felt that the issue there was violence in our society, and the attack of our spiritual dimension, because the mountain is the spiritual symbol in our landscape. It’s where people go to meditate, where people go to return to nature, where people go for the sense of returning to their roots, their nature. It’s the highest spot. It has this symbolic shape to it of yearning, of seeking, and that really got to me. I really got enraged over the sense that this was being taken from our community at a time when I felt this is what our search was. In the ’80s, our search was for spiritual meaning, for the purpose of our life. We were facing extinction, on every level. What was the meaning of our life? What did we have to live for? I felt that was the most crucial issue.
I didn’t start out by saying, “We’re going to dance about the killer on the mountain.” I just said, “What’s the myth in this community?” What are our myths to live by? I just put it out in the community that we were going to do an exploration of, a search for, living myths, and we were going to do it through movement and the environment. One hundred people came, and we worked for nine months and sure enough the mountain kept reappearing in everybody’s drawings. I said, “What is this saying to you?” And all of a sudden, “Phew,” big explosion. We are enraged, we’ve been disempowered, we have no channel to express our feeling. So that became the myth and the issue—the violence on our mountain.
That first time, the Tamalpa company did the dance for the community, using the resources we developed in the workshop. But we were still dancing in the theater. Then we went up to the mountain with 80 people and did various activities at the top—planted trees, read poetry, sang songs. We defied the killer and we walked down the mountain. Our purpose was to reclaim the mountain. A few days after the performance the killer was caught. The tip came from someone in the community. Now the community felt they were part of it.
Then Don Jose Mitsuwa, a Huichol Indian, came to me and said, “The healing of the mountain will not work unless you do it for five years.”
So we did a series for five years. Always with the company. I never particularly felt the performances worked. We would take a different theme every year. The big change came when it became a peace dance. The idea was that we would exemplify a peaceful way of being through the way we created the dance. And also, I said, “We can’t do a peace dance with a company. It’s got to be done with 100 people.” I just knew that it had to be a huge scale. And 100 people had to learn how to work together in nine days. That fast. Because there was urgency behind it.
What I required was that they find a conflict in their personal life, in their family life, in a community or in a relationship and that they find a way to resolve that peacefully, and find peace in themselves. After the dance they were required to make a specific application, in their life, and in the world. They were to join a group, or make a donation, or they had to do a peaceful act, in the world. It wasn’t enough to just dance it.
We took the dance to different places in the world and different groups would have different visions and different ideas. I’d pick up an idea from people who did it in Switzerland and share it with the people in Australia. And the people in Australia introduced the didgeridoo and I would bring that back here. So it was wonderful because by the time I’d bring the dance back home it was totally different because of the input I’d gotten from everywhere I’d been. Then that led to the idea of wanting to be able to all connect at the same time. So we began the Planetary Dance.
By 1988, we had 73 groups in 36 countries performing a score called “The Earth Run,” from Circle the Earth, every spring at the same time. That brought up for me the need and the importance of a planetary consciousness as another issue. That we needed to expand and find new ways that we could link together so that never again could we feel ourselves as nation against nation.
Then, this year, 1989, was perhaps the most challenging, the most rewarding performance which I’ve experienced in my whole life. This was dealing with the AIDS issue. It was the AIDS issue, but the myth is—how do we deal with death. This has been my personal issue since I had cancer in 1972. And this is where my personal research and my competence was put to test. Because for me, this dance was the ultimate test of dance. First of all, the alienation and fear around AIDS in this area is intense. People with AIDS are feeling totally isolated and discriminated against and fearful. I said, what we’re going to do is get people with HIV positive, ARC and AIDS, and I’m going to work with them for a year, which I have been doing. I’m working with a women’s group called Women with Wings, Women with AIDS. I’ve been working with the Steps Theater Company, People Challenging AIDS. We’ve been working with the men since last June (’88) and with the women for about six months. Separate, because the women originally were working with the men but they said that they had separate issues.
Then I said, “It’s time now to invite the community to come and dance with us. To join us. To support us.” Up until one week before the event, we only had 40 people. It was like people got cold feet. They’re afraid of getting AIDS. And even the people with AIDS weren’t registering—“Can I trust this process? I’m making myself totally visible.” I was just freaking out, they won’t do it. Only 40 people, I can’t believe this. So I did a massive telephoning. I just called everybody and all they needed was reassurance. Finally, by the last week we had about 35 people with HIV, ARC and AIDS dancing in the workshop with 70 people who didn’t have it, totalling over 100 people.
The issues were so real and so devastating, and so powerful. We were dealing with death as a way of living life fully now. And we were dancing with people who are in fact facing the issues of death. And people who were scared, “Will I get AIDS?” And the dance, which was Circle the Earth—this time called Dancing with Life on the Line, totally changed. You couldn’t recognize it as the same dance.
I asked each person with AIDS to come forward onto the space and call a support person that doesn’t have HIV or AIDS, that you’ve made friends with, call them out. Then I said, “Why did you call them, what are they to you?” Each person had a different issue, and they used it in the performance. For example, a young man called out, “Andy—I’ve fallen in love with you. Will you still love me with the AIDS virus?” One girl called Urike out and said, “Urike, are you still afraid of getting AIDS from me?” And Urike faced her and said, “I was at the beginning, I’m not now. Now I’m afraid that I don’t have any purpose in my life. And that I will die without any purpose.” Somebody else called someone out and said, “Will you be there for me if I get really sick?” and she answered, “I will love you, I will support you, I will not let you out of my sight!”
It was really touching. These were real issues that they were dealing with, put into performance. And at the end of the performance, people felt so empowered, so together. The people in the audience, the witnesses, would cheer them. The performers started the dance by running forward and shouting, “I want to live!” The witnesses were with them and so supportive—crying and laughing and clapping and cheering, tears just streaming from their eyes.
A parent came up to me saying, “We didn’t know our son had AIDS until the performance. It’s his way of telling us.”
And so the dance did work. It transformed. It brought people together, they overcame their fear and isolation. We did a restoration at the end of the dance. We invited any witness who had HIV, ARC or AIDS to come into the center and be restored. And anybody who’d lost a lover or a friend or a member of the family, to come and join in the circle, to be restored. And then anyone who chooses to support it. And gradually everybody joined.
STEPS Theater Company for People Challenging AIDS performs a triumphant dance of the immune system, San Francisco, 1988.
Photo by Margaretta Mitchell.
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