Saenz raises AIDS awareness with senior thesis video production

In 1982, AIDS celebrated its first birthday. While scientists now believe that the disease had been present in humans throughout the Twentieth Century, it was not until 1982 that those four letters replaced such monikers as "gay cancer" and "GRID"—gay related immune deficiency—to become the all-inclusive acronym that is known across the world today. AIDS, as a term, does not exclude anyone from its deadly roll call—it could affect any one of us on any given day.

Why then, did our nation's president at the time, Ronald Reagan, refuse to acknowledge the term until five years later in 1987? Why was the Ray family, with its three hemophiliac HIV-positive sons run out of their Florida hometown after an arsonist torched their house? Why did AIDS victim and activist Ryan White have to fight just to be allowed into his high school? And why today, twenty years later, does the Reverend Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church (sponsors of the "godhatesfags.com" website) repeatedly turn up on the news marching with signs reading "AIDS cures fags?"

The answer is alarmingly simple: AIDS carries a stigma, even today.

It is this issue that Noelia Saenz '01 is investigating through her creative thesis entitled "Attitudes and Perspectives on the Stigma of AIDS" which will feature a performative installation that will open free to the public this Thursday in the Wilson Blackbox.

"I'm looking at how a performance—in this case a mixed-media installation—can affect attitudes and serve as an intervention for promoting AIDS awareness," Saenz said.

Satisfying requirements for both the Department of Psychology and the Program in Theater and Dance, Saenz's installation uses as its centerpiece a video consisting of interviews she has conducted over the past several months with HIV-positive patients telling their own personal stories about the challenges of living with HIV. The installation will also prove crucial to an ongoing study Saenz has been conducting on campus that measures each participant's own awareness about AIDS and HIV-related issues and attempts to uncover any stigmas attached to them.

"My previous independent work in the Psychology Department has looked at the therapeutic effects of theater, drama therapy, etc., but I wanted to do a study that tries to measure the extent that viewing a performance can affect people," Saenz explained.

"It's a study in which a group of students fill out a questionnaire two weeks before viewing the performance and then immediately after in order to look for an attitude change. These students then have the option to come in a third time to fill out the questionnaire so that I can measure whether the attitude change sustains over a period of time," she added.

Having worked every year of her Princeton life behind the scenes of the campus theater community, Saenz is well familiarized with the influential power of theater and performance. Two years ago, she directed George C. Wolfe's "The Colored Museum" at Theatre~Intime, a production that also sought to exploit and explode personal stigmas. With this project, however, Saenz admits that she is going out on a mostly uncharted limb.

"[The installation] stretches the bounds of theater in that it isn't a live performance, but a video consisting of interviews," she said.

But while the "performance" in this instance is not live, its message is still highly charged and personal. As Saenz commented, "Interviewing the clients [of the AIDS clinic] was one of the most interesting experiences I've ever had. There's a definite distinction between reading about HIV disclosure and HIV-related stigma and actually dealing with it face-to-face. AIDS is an issue that I take to heart and so I thought if anything, I could help spread awareness on this campus as well. I've found [this project] to be incredibly fulfilling and it makes me feel like my education is actually being put to some use," she added.

"Attitudes and Perspectives on the Stigma of AIDS" opens with a reception today at 4:30 p.m. in the Wilson Blackbox. The performances will run every half hour on the following dates and times: Thurs., 4:30-6:30 p.m.; Fri., 2:30-4:30 p.m.; Sat., 4:30-6:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30-4:30 p.m.