As an extension of the ‘Exposé·e·s’ project, which brought together the Centre National de la Danse and the Palais de Tokyo in 2023, the CND initiated a collection of testimonies intended to look back on the first decades of AIDS, which had a profound impact on the choreographic community. This project has resulted in the recording of nineteen long interviews with people affected by the HIV epidemic, those close to sufferers, activists or witnesses in other ways to the realities of AIDS.
They discuss the impact that AIDS has had on working methods and professional networks in dance, the imagination and substance of works, artistic proposals and approaches, the endangerment or, on the contrary, the attention paid to the body, reflections on bodily practices, but also the weight of the absence of close friends or artists, the ostracism that affected many people, the intimate experience of a disease that affected not only those who were ill but also an entire era, a milieu, lifestyles, sexuality, risk-taking and creativity.
It is this oral archive, recorded between July 2023 and March 2024 and totalling nearly forty-five hours of discussions, that is made available here, accompanied by two texts written afterwards by each of the interviewers and project leaders, Laurent Sebillotte and Isabelle Ginot, and a chronology detailing the background to the interviews.