In “Blood and Sweat,” David Gere expresses great frustration at the hollow, painstakingly neutral messaging of the uptown New York AIDS dance benefit Dancing for Life. Juxtaposed against a San Francisco street performance, Washington DC protest, and downtown New York AIDS dance benefit which all reckoned directly with the crushing impact of AIDS on the gay community and gay bodies, Dancing for Life clearly evaded the significance of AIDS to the disproportionately gay dance community. When compared with the downtown Dancing for Our Lives! title, the uptown benefit’s nebulous name denied its gay performers the personal stake in the benefit that they deserved in order to earn donations and sponsorships from large companies still rife with homophobia.
Gere’s critiques of Dancing for Life on these grounds are valid, as the other performances he documents feature far more meaningful physical reactions to the AIDS epidemic. However, outside the realm of performance studies and dance lies a crucial fact: through its pandering and moderation, Dancing for Life raised $1.4 million for AIDS relief—280 times as much as Dancing for Our Lives! Authentic, powerful art is still vital, particularly in crises like the AIDS epidemic. However, to so many of the men afflicted with AIDS and their partners, friends, parents, siblings, and children, the money raised in a corporate, relatively soulless benefit was life-changing.
To those whose lives were saved by these funds, it likely did not matter much that Nancy Reagan, the First Lady of a White House keen on ignoring AIDS, was the honorary chair. It likely did not matter much that “AIDS” was not once stated at the gala. It likely did not matter much that the benefit overlooked the unique impact of AIDS on the dance community and its large faction of gay men. In a very different way from its three counterparts praised by Gere, Dancing for Life generated something powerful—not the cultural/political impact of its downtown opposite, but life and hope for its beneficiaries. This assistance could not be achieved through an authentic depiction of AIDS’s relationship with the gay community. It required the empty yet broadly palatable rhetoric seen, generating valuable meaning and impact through intentionally subdued means.
For this reason, I analogize Dancing for Life to the 1985 Live Aid concert in London and Philadelphia to raise $125 million for famine relief in Ethiopia. Not unlike Dancing for Life, Live Aid was light on meaningful analysis of the crisis and the human condition, but choc full of uncontroversial platitudes. For humanities scholars, few thoughtful choices exist to fill pages of academic journals with praise. Instead, Live Aid has attracted scholarly criticism for its choice to depoliticize an indisputably political event.
Nonetheless, for the beneficiaries of both Dancing for Life and Live Aid, the awareness and dollars raised through performance devoid of meaning speak for themselves. Artistic freedom and meaning are worth a lot, but so is life. Saving lives and creating rich art that captures the human condition are both noble ventures warranting applause, not criticism for failing to perfectly accomplish both goals at once. Just as Dancing for our Lives! does not deserve condemnation for failing to raise enough money, Dancing for Life should not be attacked for its artistically hollow choices.
Works Cited
Bridgman, Timothy. “Don’t Mention the War: Live Aid Concert and UEFA EURO 2020 Finals as Examples of the Separation of Global Mega-events from Political Conflict.” Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 7–21.
Gere, David. “Blood and Sweat.” How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, pp. 39–89.