I interviewed Michael Vonn last week for PositiveLite. Typically you don’t get to know interview subjects all that well. You talk a little, sit a little and then the cameras start rolling (or not – this is the digital age after all) and afterwards you part ways. But due to a glitch that occurred that morning because our camera-man was nowhere to be found, I had a chance to talk with Vonn for some time. What an interesting woman she is!

I think the filmed interview we eventually did will be VERY interesting. Watch for it here on PositiveLite.

Vonn is with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. She was in Toronto to speak at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network Symposium on HIV, Law and Human Rights. Our interview was one in a series resulting from PositiveLite’s collaboration with the OHTN in filming these videos for our website and theirs. I’m not sure when this particular one will be aired, but in the interim, I wanted to write about Michael Vonn’s message.

The topic of her talk to the symposium was about the declining privacy of health records in the age of electronic information. In other words, the question is how secure is information that may be recorded in your electronic health records, and what is it being used for?  Now Vonn is no Luddite; she is quick to acknowledge that data sharing is not a bad thing; her issue is the extent to which the patient has control of the date. And she thinks that control is slipping away in BC, where she comes from, with similar trends being seen in Ontario and elsewhere.

Now I like to do my homework before any interview. On the internet I had come across a speech of hers at a Vaccine Safety conference in January 2011. In it she says “to no one’s surprise, economics is a major driver of the shift in patients’ rights. . . . The government of BC is devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to an unprecedented and possible unconstitutional consolidation of citizen data held by different ministries with an additional data grab of citizen information from private sector entities ranging from private medical laboratories to community-based counselling services.”

She’s feisty! I told her I see here as a radical; she said no.  We agreed to disagree

Anyway, it turned out that this same speech I’d found was a gold mine of quotes on issues near and dear to my heart. Let me quote, for instance what she says about treatment as prevention. Not sure what that’s about? Check out our previous entries on this topic, the most recent being here and here .

Not unexpectedly, Vonn like myself, is an opponent of treatment as prevention. She quotes Nguyen at al’s writing on BC’s treatment as prevention strategy known locally as “seek and treat” thus: “the theory is that since high viral load increases infectivity, if treatment can reduce the viral load of a sufficient number of patients, new HIV infections will be greatly reduced or even eliminated. While traditional rights language is used in describing the “seek and treat” program – which explicitly invokes the “right to treatment” , treatment per se is NOT the focus but rather treatment as de facto vaccination”

She quotes Cindy Patton, Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health as saying something similar “Although superficially cloaked in rights-resonant language, the treatment as prevention approach quickly slides from “vulnerable populations” to “at risk populations” to actuarial claims about the number of “infections” the program might avert, and at what dollar investment and savings, with little further consideration of the realities of living with HIV on the ground.” Vonn says "in this scenario, it is not only that patient's rights are being given incredibly little weight, but that it is also that the very nature of rights is being refined”.

Vonn and I chatted about this at length while waiting for the cameraman to arrive. I told her this is exactly the point I’ve made repeatedly in the past – that public health interests are trumping patients’ interests. Meanwhile proponents of treatment prevention – sadly they go virtually unchallenged - will say that the program is justified a) because infections are going down (that is true in BC) , and b) because there is no treatment without consent. But that latter argument falls apart when one realizes it's based on a false assumption, namely that a newly diagnosed person who knows nothing about HIV and is often in an emotionally fragile state is able to give “informed consent”.

Vonn had earlier stressed the importance of advocates within the HIV community – HIVers and ASO’s - raising concerns with issues like these where patients rights are placed low on the totem pole of decision making. I'm not sure that dilaogue is happening.

In any event, it was a great discussion we had. When the cameraman finally appeared and we made ourselves look pretty and sat down to talk before the camera, the words flowed naturally. We talked about both E-health records and the treatment as prevention issue. With a bit of liuck we'll be both pretty AND pretty interesting.

All photos courtesy of Wayne Bristow

I reviewed three shows here from Luminato last year, Toronto's premiere summer arts festival. I went rather gaga about them all.  So I was thrilled to be reviewing Luminato's 2011 flagship production One Thousand and One Nights. Word was that this was the biggest show Luminato had ever commissioned with a huge cast and creative crew, several years in the making from wunderkind creator/director Tim Supple.

The raw material for the show is from a source we are all at least vaguely familiar with – the Arabic fable of Shahrazad (sometimes adapted to Sheherazade), a spinner of stories told under the sentence of death to King Shahrayer. Maddened by the discovery of his wife’s orgies, the King believes all women are unfaithful and vows to marry a virgin every night and kill her in the morning . To prevent more slaughter, Shahrazad spins a web of tales night after night, leaving the King in suspense when morning comes, thus extending her life another day.

