The Way We Live Now (2017) is a multimedia, performance-based collaborative project centered on the Susan Sontag short story “The Way We Live Now” (1987). While explicitly about AIDS and situated in an early moment of the epidemic, the story has also become timeless and impersonal in a way that makes it, actually, deeply universal. We may not all be (or think of ourselves as) directly affected by AIDS, but we have all experienced (or will) being sick ourselves or the sickness of someone close to us. Furthermore, the adaptation of this story during our current moment, situated as we are in the midst of the opioid epidemic, makes a connection between the AIDS epidemic and the opioid epidemic explicit: the number of people currently dying of opioid overdoses is roughly equivalent to the number of those who died in the late 1980s and early 1990s of AIDS.

But an epidemic does not end in these deaths. It is the way we live now, and we go on living. Our culture continues to struggle to find ways to process pain and trauma amongst the living while attempting to take political action to end the crisis we face. The AIDS epidemic provides a valuable lesson in demonstrating the horror and violence that accompanies the fear-driven stigmatization of people with diseases. We see this kind of stigma and invisibility attaching itself now to those who are both affected by opioid abuse and those living with chronic pain, and believe that this lesson is one that bears repeating, writing about, acting on, and performing.

The Way We Live Now (2017) therefore aims to invite and facilitate the public processing of what often remain private and painful experiences, in a participatory, audience-generated and multimedia format. Through a series of workshops set up for the general public as well as run for specifically invited community groups and stakeholders, we will use the model of Susan Sontag’s short story to ask: what does it mean to live within an epidemic? How do we continue living?

As a chronically ill person being treated with these medications and as someone who lived through the overdose of a loved one, we are inspired by Sontag and other AIDS activists. We recognize that any attempt such as this must be rooted in a willingness to openly engage with our lives, those of others affected, and with personal truths that feel risky, honest and necessary.

Maia Dolphin-Krute

www.ghostbodies.com

Jesse Erin Posner

www.jesseerin.com

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