Live With It we all have HIV is a striking, cross-arts performance experience, tracking the still present, important issue of HIV/AIDS, and how it impacts those of us who live with HIV/AIDS bodily; and those of us who are profoundly affected by the virus in other ways.

BalletLab Artistic Director Phillip Adams and visual artist Andrew Hazewinkel have developed this powerful, life-affirming work with project participants of diverse age, sexual orientation and ethnicity; through a series of workshops held in regional and urban centres across Victoria.

Live With It is an intimate portrait of how we, as a broad community, have lived through and shaped Australia’s 30-year history with the virus. Live With It presents co-authored and individual stories across multiple expressive platforms. Choreography, written and spoken words, video and other visual media are used in interpreting the ideas expressed by the participants, which define their personal relationship with the virus. Live With It explores aspects of the everyday that structure these highly personal and sometimes fugitive spaces and introduces us to the identities inhabiting them.

Created in partnership with the Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men’s Health Centre, Live With It will be presented alongside the 20th International AIDS Conference. Live With It attempts to lift the stigma too often associated with HIV/AIDS, foregrounding a distinctly Australian perspective. This message is powerfully entwined with a commitment to the affirmation and wellbeing of its community of creators.

Live With It is a unique and timely journey into what HIV/AIDS means to all of us today, and a compelling, uncensored expression of shared human experience.

“We co-create HIV, each of us bringing a whole world to the moment in which those three letters are said.” — LIVE WITH IT Participant