Let’s be clear here, the gender politics suck. There is more sexism, misogynist and other dated attitudes in this series of stories than you can shake a stick at. That shouldn’t get in the way of enjoying this piece, however – it’s a snapshot of a particular time and place which never existed anyway. But be warned; the incessant rapes, violent beatings, mutilation and subjection of women that this piece features may not sit well with all. It also goes without saying that this show is definitely NOT suitable for a younger audience.

Having said that, there is much here to admire, and Toronto’s Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre isn’t a bad place to do just that. The cavernous space has been adapted to include a large thrust stage jutting out well in to the audience, which brings a certain intimacy to this otherwise epic production. It’s a handsome-looking production too, full of colour and movement and ingenuity. The international cast of nineteen, plus a five-piece middle-eastern orchestra, doesn’t disappoint either. Dialogue flows seamlessly from English to French to Arabic. Three screens situated around the audience provide surtitles, although the arrangement needs improvement. For Part one – this show is in two parts - I couldn’t see the screens clearly enough to understand everything that was being said. And while we’re talking audience logistics, Luminato peeps, please don’t seat us on cramped, wooden chairs for over six hours at a time; my ass is still in recovery mode.

That running time of six-plus hours needs additional comment. It is split in to two halves of approximately three hour shows, each with an intermission. You can see one or both halves; it really doesn’t matter. I saw both shows, one after the other, and wasn’t bored, in fact this immersive experience brings home the truly epic nature of the show. Having said that, one questions whether we need to see six hours of this. There are twenty tales included here, many of which do not add to the production other than contributing to its length.

These are quibbles though. This is a show which Toronto and Luminato can be proud of and will likely do well – perhaps even better if it receives some tightening up before it travels to Chicago and Edinburgh later this year. My gripe would be perhaps that it needs a little more flourish – more dance perhaps, of which this show is light on, or some big theatrical middle-eastern moments, borrowed from the world of Broadway even, to make what is an incredibly earnest, highly competent production something that will become the talk of the town. For example, there are acts of magic featured in the story, but why not create real magic? Why not real flying instead of simulated? Or is it heresy to suggest “serious” theatre borrow from its populist cousins so blatantly.

Overall, this one rates a 3 out of 4.

I could talk about the topics that were hot at the conference - HIV and aging of course (the new black), criminalization, funding.  They all come immediately to mind - but instead I'm going to talk first about the people.

We use - I use- the term "HIV community" a LOT, on the assumption that everyone knows what  it means.  That's probably not the case so I'll explain: it’s a quite unique collection of people united by HIV. It’s people living with HIV, of course, and their caregivers. but also those who work in associations that support them - ASO's, NGO's - augmented at times by funders, researchers and those in health care. Defined thus, the Canadian HIV community is, I’d imagine, about 40,000 strong.

Many of us are very fond of each other. There is in fact very much love within our community. We are the huggiest bunch on the planet!

It’s odd, isn’t it, that something so odious as the virus, thirty years old this month, has spawned something so wonderful, a model for other groups, and something which in itself sustains us? Sadly, after all this time, it’s needed more than ever. But if perchance a cure was found, the sick were healed and the organizations that served them closed their doors for good, what would that feel like.

Part of me - perhaps MOST of me - would be devastated. Simply put, I would miss these people terribly.

I walk with giants, you know.

One such giant is the recipient of the CAS 25th anniversary Leadership Award.  His name is David Hoe (pictured above). There couldn’t be anybody more worthy. I’ll write more about him later. For now, let’s just say I filmed the awards ceremony, with interviews with David himself and CAS Executive Director Monique Doolittle-Romas, with a guest appearance by Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party. Watch for it shortly on PositiveLite. Also filmed at the conference were interviews with Walter Ewing, a 67-year-old HIV-positive marathon runner from Orillia and David Nelson, a likeable HIV-positive two-spirited activist in the aboriginal community in Edmonton, Alberta. Those interviews will also be up on the site shortly. The subjects are giants all.

But returning to the topic of community, one of the benefits of conferences like the one just passed is that all the warm and fuzzy feelings we get from these events remind us that, despite the inherent grimness of the epidemic, it can be a joy to do the work. And it is.

I’d like to think that PositiveLite contributes in some small way to that sense of community. The internet can do that, particularly with hard to reach populations or those who would prefer to be completely anonymous. Certainly when I presented at the conference – I was on a panel about social media use in HIV-land along with fellow-PositiveLite blogger Michael Burtch and Dale Smith from Capitol Xtra – I cited this as one of the benefits of sites like ours. And I really believe that.

