Works In Progress
When times are challenging, how can the arts help us find our way forward? Works In Progress is a podcast from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, a forward-looking interdisciplinary center for creativity and scholarship. The show's host, Sean Arenas, looks at current topics and trends through the lens of art, architecture and design, and explores the ideas and practices of UCLA’s faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Learn more at https://podcast.arts.ucla.edu.
Works In Progress
David Gere: Making dances in an epidemic
Artists took to the streets to protest government inaction in response to the AIDS crisis. What lessons can a new generation apply to COVID-19?
Works In Progress talks to David Gere, a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and the director of the UCLA Art and Global Health Center. His center sponsors the UCLA Sex Squad -- a theater troupe that teaches young people about sexual health through music, dance and spoken word -- and organized the recent photographic exhibition "Through Positive Eyes" at the Fowler Museum.
Gere moved to San Francisco in 1985 to be a dance critic, and he wrote about theatrical dances and the "choreography of activism" in response to the AIDS crisis in his 2004 book "How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS.”