PORT ANGELES — Studio Bob will host on Thursday a World Aids Day event featuring the screening of the film “Night Sweats.”
The film screening and an educational panel will be presented at 7 p.m. at the studio at 118½ E. Front St.
This screening will be the in-person premier of the film. Tickets are $15; no person will be turned away for lack of funds. For tickets, and more information, see https://checkout.square.site/buy/353PB4XOQ 6SSHKNBV EI577H2.
“Night Sweats” is a poem originally written by one of Connecticut’s oldest living HIV+ activists, Rev. Alexander Garbera, in 1991, at the apex of AIDS-related deaths in the United States.
Under the artistic direction of composer Noah Michael Smith, the poem has been transformed into a multimedia landscape with an original score of music, Choreography and body art by Arien Wilkerson, and visual art by Noah Smith and Ike Smith.
The New Haven Pride Center, in collaboration with the New Haven Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS and the Guardian Health Association, commissioned “Night Sweats” in honor of the 32nd annual World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, 2020. The video might trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy, organizers warn, so viewer discretion is advised.
Presenters:
• Lisa Al-Hakim is the current Prevention Specialist and Harm Reduction Health center coordinator at Clallam County Health and Human Services – Public Health.
Before moving to the Olympic Peninsula, Al-Hakim was the director of operations at the Peoples Harm Reduction Alliance, based in Seattle for eight years and oversaw the expansion of HCV and HIV programs to multiple counties throughout the region.
Al-Hakim sits on the Washington state Syndemic planning group, addressing treatment and prevention for HIV, hepititis C, and sexually transmitted infections in the state, has lived with substance use experience and is as a certified medical assistant and phlebotomist.
• Arien Wilkerson believes in creating immersive experiences wherever the viewer enters, a completely altered world with altered rules, organizers said.
“My practice articulates epistemology, and ontology by the producing of large-scale performance installations where audiences, public mass or viewers are submerged within an immersive experience that populates multiple meanings, multiple engines and embody specific movement vocabularies, choreographic structures, and improvisations,” Wilkerson said.
Performances, online lectures and events have taken place at art galleries, institutions and incubator spaces throughout the East Coast.
Noah Smith is a queer composer, visual artist and performer, based in Port Angeles, who is director for Music Ministry at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and co-dean of the Peninsula Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
Smith conducts the peninsula queer xhoir, which is a singers’ group pursuing the activity of radical listening, sonic explorations and vocal improvisation, and has performed in Clown Car, The Erotic Art Show and the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts’ summer music festival.
Smith will perform the Poulenc organ concerto with the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra in the spring and, with local artist Sarah Tucker, will direct The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar next year.
• The Rev. Alexander R. Garbera, MA, MSC, DD, serves as co-chair for the New Haven Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS and is the first founding member of the New Haven Pride Center, co-founder of the Guardian Health Association, New Haven HIV Consumer Council, the CT AIDS Drug Assistance Program Community Advisory Board and member of numerous HIV/AIDS planning bodies. His initiatives include the first anal pap and awareness campaign in 1998.
