Immersive FIGHT BACK Adds Additional Performance in June
Proceeds will be donated to The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.
An additional performance of Fight Back, the immersive theatrical experience created by David Wise, will take place in New York City on Monday, June 15 due to popular demand. All net proceeds will be donated to The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Centerwhere Fight Back takes place, in the actual room where the 1989 meeting happened. Over $2000 was raised and donated to The Center following the May presentations. A $19.89 donation is suggested for all participants.
Fight Back ambassadors include Amber Ruffin, Joel Kim Booster, Margaret Cho, Michael Urie, Peppermint, Rosie O’Donnell, Roxane Gay, Ryan O’Connell, and Wilson Cruz.
The premise of this theatrical experiment is simple: It’s the March 13, 1989 meeting of ACT UP New York, the passionate group taking direct action to fight AIDS. But – there are no actors and there’s no audience. When participants come to Fight Back, from the minute they arrive, they are a person attending the meeting.
Participants get a biographical profile of their persona and instructions for how to engage. Some (self-selected) people will also get details about specialized roles they’ll have at the meeting. Every persona will be an actual person who was at that meeting. When participants register for Fight Back, they will fill out a brief questionnaire so that they get matched with a persona that suits them.
The goal of Fight Back is to try to experience the amazing, complicated, life-changing emotions that the people at an ACT UP meeting in 1989 felt. For many ACT UPers, the weekly Monday night general meetings were central to their experience in ACT UP. Through these meetings, ACT UPers came to understand that their lives had worth — contrary to what they were being told by their families, their communities, and their government. During an unfathomably horrible time, they brought their anger, their shame, their defiance, their fear, their humor, their stubbornness, and their sexiness, and discovered that together they could use all of this to truly change the world and save their lives.
Fight Back explores whether there is something additional we can experience by attempting to inhabit the people who were actually there. Through trying to feel what they felt — by having our bodies enact their actions — can we come closer to experiencing what they experienced?
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