ACT UP members Diane Woodward and Sheila Blattman, New York City, December 1988.
ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, is a diverse, non-partisan group united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. We protest and demonstrate; we meet with government and public health officials; we research and distribute the latest medical information; we are not silent.
ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS
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How to teach the history of one pandemic, while living through another? In April 2020 I sat on a Zoom call with 20 freshman theatre students and discussed Larry Kramer’s AIDS chronicle The Normal Heart, a play that I have taught almost every semester. Together we watched documentary footage of ACT UP and used our toolbox of performance theory to analyze street protest as a theatrical event. A few weeks later I sat on Zoom again, this time with a different class, watching and discussing Joe Goode’s Remembering the Pool at the Best Western, a choreographic contemplation of the enduring hauntings of memory and a eulogy for a friend who died of AIDS. Together we discussed the experiences of grief, mourning, and ghosts. I grieve that we didn’t, as a nation, internalize those lessons that the members of ACT UP worked so determinedly to impart to us. I have repeatedly mourned that loss through my pedagogy. I continue to move with the presence of ghosts.