Activism in art

‘In eighth grade there was a ‘Future Day’ contest, which was a big deal at school. Everyone dressed up as a fireman or astronaut or whatever cliché dream kids have, and for some reason I thought it would be really bizarre and raise a few eyebrows if I came to school as ‘The Future of AIDS,” recalled Stephen Beaudoin, 23, founder of the Boston-based artistic AIDS activism group, Project ARIA.

‘I wore all black and I left the house just wearing black jeans and a black shirt,’ he continued. ‘I brought an eye pencil with me and when I got to school I scrawled the words ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ all over my head and all over my arms and I didn’t talk to anyone. People were totally weirded out by it. People were like ‘What is with this kid?”

A 2002 graduate of New England Conservatory of Music and a classical music writer for Bay Windows, Boston’s weekly gay and lesbian newspaper, Beaudoin’s flair for the dramatic and interest in activism played a major role in his founding Project ARIA (AIDS Response by Independent Artists), which educates and promotes AIDS awareness through creativity.

Recently, Beaudoin revisited the dramatic ‘Future Day’ scene from his youth in ARIA’s first production, Six Characters in Search of an Opera, an opera he wrote, produced and performed in.

‘I was trying to make a splash,’ Beaudoin said. ‘That isolated [Future Day] incident is very telling because I think, even then, I sort of had the flair for … raising eyebrows as I could around topical issues that people really didn’t want to have to deal with.’

The son of a minister and the youngest of four children, Beaudoin grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Independence, Mo., a suburb of Kansas City. When he was in sixth grade, he came out of the closet first as a bisexual and later as a homosexual.

‘[My parents] knew, there was no sort of avoiding it…’ Beaudoin remembered. ‘I did all sorts of outrageous things as a queer kid, like dressing up in towels and sheets and my mother would take pictures of me in these elaborate costumes … I’d put an undershirt around my head so that the part around your neck would be around my head and act like it was a mane of hair it was exquisite,’ he laughed.

Beaudoin said he was well aware of AIDS and HIV growing up, but his interaction with the illness was limited to the media and the bisexual father of a junior-high acquaintance who died of AIDS-related illnesses, the circumstances of which were very ‘hush-hush.’

After attending Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts in Kansas City, where he began performing as a singer and in musical theater, Beaudoin came to Boston to study voice at NEC in 1998. In 1999, he became friends with Neil, a young man infected with HIV.

His friendship with Neil made him feel like he ‘took a step closer to understanding what I could understand about HIV and AIDS. I had stopped feeling so disconnected from the whole thing,’ Beaudoin said. Soon after, Beaudoin began volunteering at the Boston Living Center, a place for people with HIV and AIDS to share meals and participate in social activities.

‘It was nice to reconnect with that sort of desire to connect with that community of people,’ Beaudoin said. ‘I feel like I’m contributing in some way.’

Beaudoin said his need to ‘reconnect’ helped spawn the idea for Project ARIA.

‘The main impetus behind putting [Project ARIA] together was to attempt to bridge or at least address – the huge gap between what we see on TV and what we know,’ he said. ‘Touching someone and talking to someone and hugging someone and being in the room with someone who is HIV-positive is completely different than hearing their story in some lecture or seeing them on TV in some made-for-TV movie or something like that.’

Beaudoin said he had always wanted to work with a composer and write a libretto for an opera, and in the spring of 2001, he began collaborating with ARIA’s original composer, who was later replaced by music director Martin Near.

While investigating funding for the production, Beaudoin came across the Boston chapter of the American Composer’s Forum, a national group that provides grants for composers. The group has a program called Community Partners, which places a composer in a community setting or matches them up ‘if not physically, at least conceptually by introducing a composer to a community where you wouldn’t normally think of new music being created,’ Beaudoin said. Some pairings have included health centers, nursing homes, schools and shelters for battered women.

Beaudoin decided to collaborate with the Fenway Community Health Center, a Boston clinic that provides medical and mental health services to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. He knew contacts at Fenway, having done some educational outreach at the clinic, and they responded warmly to the idea.

‘It was a great opportunity for us to be innovative in our prevention work,’ said Gail Beverley, director of HIV prevention and education at Fenway.

In early 2002, Project ARIA held auditions for the opera. Beaudoin knew most of the cast and later joined them after an actor dropped out of the production and director position, hiring Jeremy Johnson to stage direct.

During the initial rehearsal period, Beaudoin had cast members keep journals to record their reactions to rehearsals, explore themes of the issue and note HIV in the media. He later collected the journals, taking ideas from them to write the libretto.

‘From day one I had the idea that I wanted this to be a collaborative process,’ Beaudoin said. ‘I wanted everyone involved to get more educated and become more aware of the disease.’

For more than two and a half months, the cast did improvisation exercises to figure out the group dynamic and what themes they wanted to cover. Beaudoin made up technique as he went along because he felt it suited the subject matter.

‘I didn’t think it was appropriate to create this very easy-to-swallow, easy-to-put-together approach to building an opera, like, ‘this person will write the text, then the singers will learn their notes, and so on,” he said. ‘It didn’t make sense for the subject matter. We were covering something much more abstract than that.’

Beaudoin invited two HIV-positive patients from Fenway to join the cast for a rehearsal and asked black poetry group Blackout Boston, whose original works dealt with many of the same issues as the opera, to read before each performance.

‘It was an amazing experience for myself and for other actors to interact with these people as humans and talk to them and have the actors listen to what these people had to say and work with them,’ Beaudoin said.

The opera, which included both improvisational and orchestrated music, ranged from comedy to drama and also included a question and answer ‘talkback session’ after each performance. Highlights included the A-B-Cs of HIV and a simulated Jeopardy!-type game show revealing the myths and facts of HIV and AIDS.

‘Everyone thought that it was important that art is created about AIDS,’ said Beaudoin, reflecting. ‘… At the end of the day, it’s about reaching one person.’