What memories do we have of the times before AIDS?

 What ghosts did AIDS leave behind? What are their whispers?

AIDS struck (and continues to strike) our City in devastating ways, many irreparable.  It is a disease that hit our Queer, Black and Brown folx, poor folx at horrific, disproportionate numbers and echoes. We can not continue to bury, hide, or forget this time, period, and people.  For a culture that generally is well versed in “working through” dramas and traumas (from colonialism onward), this is also a culture of storytellers carrying history, memory in deep detail, with the possibility to illuminate our path moving more fully forward.  

We hope to gather, cull, and curate stories from the community that parallel our loss of culture, City, and sense of family, but also paint a picture of our world before AIDS.  We hope the telling, recalling, recreation, reinterpretation, re-contextualizing, these memories and stories can help us more openly  see ourselves as children who grew out of the epidemic and listen to stories that speak to the fears and feelings of living through a pandemic today. 

Dugo is Tagalog for blood- and through the river of blood in these stories we will follow: AIDS blood, Filipino blood, family blood, shed blood, everlasting blood.  This project is  about remembering our past, and a time before lost culture, lost cities, lost family, lost loved ones.  It is a chance for us as a community to assess the many losses over the past 30 years through the lens of Filipino families in  this City and specifically, the SOMA Pilipinas neighborhood.

Join us in ceremony and conversation  as Sean San Jose introduces his 2 year project of creating an active testimonial and portal for remembering and reimagining times before the AIDS epidemic for Filipinx families in San Francisco.

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Sean San Jose has more than 25 years of experience in creating, developing, premiering, and producing new performance works. In that time, he has helped to lead the award-winning ensemble Campo Santo. Recently, he was named artistic director of San Francisco’s Magic Theatre.