The AIDS epidemic nearly wiped out an entire generation of creative lights - writers, artists, musicians, actors and intellectuals - but it hit the dance community especially hard.
"Dancers We Lost: Honoring Performers Lost to HIV/AIDS," an important dance history exhibition now at the GLBT History Museum in the Castro, pays tribute to gay male dancers with connections to the Bay Area, all of whose lives and successful careers were cut short by AIDS, and whose premature deaths left a void.
The show, which utilizes an assortment of documents, snapshots, videos, home movies and kinetic photographs of the supremely athletic, graceful, caught-in-mid-air variety - about half of them publicity stills - looks at 27 dancers in their prime from the worlds of jazz, modern, tap and ballet. Ed Mock, a respected local teacher, modern dancer and choreographer, partial to dance-theater and elaborate costumes, one of which he wears in a picture here, is among them, as is Billy Wilson, who appeared in the London production of "West Side Story" and choreographed the musical "Bubbling Brown Sugar." His towering image is displayed in the museum's window. The emotionally expressive, lightning-quick virtuoso Edward "Eddie" Stierle, once a member of the Joffrey Ballet with a bright future ahead of him, is the youngest casualty; he perished at 23.
If the scale of this well-researched exhibit is modest, its aspirations and value are anything but. The virtue of shows like this one is that they can make the loss of creative vitality tangible and keenly felt. "There's an absence," observed curator and historian Glenne McElhinney during a recent interview. "They disappeared, and not enough is remembered about them, and though they may not have been forgotten by their students, fellow dancers and the audiences who saw them perform, they are lost to history. This show is a way of honoring them and bringing them back to life."
McElhinney, who specializes in what she calls "hidden histories," is the founder of Impact Stories, a California-based project that uses oral histories, documentary films and exhibits to make LGBT cultural history more widely available, especially to younger viewers.
Brief biographies of the dancers, printed in free brochures that can be picked up at the museum's reception desk, illustrate the truism that the talent and the creative impulse can blossom in unlikely places. K. Craig Innes, for example, a successful dancer on Broadway and in Hollywood, was a Redwood City native who first performed on the rotating stage at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos. Steve Merritt, the choreographer of Vegas-style acts for Sammy Davis, Jr. Liza Minnelli, and Beach Blanket Babylon (for several years), as well as the L.A. incarnation of the Chippendales show, hails from San Jose.
Some were major players in the entertainment industry, like Michael Peters, the wildly talented, award-winning choreographer behind Michael Jackson's groundbreaking "Thriller" and "West Side Story"-influenced Beat It music videos. He also shared a 1982 Tony Award with Michael Bennett ("A Chorus Line") for his work on the Broadway musical "Dreamgirls." He died at the age of 46. Prior to those gigs, Peters had danced with Talley Beatty, Fred Benjamin and Alvin Ailey, the latter a giant in the modern dance world who shepherded Judith Jamison, and choreographed "Revelations," a suite of rousing dances set to spirituals and blues that was an exhilarating experience for audiences lucky enough to see it.
But before he founded the largely African-American company that bears his name, Ailey performed in nightclubs in and around San Francisco's Western Addition and Fillmore for a few years in the early 1950s. It was during this period that he befriended and performed with Zack Thompson, a ballet-trained jazz dancer to whom the exhibition is dedicated. "I fell in love with Zack's story while researching the history of 330 Grove, a beloved [gay] community center in San Francisco [in the 1970s] that was demolished to make way for a parking lot," recalls McElhinney. "Zack had a dance studio on the second floor there in the late 1960s and was an extremely talented dancer. His story is of the struggle of being a black, gay dancer, and the triumph of dancing and teaching all over the world, only to tragically die of HIV/AIDS complications in 1996." McElhinney is currently producing a short film about him.
All of McElhinney's project materials will eventually go to the San Francisco Museum of Performance + Design, where they'll complement files assembled by MPD's gay founder, Russell Hartley, and Jeffrey Friedman's Oral Histories from HIV-positive dancers.
Runs through Aug. 7 at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF. For more information on the project, check out dancerswelost.org