About Fight Back/David Wise

The goal of Fight Back is to try to experience the amazing, complicated, life-changing emotions that the people at an ACT UP meeting in 1989 felt. For many ACT UPers, the weekly Monday night general meetings were central to their experience in ACT UP. Through these meetings, ACT UPers came to understand that their lives had worth — contrary to what they were being told by their families, their communities, and their government. During an unfathomably horrible time, they brought their anger, their shame, their defiance, their fear, their humor, their stubbornness, and their sexiness, and discovered that together they could use all of this to truly change the world and save their lives.

We can read about the meetings in many fascinating accounts, like Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show. We can listen to oral histories. We can watch some of the limited documentary footage that exists from ACT UP meetings. But Fight Back explores whether there is something additional we can experience by attempting to inhabit the people who were actually there. Through trying to feel what they felt — by having our bodies enact their actions — can we come closer to experiencing what they experienced? Fight Back uses some somewhat advanced theatrical techniques to accomplish this, but it makes those techniques accessible to everyone.

Fight Back is a proud recipient of a Support for Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The creator of Fight Back is David Wise, a multidisciplinary artist whose works blend performance art, immersive theater, and interactive experiences, exploring New York histories. A bit younger than the people who were involved with ACT UP in the late 1980s, David is inspired to explore their experience by the great writer and ACT UPer Vito Russo's famous Why We Fight speech, particularly when he said:

“AIDS is really a test of us, as a people. When future generations ask what we did in this crisis, we're going to have to tell them that we were out here today. And we have to leave the legacy to those generations of people who will come after us. Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes — when that day has come and gone, there'll be people alive on this earth — gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.”

David's first major project was Momma's Knishes, an interactive experience performed in people's kitchens. David transformed himself into his great-grandmother in Brooklyn 1938, and the host and their friends became his great-grandmother’s 12-year-old daughter and her friends. The piece, performed in kitchens across the country, unfolded based on the stories that David's grandmother told him about growing up in 1930s Brooklyn. The work was covered in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Time Out New York.

David followed that with Central Park Papers, an adventure experience in which participants use a set of clues to uncover a secret hidden in Central Park.

His most recent work is The Atlas Pursuit, an interactive digital novel in which the reader takes to the streets of New York City to follow in the footsteps of the actress Patricia Neal and a private detective to solve a mystery left by Neal’s famous husband, the writer Roald Dahl. The piece was featured in The New York Times.

After graduating with degrees in Theater Arts and English from the University of Pennsylvania, David worked as a dramaturg at the Wilma Theater and the Arden Theater Company, both in Philadelphia, and was commissioned to create immersive experiences, including The Mercury Letter, an interactive tour for the video game company Atari; Beyond Eros, an interactive piece for two people that appeared at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival; and an ensemble theatermaking initiative for actors called the Experiential Theater Project.

Originally from Danbury, Connecticut, David now lives in New York City.