Inside our queer bubbles in major cities, it’s easy to forget about ignorance, stigma, and shame. It’s easy to forget that, in general, people still have a shockingly low awareness of HIV and that the stigma surrounding it remains very real. Despite all the advances in HIV healthcare, that world-breaking secret, that shame that separates us from our bodies and the people we desire or love, has yet to go. But it’s not serving us. It never did. And it was never ours to carry in the first place.
Without the modern advancements in medication, 2025 would have been the year I could have expected to die from HIV/AIDS-related complications. That’s quite wild to think about. Instead, it’s the summer in which I premiere Tell Me: a new performance work telling the story of a female-presenting character, her friends, and her diagnosis. There are no words here. It’s purely physical. Using circus, dance, and theatre, my awesome collaborators and I get to take audiences on a journey toward acceptance, love, and shared human understanding on a new circus apparatus I’m very proud of designing.
Looking back, I can see how my training in circus gave me both the unique ability and the purpose to tell queer narratives like this through physical performance. I was always a bit of an alternative kid, and by 14, I was in my full-blown teen goth phase. My group of friends was approached by a circus company called Tepooka, which was doing outreach work with children and young people. By 15, I was spinning fire at school performances and riding around town on a unicycle.
At 17, I met my first friend who was living with HIV. His living conditions were not great. I come from a low socioeconomic background and grew up on several council estates in Scotland, so when I say they weren’t great, I don’t speak from privilege. The conditions surrounding this loving, encouraging, independent person are still saddening to think about, largely self-imposed, on reflection, the effects of depression, because he didn’t believe he was worth more. No one should believe they are worth less because of the social messaging around HIV. I am not immune to this either.
I trained at the National Centre for Circus Arts in London, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Circus Arts. I was diagnosed with HIV in my first year. I remember telling one friend, and the news spread like wildfire. It was 2014, and people started distancing themselves from me. In the circus, we work very closely together, so I could really feel this. At a party, someone shared a drink with me, and later I found out they had freaked out, thinking they were at risk of contracting it.
It very quickly pushed me into a position where I needed to take back control. I needed to talk about my diagnosis and learn about it openly, and I invited my year group to either come on this journey with me or essentially… to FO.
Three years later, we were rehearsing our final performance pieces (mine was a work on Islam and queerness, The Chosen Haram, which went on to tour internationally for two years, but that’s another story). I cut my hand open while rotating in the air five meters up. Blood sprayed from my wound and covered the floor of the entire studio. The same students who had been scared to work with me in the past, without a moment’s hesitation, grabbed me, patched me up, and helped me clear my blood from the floor.
This moment will stay with me forever. Together, we had overcome ignorance through shared experience, throughopenness, through knowledge- and it was a beautiful side effect of the journey we’d been on together.
I want this show to have some of that power. A chance to change the audience’s perceptions with something they weren’t expecting to encounter. To help them realise how it relates to them in this day and age. What it means- and what it doesn’t mean- to be living with HIV in 2025.
It is my belief that circus can be a tool for change, for understanding, for fostering debate and discussion, as well as a beautiful contemporary art form.
Tell Me is created by Sadiq Ali Company and produced by Turtle Key Arts, supported by Without Walls and commissioned by Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Inspirate, Certain Blacks and Stockton International Riverside Festival. The R&D for Tell Me was supported by Blueprint: Without Walls R&D Investment Fund. Tell Me was rehearsed and created with space provided by 101 Outdoor Arts, Imagineer and National Centre for Circus Arts. Charity partner – Positively UK. Tell Me is available for bookings in 2026, and (spoiler alert) is awaiting confirmation of funding to be extended for indoor theatre spaces premiering in January 2026.
You can see Tell Me this July 26 and 27 at the FREE Certain Blacks Ensemble Festival at Royal Docks: https://certainblacks.com/sadiq-ali-company-tell-me/24099/
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