Magic Theatre presents a limited engagement of DUGO, I Don’t Want Her To Go, a new performance piece walking through memories of a time before AIDS, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture. DUGO is a project by Magic’s lead director Sean San José in collaboration with Rachel Lastimosa, Patricia Barretto Ong, Joan Osato, Christopher Sauceda, and Tessa Nebrida. DUGO is sponsored by the SOMA Pilipinas Filipino Cultural Heritage District.

What memories do we have of the times before AIDS?

What ghosts did AIDS leave behind? What are their whispers?

AIDS struck (and continues to strike) cities in devastating ways, many irreparable. It is a disease that hits Queer, Black and Brown folx, and poor folx at horrific, disproportionate numbers and echoes. It is harmful to affected communities to continue to bury, hide, or forget this time, period, and people. For a culture that generally is well versed in “working through” dramas and traumas (from colonialism onward), this is also a culture of storytellers carrying history and memory in deep detail, with the possibility to illuminate the path moving more fully forward.

DUGO participants hope to gather, cull, and curate stories from communities that parallel their losses of culture, city, and sense of family, but also paint a picture of the world before AIDS. The performers hope the telling, recalling, recreation, re-interpretation, and re-contextualizing of these memories and stories can help communities more openly see themselves as children who grew out of the epidemic and listen to stories that speak to the fears and feelings of living through a pandemic today.

Dugo is Tagalog for blood — and through the river of blood in these stories DUGO follows: AIDS blood, Filipino blood, family blood, shed blood, and everlasting blood.  This project is about remembering the past, and a time before lost culture, lost cities, lost family, lost loved ones. DUGO is a chance for communities to assess the many losses over the past 30 years through the lens of Filipino families in San Francisco and specifically, the SOMA Pilipinas neighborhood. Join Magic Theatre and SOMA Pilipinas Filipino Cultural Heritage District in ceremony, conversation, and creation of an active testimonial and portal for remembering and re-imagining times before the AIDS epidemic for Filipinx families in San Francisco.

DUGO, I Don’t Want Her To Go plays Saturday, August 26, 2023, and Sunday, August 27, 2023, 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., in the Young Performers Theatre space, Southside Theater, Building D, third floor.