The Lost and Found Platform curatorial team partnered with StoryCorps to record five 40-minute interviews on August 15, 2016, a blisteringly hot day, at Storycorps’s StoryBooth in Foley Square. The following five pairs interviewed each other: Muna Tseng and Nicky Paraiso, Arthur Avilés and Saúl Ulerio, Lesley Farlow and Jaime Shearn Coan, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Travis Chamberlain, and Lucy Sexton and Laurie Berg. The interviews were coordinated by Jaime Shearn Coan and facilitated by Carolina Escobar and Gautam Srikishan of StoryCorps. These recordings are archived at Danspace Project, StoryCorps, and the Library of Congress.

Each pairing was slightly different and afforded a unique opportunity for exchanges between dancers, makers, curators, archivists, and scholars; between and among time periods, cultures, generations, genders, and sexualities. While the Platform served as a common reference point, each conversation unfolded according to its travelers. The occasion of recording offered an opportunity for new connections and revelations between the paired participants. It offered as well the chance to document a handful of oral histories, a modest sampling of some of the intersections of dance and HIV/AIDS in New York.

—Jaime Shearn Coan
November 4, 2016

The following clip, excerpted from Muna Tseng and Nicky Paraiso’s recording, was generously edited by Gautam Srikishan.