Another thing that’s odd. For all this walking we do with giants, we never think of OURSELVES as giants, right?

In any event, there are thousands of giants out there. Many I’ve met, many I haven’t. There was a ballroom full of them this past week in Ottawa.

I never want to say goodbye to this work. Isn’t that terrible?

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.  I didn't like Tightrope.  Judging from the thinnest applause I've heard in months, nor did many in the capacity opening night audience for this world premiere event. 

The subject matter is interesting, for sure. I for one am fascinated by how the arts process the epidemic, good or bad, and how that attention changes over time. This one is a memorial to those fellow HIVers who lost the battle, a cry for remembrance and a commentary on our collective faulty memories.

While we sometimes fret that AIDS and its massive impact on the gay community in particular are ignored by the media, that isn’t always the case. Tightrope, for instance is the third requiem to the (AIDS) dead to  appear on Toronto stages this year. Jill Battson's Dark Star Requiem shone in Luminato’s 2010 program as did the immensely touching and brilliant Buio con Feroce from Harbourfront's impressive Worldstage season just passed. Both shows were reviewed favourably here. Tightrope is also an act of remembrance, a ritualized mourning for the dead. But its just not that impactful of a show, even though its talented creators and principal performers, 2boys.TV (Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard), from Montreal, try very hard to make it so.

First the good stuff.  This is a very earnest, high concept show with impressive ambitions.  There is a lot to delight the eye too. The gender bending principals are joined on stage by six local drag queens.  Mingling with the audience before the show proper starts (a nice touch), they are dressed entirely in black. After an announcer comments on what we are about to see, the drag queens are introduced with much fanfare as celebrity mourners – and boy, do they mourn.  It's a cheeky and likable concept, albeit damaging to the sombre mood the piece mostly evokes and sometimes plays with, sometimes not.  Indeed the drag queens are used well throughout the one hour and ten minutes show, framing the stage most effectively and acting like a deranged Greek chorus at times.  They make for some striking visual tableaux too.

Says Lawson, coupled with Pollard in real life “the local performers take on the role of professional mourners in the piece. It was very important for us to bring people from the local community in to the work. We want to foster intergenerational communication within the drag community” he adds. "It’s our responsibility to facilitate and encourage younger generations of queer performers That’s also a key platform of Buddies’ mandate which is a part of what makes the piece a natural fit for them.” Indeed.

So yes, I liked the drag, the use of which includes Lawson and Pollard too. I also liked the very intriguing audience participation. Some patrons waiting to enter the theatre had been asked if we would agree to come on stage and read something from an envelope during the show.  I begged off, saying I was reviewing the show and it just wouldn't work.  Partner Meirion also declined, citing shyness.  But the three individuals who did agree to go on stage and deliver readings, each one a personal memento of the AIDS epidemic, did really, really well. It was a wonderfully powerful theatrical device I’ve never seen before, and it worked.

But those moments of engagement also illustrated how much the production fell short of reaching its potential. Its mementos of a horrible time should have brought us to tears.  They did not, nor did anything else in this production. The emotional disconnect between the piece’s creators and the audience was in fact hugely apparent throughout, sitting like an elephant in the room.  The performers, however brilliantly staged, just did not connect, hence the tepid, polite applause at the show’s conclusion. No standing ovations here.

I could also talk about the unintelligible dialogue at times, the abrasive musical sound-scape and the less than overwhelming use of video.  But I won't.

Does this show have appeal for the HIV community?  I'd say maybe. ANY portrayal of the swathe cut by the epidemic shouldn't be ignored.  There is merit in the very act of it being put before us, and I for one respect that and am grateful. The show has in fact terrific potential on paper and with a less self indulgent, more approachable treatment that actually tries to CONNECT with its audience, it might score.

There is no scoring here, right now.  I hate to say that, because I applaud anyone brave enough to shine the spotlight on HIV in 2011. But this one’s not recommended  for any other than the curious.  Sorry, Buddies in Bad Times, I love you dearly - but not this show.

Tightrope

Previews Thurs May 26, Opens Fri May 27, Closes Sun June 5

Shows Tues - Sat, 8pm, Sun 2:30pm

Tickets PWYC - $33 (full price list available online)

Box Office 416-975-8555

Tickets available online at totix.ca

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

12 Alexander Street, Toronto ON CANADA

BUDDIESINBADTIMES.COM