Finally ready to make art about AIDS: 30-year survivor puts story on stage
By 1987, the terrifying and mysterious new syndrome afflicting gay men had become a deadly epidemic with a name: AIDS. That year, 28,000 Americans would get HIV. One was 19-year-old Brian Sanders, infected by a man in New Hope who got sick shortly afterward.
By 1987, the terrifying and mysterious new syndrome afflicting gay men had become a deadly epidemic with a name: AIDS. That year, 28,000 Americans would get HIV. One was 19-year-old Brian Sanders, infected by a man in New Hope who got sick shortly afterward.
"I thought it was the flu. Then I heard he died three months later. I never really put that together," said Sanders, now 49 and artistic director of the dance-theater company Brian Sanders' JUNK. "Maybe I just never wanted to."
Today, Sanders is marking 30 years of living with HIV - and, with the benefit of perspective, finally putting the pieces together. The result is Carried Away, running Sept. 9-24 as part of Fringe Arts. It's a semiautobiographical look at the pervasive fear and reckless, raucous escapism of gay culture amid the AIDS crisis, set in the underground party scenes and dance halls of Sanders' youth.
The last time Sanders made a performance piece about AIDS, in 1993, his friends were dying around him, and it seemed likely he'd be next. Instead, the life-and-death drama became a daily grind of self-care. So, just as museums have begun to undertake historical surveys - one of the first, Art AIDS America, is at the Bronx Museum through Oct. 23 - Sanders is also revisiting that era with a mix of grief and nostalgia.
He took inspiration from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and illustrations of erotica artist Tom of Finland. And he selected a disco-era sound track that includes heroes felled by AIDS, like Freddie Mercury and Sylvester, and others, like Donna Summer, a gay-icon-turned-outcast after it was reported she described AIDS as a punishment for the sin of homosexuality.
"Their art brought me back there, to that time and place that I was trying to forget about for a long time," Sanders said. "It was scary and painful, and I spent most of my 20s mostly ignoring the realism of it. Then, my 30s became trying to be responsible, to live a life, but also wrap up my life, because I was pretty sure that was it. Then, 10 years later again, someone said to me, 'You have the same life expectancy now as a normal person.' "
He wondered whether that meant he should try to discard the past. But he found he wasn't ready.
Instead, he transformed the JUNK dance studio - at 2040 Christian St., in the sanctuary of Shiloh Baptist Church - into a New York loft, with an oval bed and a half-dozen naked mannequins. The dancers, on the other hand, will be at least partially clothed; Shiloh's reverend banned nudity after JUNK's 2014 Fringe show. "Two guys did this steamy erotic duet in chocolate pudding," Sanders said.
Carried Away stops short of pudding. But it's a spectacle, featuring intensely acrobatic dancing, aerial silks, and gymnastic feats undertaken while hanging from a truss or balancing atop a treadmill.
A reporter visiting a rehearsal walked into a scene of two dancers simulating oral sex. It turned out to be among the tamer moments, leading in to an athletic orgy (involving dancers and mannequins) before a bedsheet was repurposed as shroud and an AIDS victim was carted offstage.
It's a party - a heartbreaking one, filled with lust, debauchery, shame, loss, and survivor guilt. So, at one point, in between the feats of acrobaterotica, the dancers do the hustle. (Sanders took the company to a nightclub in Trevose to learn the dance.)
Later, dancers don yellow rubber dish-washing gloves for an energetic number that's about safe sex, but also about the fear of contamination.
"My parents gave me a bottle of Lysol to spray the toilet after I used the bathroom," said Sanders, who grew up in Princeton. "There was just this living in terror of touching other people. I wasn't allowed to kiss my younger siblings."
He first tried to get tested for HIV in 1988. His doctor refused, telling him there was no treatment anyway, and people were getting blacklisted from insurance. Later, he tested positive, and came out to the world with an "HIV+" tattoo on his arm, posing naked on the cover of the Philadelphia City Paper.
His choreography tracks the progression of gay culture that grew up alongside HIV and AIDS: the hedonism of denial, the hope vested in pharmaceuticals, and - in a series of dance numbers on a treadmill and monkey bars - the rise of "the gym queen" as people with HIV regained their health through use of testosterone.
"Now, our latest issue is we have accelerated aging because of long-term HIV. That's something they just noticed, because we are aging. It's new ground."
Sanders is now part of a long-term-survivors support group, connecting with others who are also in the unwanted, pioneering position of being among the first to live 30 or more years with HIV.
They're doing so mostly out of the public eye, said Heshie Zinman, 65, of Center City, a longtime activist who helped organize a summit this summer of 100 long-term survivors.
"It's kind of been forgotten by mainstream culture," said Zinman, who was diagnosed in 1989. "People are living healthier, longer, so there's less conversation around AIDS and death and dying. HIV has become a chronic disease that is manageable."
That explains why you don't see much HIV art - for the same reasons there's not much art about hepatitis C, or diabetes.
But the trauma of AIDS remains: "It's kind of like living through a war and then recounting your experience of having lived through the war," Zinman said. "Both are valuable."
In this case, Sanders had to first educate his corps of six dancers, ages 21 to 30.
Matt Emig, 22, who graduated in May from the University of the Arts, portrays Sanders in the performance. Though the choreography is demanding, he thought the acting would be easy: He's a young gay man, just as Sanders was then.
But he had a lot to learn.
"So many people died, and so many of the voices were lost," Emig said. "It is hard to find a first-person account of someone who lived through it and is HIV positive, like Brian."
The body count is high in this performance, and, near the end, Emig is among a group of performers who are dancing themselves to death, falling one by one.
Sanders said that, in rehearsal, there was a moment of confusion. "One of the dancers said, 'Doesn't he die, too?' It's me, as a character. I said, 'No, I'm still here.' "
For ticket information: fringearts.com/event/carried-away/ or 215-413-1318.
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