Customer Reviews

How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS

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Reading Professor Gere's book reminds me so much of Eve Sedgwick. Like her minoritizing/universalizing schema, he invents an equation for defining AIDS performances. He then goes on to describe seven aspects of this artistic contributing. Like Professor Sedgwick, he uses huge words and it would benefit the reader to have a dictionary near him or her as they read. Also, the two academics are dedicated to acknowledging and celebrating the works of gay artists.

Unfortunately, like Sedgwick, you don't have to read beyond Gere's introductory chapters to get the point. The rest of the book is just lots of description. I highly doubt that professors will assign the whole book, rather than just the first part of it, to students. Only those who want to use the books for specific examples would benefit from reading the whole thing. Additionally, some of the details are gross (drinking shakes made of junk, spilling liquids meant to represents distasteful bodily fluids, etc.) The book covers cutting-edge dancers, and believe me, they succeed at shocking their audiences (or at least this reader).

Professor Gere is not only an academic describing performances after the fact, he was also a journalist who was covering AIDS and the dance community's response to it from the beginning. He must be exciting in the classroom given the multiple hats he wears as academic, journalist, and activist.

AIDS has wreaked havoc upon gay males and many professional dancers. Thus, of course, they would respond to the epidemic in their art. I am glad that a person in the academy has recorded and is responding to this urgent work and action.