It’s been an interesting experience performing as part of HIV Voices, creating a piece but only performing it for an evening then having weeks and months in between performing it again.

Keeping going. An event like HIV Voices, it hasn’t exploded, like the HIV being talked about when I was younger, that surrounded Freddy Mercury’s death, it has been gentle…supportive, educational. It has shown the reality of lives, our lives and the truth of what we don’t talk about. It has just been keeping going over the last year.

As a performer, I’ve loved it. My not preparing for repeated nights of performances, I’ve picked my piece up and put it down again, hardly rehearsed…its just…been there. Putting it to voice over has helped too – no lines to learn.  Just creating and re-creating my dance. Letting it change in the new space, from town halls, to theatres to bookshops basements…letting it change to the audience. Without me doing a thing, it has been keeping going, living at its own pace and growing.

It’s so important, this togetherness that HIV Voices has created. To hear the voices of people who are living with HIV. At our last event at the King’s Head Theatre in London, we had as part of our theatre performance evening:

Greg Owen with his piece titled “Learning to Love”

“I will be talking about fear, stigma, learning and love. Love and fear are two of the greatest fuels of the human condition. Identifying when fear and the potential to love are present enables us to learn. Learning is what feeds love and starves fear. Stigma starts to wither when there is more love in the mix than fear. I dissect and present this revelation using a recent life story”