teaching about HIV. For example, in one episode a woman is beaten by her cousin for having visited a public health clinic -- she shouldn’t be talking about sex outside the home. Vijay miraculously appears, shields the woman from her cousin’s blows and then sends his female assistant (and love interest) to buy condoms with the woman at the village drugstore. The message: Women can protect their families from HIV infection, as well as unplanned pregnancy, by providing condoms at home.

“Detective Vijay,” with substantial backing from the BBC World Trust and India’s National AIDS Control Organisation, also makes significant strides in confronting the stigma of HIV, which is perhaps even worse in India than in the U.S. owing to widespread discomfort in Indian society about discussing sex and sexuality. At the climax of the show’s first season, after audiences had come to identify strongly with Vijay, the show’s handsome protagonist, the dashing detective himself was revealed to be HIV-positive. Preconceptions about who gets HIV -- in the Indian mind-set, that would be lascivious truck drivers and promiscuous sex workers, much as in the U.S. it had been gay white men -- were toppled in an instant. (And when was the last time a lead character on American prime-time TV was HIV-positive?)

The show’s ratings suffered initially but soon recovered. Now in its third season, “Detective Vijay” remains one of the 10 most-watched programs in India.

The painter-bards of the village of Naya, three hours west of Calcutta, work on a dramatically smaller scale but are no less important to a multipronged anti-AIDS arts strategy. Most of the people of the region do not have electricity -- hence, no television -- and can’t afford batteries -- no radio, either. Over centuries, the residents of this particular village, virtually all related to one another, have developed extraordinary skills as scroll painters who sit cross-legged on the floor and sing texts to accompany their images, much as one might narrate individual frames in a storyboard as part of a Hollywood pitch.

Three years ago, a prominent Calcutta-based folk arts curator, Nandita Palchoudhuri, proposed that the scroll painters of Naya expand their repertoire to include information about how to avoid HIV transmission, by using condoms or avoiding used needles and tainted blood. The idea has taken hold so effectively that dozens of artists in Naya and neighboring villages are now painting HIV scrolls. The village’s residents stand ready, if given the necessary government backing, to travel from house to house throughout their larger district, delivering AIDS information in a way that requires no literacy, no paper, no electricity.

Another of the most effective arts groups in India is Nalamdana, a street theater troupe whose name, in the Tamil vernacular, translates as Are You Well? Based in Madras, this group travels from neighborhood to neighborhood performing dramas laced with humor and sitcom-esque pratfalls. The acting is good, and the entertainment value of the group has lent it a share of fame.

But the members of Nalamdana do far more than entertain. Their most popular plays are packed with lifesaving information about HIV, for which their audiences are hungry. On the eve of World AIDS Day 2004, an administrator at the government hospital in Tambaram, outside Madras, e-mailed to tell me that the Nalamdana troupe had performed a play there and that the reaction had been wildly enthusiastic.

The Tambaram hospital has since signed a yearlong contract under which the group will put on its plays for the 1,000 patients who line up for treatment each morning at dawn as well as run arts-based workshops for people who stay in the hospital to tend to loved ones while their AIDS treatments are being calibrated. This collaboration, as far as I know the first of its kind, promises a new approach to public health in the age of AIDS.

Each of these projects strikes me as a model that could be replicated in other parts of India or the world. Each is situated at the sweet spot where the arts meet public health and skills in communication meet the commitment to save lives.

I started my career as a dance critic thinking I was a formalist, someone who finds value in composition, visual design, the arrangement of bodies in space, beauty. These values still have resonance for me, but at a time when people are dying -- more than 40 million are infected with HIV around the world, and fewer than 10% who need it have access to antiretroviral treatment -- I’m looking for art that values human life and for artists who are willing to do something about it.

Gere is director of the MAKE ART/STOP AIDS project and an associate professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA.