THE BODY POPULAR: I, OF COURSE, WAS LIVID

Sunday, December 4th at 2pm ET, 2022 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Theodore Kerr alongside ISSUE Project Room, Housing Works, and What Would an HIV Doula Do?, present I, OF COURSE, WAS LIVID. The performance features testimony that women living with HIV provided the CDC in 1992 as part of the activism done to pressure the US government to create a more inclusive definition of AIDS.

I, OF COURSE, WAS LIVID, is based on a federal hearing transcript documented by activist Nancy MacNeil and archived in The Judy Sisneros / ACT UP LA papers at the ONE Archives. The transcript was edited into a performance text by Elizabeth Koke and Theodore (ted) Kerr for the community group What Would an HIV Doula Do?

Audiences will hear the words of Mary Lucey, Wendy Alexis Modesty, and other women battling HIV who demanded the CDC update the then exclusionary definition of AIDS, which did not account for the symptoms being experienced by women. Cast to be announced includes artists and activists currently responding to the ongoing AIDS crisis.

What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis. We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition. We understand HIV as a series of transitions that begins long before being tested or getting a diagnosis, and continues after treatment. We know that since no one gets HIV alone, no one should have to deal with HIV alone. We doula ourselves, each other, institutions and culture.

This program is curated by Theodore (ted) Kerr as part of THE BODY POPULAR, his curated series of gatherings and broadcasts for ISSUE Project Room that looks at the ways ideas and information circulate within a period of massive social change. THE BODY POPULAR is a riff on the phrase, “The Body Politic,” a notion that groups of people together have power. Throughout the broader series, audiences, artists, and other collaborators are invited to consider the limits, possibilities, and responsibilities of the “popular.”

Masks are required in the lobby, public areas of Actors Fund, and in the theater/performance space. ISSUE will have masks available on site for you if needed.

Cast:
VOICE OF THE PRESENT - Valerie Reyes-Jimenez
NANCY MACNEIL- Joanie Drago
WENDI ALEXIS MODESTE - Elenor Kipping
MARY LUCEY - Elizabeth Koke
KERI DURAN/CHORUS: Kamala Rose

Elizabeth Koke is a writer, performer, and organizer from NYC. She has participated in readings and performances at Dixon Place, Wild Project, Brooklyn Museum, Joe’s Pub, and other institutions, backyards, and dive bars. She is a graduate of the William Esper Studio and has an MA in Performance Studies from NYU where she studied with Karen Finley. She is currently Creative Director for Housing Works and lives in the Lower East Side with her partner Gavin, and her rescue dog, Onyx.

Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer, organizer, and artist. With Alexandra Juhasz, he is co-author of the book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Cultural Times of AIDS (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Kerr curated the 2021 touring exhibition AIDS, Poster, and Stories of Public Health: A People’s Pandemic for the US’s National Libraries of Medicine. In 2020, he worked with the New York City AIDS Memorial as a creative consultant on HEAR ME, an audio installation at the memorial, that resulted in A Time To Listen, a multi part online conversation series. In 2016 / 2017 Kerr performed 10 interviews for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. In 2019, Kerr was the editor of an issue of On Curating entitled, What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill A Museum. Kerr is a founding member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective. Their 2019 / 2020 exhibition, which Kerr co-curated, Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives and Activism was on view in LA and New York, and is now online.The collective’s work has been featured in The Body, Art in America and POZ magazine.