Julie Sokolow makes YouTube documentary on artists and health care

A Crusader on What Ails Artists
by Ben Sisario, The New York Times, February 18, 2014

Healthcare for New York City's dance community

The William F. Ryan Community Health Network invites the dance community to register for services including primary and preventive care, routine dental, mental health, OB/GYN, and eye/vision services. Click here for its letter to the field.

Founded upon former congressman William F. Ryan's belief that "health care is a right, not a privilege," the William F. Ryan Community Health Network is a family of not-for-profit, federally qualified health centers, which delivers medical care to diverse and underserved communities. The William F. Ryan Community Health Network is: dedicated to its patients, culturally sensitive, community-oriented, and linguistically diverse. Its goal is to ensure that everyone receives the most comprehensive care possible. www.ryancenter.org

Contact:

Maria A. Lugo
Director of Operations
William F. Ryan Community Health Center
110 West 97 Street
N.Y. N.Y. 10025
212-316-8361 (Office)
212-932-8323 (Fax)
maria.lugo@ryancenter.org

The need for healthcare options in dance is demonstrated by recent Dance/NYC research. For instance, the Dance/NYC Junior Committee's Dance Workforce Census: Earnings Among Individuals, 21-35, shows that only 55% of full-time danceworkers, and 3.6% of part-time dance workers receive health insurance benefits.

The Ryan Community Health Network's new initiative is one response to this identified need and grows out of field discussions initiated by Charles Reinhart and including dance artists and managers, Dance/NYC, Dance/NYC Junior Committee's Healthcare Subcommittee, Career Transitions for Dancers, Elsie Management, The Field, Fractured Atlas, Harkness Center for Dance Injuries, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Live Arts, and Pentacle. For more on dancer health and to learn about Dance/USA's Taskforce on Dancer Health, see Dance/USA's resources.

Filmmaker France tells the history of ACT UP [UPDATE]

How To Survive A Plague
USA 2012; 110 min.
directed by David France
A Sundance Selects release

Peter Staley in action. Photo: William Lucas Walker

That's Peter Staley--former Wall Street bond trader; later, ACT UP's rock-star activist--who not only talked the eloquent talk but walked the kickass walk along with many comrades, putting the media, pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and politicians on notice that a community terrorized by AIDS was not going to sit quietly, simply hoping for attention and help. It was going to get in people's faces and demand the research and treatments it needed to survive.

David France's exhilarating and moving How to Survive A Plague relates the boisterous history of ACT UP--all the triumphs and missteps--with a personalizing focus on several of its leading activists. These include Staley and Mark Harrington as well as the late Bob Rafsky who died from AIDS complications in 1993. Rafsky will be remembered by most for his confrontation with presidential-hopeful Bill Clinton that led to the famous "I feel your pain" non-answer.

That scene, from a Clinton fundraiser, is highlighted in France's documentary along with many others that retell the progression of HIV/AIDS in New York's gay male community and that community's dramatic, intelligent responses. Although a sprinkling of women and people of color are shown or interviewed, France has concentrated on assembling footage and gathering oral history that reflect ACT UP as an initiative emerging from well-educated gay white men with an inherent sense of empowerment commensurate with their rage and compassion. Along the way, we do get to see and hear from female advocates and activists--media-savvy Ann Northrop, future journalist Garance Franke-Ruta and pharmaceutical chemist Iris Long, PhD, among a few others.

Essential history can easily be lost. In a climate of right-wing backlash, it can get twisted. New generations of social activists working on marriage equality, transgender rights, immigrant rights and many other progressive issues today need to learn about these shoulders upon which they stand. And we all need a blade of truth to disrupt the nasty fog of culture war that has arisen once again in our country.

[Update: Frank Bruni writes about this documentary in the March 17 New York Times--The Living After the Dying.]

See a screening of How to Survive A Plague at the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival at the following locations:

Saturday, March 24, 9pm
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Monday, March 26, 6pm
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53r Street (between 5th And 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

How to Survive A Plague Web site

How to Survive A Plague Facebook page

Information on New Directors/New Films

Return from exile: Sanchez illuminates World AIDS Day

Last night, I made my first trip to WNYC's Greene Space for a World AIDS Day event featuring performances by the pioneering poet Sonia Sanchez and acclaimed dancer-choreographer Ronald K. Brown as well as a conversation among Sanchez and health advocates. Greene Space's intimate setting created a special feeling of welcome quite appropriate to the artists' theme of acceptance, truthful dialogue and reconciliation within the Black family and within the larger family that is the Black community.

Warmly accompanied by jazz musicians Odean Pope (saxophone), Kenny Gates (piano) and Lee Smith (bass), Sanchez performed her award-winning Does Your House Have Lions?--a rhythmic conjure-work in book form. The poem deals with her gay brother's estrangement and struggles, his migration from the South to New York City where "a new geography created him," his political awakening and his passing, from AIDS, in 1981. Brown enhanced Sanchez's mesmerizing vocal performance with big, hungry, panther-ish moves. The radiance of speaker, dancer and musical trio reached across the short distance from artists to audience, hearts to hearts.

"How how how...how to return from exile?" Sanchez's poem asks. The evening's panel, moderated by pan-media journalist Esther Armah, explored this question as it relates to the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on people of African descent. With an increase in HIV infection among Black men who have sex with men, young Black men and Black women under 30, the African-American community simply cannot afford to avoid frank, uncensored talk about sexuality and health.

Panelists Dr. Monica Sweeney, MD (Assistant Commissioner for HIV/AIDS for the New York City Department of Health) and Phill Wilson (Founder and Executive Director, Black AIDS Institute) offered some measure of hope, pointing to a gradual decrease in stigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS, even within Black churches, and more openness to honest talk about sexual orientation, sexual behavior and methods of preventing infection.

Societal and psychological barriers to prevention and care still exist, but Armah's panelists emphasized how individuals and communities can empower and protect themselves. "We need to have these conversations in more robust ways," Wilson said. "You have the power to stop transmission of HIV. You deserve to protect yourself."

Sweeney noted, with great concern, one segment of the population--women over 50--who sometimes engage in unprotected sex "as if age is a vaccine" and HIV something that happens to other people. She offers HIV testing to people of all ages and believes that if the test were part of all routine care, it would be accepted with no shame. The NYC health department's female condom program has been expanded, she says, enabling women to guard their health without having to figure out ways to negotiate safety with their partners.

One audience member raised the question of sexual abuse and domestic violence in the community and how they complicate prevention and healthcare. The panelists noted that the Black family and community have tended to shroud these issues in silence, although--thanks to high-profile cases, the testimony of celebrities who have been victimized, and works of art such as Sapphire's novel Push and the extraordinary film, Precious, based on it--more attention and resources are being directed to these parallel problems.

"AIDS is the health crisis of our day, and what we do about it will be our legacy," Wilson said. While he acknowledged the Obama administration's efforts around needle exchange programs, the extension of the Ryan White Act and the recent lifting of the ban for HIV+ people traveling into the US, he noted that we still lack a comprehensive, national AIDS strategy and meaningful healthcare reform.

I commend WNYC for presenting this informative and imaginative program. To view a schedule of upcoming events at the Greene Space, click here.