Using touch and movement to survive AIDS

Isabelle Ginot

While in remission from cancer in the 1970s, American choreographer Anna Halprin began offering workshops open to people fighting long-term illnesses. During the height of the AIDS crises, she welcomed HIV-positive individuals into her studio, at a time when the disease was highly stigmatised. Dance researcher Isabelle Ginot, co-director of the French oral history project Mémoires du sida en danse (“Memories of AIDS in Dance”), comments on two archival videos of these dance workshops led by the choreographer, who died in 2021, in the 1980s. 

“How can the issue of vulnerability be addressed through dance? The work of American choreographer Anna Halprin with sick people – particularly those who were HIV-positive during the AIDS crisis – raises this question. I am not an expert on Halprin, but her approach ties in with the issues that move me with the company A.I.M.E. (Association d’Individus en Mouvements Engagés) and choreographer Julie Nioche, while also echoing the Mémoire du sida en danse¹ collection, which I collaborated on, which retraces the lives of dancers living with the virus in a French context, including their treatments, bereavements, and so on…

Vivre et danser avec le sida (“Living and dancing with AIDS” and Un Cailloux dans la chaussure (“A stone in the shoe”) are part of a corpus of very short video archives available online on the Danser la vie website, which doesn’t really provide any context for them. I chose these two quite similar excerpts which show clips of the workshops in a studio – whose location remains vague – where two groups of men aged 20-30 years old (most likely gay and HIV-positive) are dancing along with a few women. They are all non-professional dancers. There is no show, no piece, there are no trained bodies, and yet this pedagogical and therapeutic approach is not a ‘secondary practice.’ It is at the core of Halprin’s artistic practice. 

These videos convey not only a vision of dance, but also of life, of the world, of illness, death... Halprin’s thinking is rooted in a rather esoteric philosophy of life, which nevertheless has the advantage of not restricting people to their illness and placing them back in the context of life. One could say that she thus dissociates them from their illness, an approach that echoes all the struggles of AIDS activists, particularly during this period, before treatments were available.

“Halprin not only gets the participants to dance, but she also dances with them, as one of their peers”

However, the voice-over differs in the two excerpts, revealing interesting tensions. In Un Cailloux dans la chaussure, a man speaking in the first person explains how being HIV positive has transformed his life and his relationship with the world. And in Vivre et danser avec le sida, Halprin describes the dancers’ experience, substituting her words for those of the people concerned. In doing so, she draws parallels between the experience of HIV-positive people and her own experience of cancer, which raises issues – as a female cancer survivor, she seems to feel justified in speaking on their behalf – but which nevertheless has the effect of placing people within a much broader community than that of gay, HIV-positive men. In one excerpt, there is a vulnerable but separate voice, and in the other, a powerful voice that reintegrates HIV-positive people into the collective.

In both videos, I think it is important to note that Halprin not only gets the participants to dance, but she also dances with them, as one of their peers. I have also noticed that this gesture of “dancing with” is often central to the work of vulnerability in dance. Touching, supporting, training, and moving together as a group is at the heart of Halprin’s discourse, even though it is based on a highly individualistic paradigm.The importance of touch and contact is striking. In 1991, when the workshops were filmed – before combined antiretroviral therapies arrived in 1996 – people already knew that the virus was not transmissible through touch. In the United States, the epidemic and understanding of it arrived earlier than in France, but rumors and fears persisted. In this respect, these archives, which show a “protected space” where men who are clearly homosexual and HIV-positive can touch each other and share loving gestures, are very beautiful and very powerful. All the more so when we know that the AIDS epidemic shattered the dawn of sexual liberation and visibility of homosexual life, particularly that of men. These skin-to-skin embraces appear as an impulse to stay alive, in spite of impending death.”

An interview by Belinda Mathieu. 

Belinda Mathieu is a journalist and dance critic working for several publications (Télérama, Trois Couleurs, Sceneweb). She holds degrees in French literature (Université Paris-Sorbonne), journalism (ISCPA), and an MA from the dance department of Université Paris VIII. She is the Editor-in-Chief of CN D Magazine.

« Mémoires du sida en danse » collection
Directed by Laurent Sebilotte, in collaboration with Isabelle Ginot 
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« IN Vulnérables » conference by Isabelle Ginot
April 11th
at Palais de Tokyo
as a part of plan D CND x Palais de Tokyo 

Projection 
Dancing Life/Danser la vie by Anna Halprin, Baptiste Andrien and Florence CorinFrom April 15 to 18 
at Palais de Tokyo
as a part of plan D CND x Palais de Tokyo 

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Fonds Mercator, 2023
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Anna Halprin 
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