It’s been going on for more than forty years: Madonna’s shows leave no room for improvisation. The carefully timed roadmap is the same at every concert, everywhere in the world. So that the spectators of the four shows Parisians of the 65-year-old singer, on November 12, 13, 19 and 20 at the Accor Arena, will undoubtedly find themselves facing a particularly commented table (a segment of the show, in the jargon) of the Celebration tour, which has begun on October 14 at the O2 Arena, London.
When performing the song Live to tell, from the album True Blue, released in 1986, Madonna will sit aboard a pod which will move her through the air. Eight giant screens of around fifteen meters will then take place one after the other. On the first, a portrait of Martin Burgoyne, his roommate in the 1980s in New York. On the next, that of Christopher Flynn, his former dance teacher. And then the artist Keith Haring, of whom she was close, and others (the filmmaker Howard Brookner, the actress Cookie Mueller, the photographer Herb Ritts…).
They were all close to him. All were killed by AIDS. And she accompanied them all until their death, often paying their medical expenses, visiting the death halls of New York hospitals, raising funds… So many actions that made her famous, with the actress Liz Taylor, the most committed to this cause. The portraits of his friends will give way to several hundred others, anonymous, also dead of AIDS.
250,000 subscribers for the online memorial
These images come from an Instagram account, The AIDS Memorial, an online memorial, with two hundred and fifty thousand subscribers. Internet users send portraits of a missing lover, friend, father, brother or son – the beginnings of the epidemic, in the early 1980s, mainly concerned homosexual men – which they accompany with a few words. It is about lives cut short, the helpless anger of loved ones, days that do not pass without a thought for the deceased.
Behind this initiative, only one man: Stuart, Scottish, who wants to remain vague about his complete identity, his age and his background, in order, he says, to “do not pull the blanket [lui] ». By phone, he says he launched the Instagram account in 2017 : “In my life, AIDS had always played the role of a bogeyman. I had to confront it. I posted pictures of people who died. Internet users encouraged me, told me about their loved ones. I invited them to imitate me. » Since then, The AIDS Memorial has published thousands of profiles.
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