1. Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt: Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century.- 2. Alyson Campbell: GL RY—A (w)hole Lot of Woman Trouble: HIV Dramaturgies and Feral Pedagogies.- 3. Janelle Fawkes and Elena Jeffreys: Staging Decriminalisation: Sex Worker Performance and HIV.- 4. Katharine Low, Matilda Mudyavanhu and Shema Tariq: ‘The Press / Supress / Our stories of happiness / They choose to define us / As “suffering headliners”’: Theatre-Making with Women Living with HIV.- 5. Peter Dickinson: ‘Still (Mighty) Real’: HIV and AIDS, Queer Public Memories and the Intergenerational Drag Hail.- 6. Marc Arthur: AIDS Memorialisation: A Biomedical Performance.- 7. Stephen Farrier: Re-membering AIDS, Dis-membering Form.- 8. Jayson A. Morrison: Finding ‘creative rebellious gay boys’ in the US AIDS Archive and Repertoire with the Aid of Bakhtinian Centrifugal Tendencies.- 9. Virginia Anderson: Performing Interventions: The Politics and Theatre of China’s AIDS Crisis in the Early Twenty-First Century.- 10. Sarahleigh Castelyn: Choreographing HIV and AIDS in Contemporary Dance in South Africa.- 11. Dirk Gindt: National Performances of Crying: Neoliberal Sentimentality and the Cultural Commodification of HIV and AIDS in Sweden.- 12. Ola Johansson: Prefigurative Performance in American and African AIDS Activism.- 13. Jacqueline Kauli: Awareness Community Theatre: A Local Response to HIV and AIDS in Papua New Guinea.- 14. Ivan Bujan: Blue Is, Blue Does: A Performance about Truvada in Several Interactions.- 15. Sky Gilbert: AIDS Theatre in a ‘Post-AIDS’ Era: Reflections on My Recent Plays.- 16. Alyson Campbell and Jonathan Graffam: Blood, Shame, Resilience and Hope: Indigenous Theatre Maker Jacob Boehme’s Blood on the Dance Floor.- 17. Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez: The Lazarus Effect: El SIDA/AIDS and Belated Mourning in Puerto Rican Theatre.- 18. Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt: Interview with Sarah Schulman: Corporate Culture, HIV Criminalisation, Historicising AIDS and the Role of Women in ACT UP.- Notes on Contributors.
Alyson Campbell is Associate Professor in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, and is a theatre director and dramaturg.
Dirk Gindt is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden, and has a PhD in Theatre Studies.
This book analyses the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective. It marks a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia, discrimination and stigmatisation. It sets out a number of challenges and contexts for HIV and AIDS performance in the twenty-first century, including: the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry; the unequal access to treatment and prevention technologies in the Global North and Global South; the problematic division between dominant (white, gay, urban, cis-male) and marginalised narratives of HIV; the tension between a damaging cultural amnesia and a potentially equally damaging partner ‘AIDS nostalgia’; the criminalisation of HIV non-disclosure; and, sustaining and sustained by all of these, the ongoing stigmatisation of people living with HIV.
This collection presents work from a vast range of contexts, grouped around four main areas: women’s voices and experiences; generations, memories and temporalities; inter/national narratives; and artistic and personal reflections and interventions.