Tell Me, a new performance co-created by London Metropolitan University Professor Rishi Trikha, has received praise for raising awareness and challenging stigma around HIV.
Date: 16 February 2026
Premiering in Manchester and later transferring to The Place, London, the production has attracted strong critical praise for its sensitive approach to representing the experience of an HIV diagnosis. Told almost entirely without words, Tell Me uses contemporary dance and circus performance to open conversations about HIV and stigma.
Performed by Sadiq Ali, Jonah Russell and Phoebe Knight, the work follows a woman facing an HIV diagnosis, unfolding through movement, design and sound to explore internalised stigma, uncertainty and support, while creating space for audiences to reflect on how HIV is understood and represented in society.
The show was developed in consultation with HIV charities Positively UK and the Children’s HIV Association (CHIVA), by Sadiq Ali Company, to ensure it’s rooted in lived experience. Rishi is the project’s dramaturg and executive director of SAC Arts.
The production has been presented as part of MimeLondon 2026 and is set to run in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the Scottish government’s prestigious Made in Scotland showcase following a national tour.
Rishi Trikha, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at London Metropolitan University said: “For all the medical progress since the 1980s, there has never been a genuine collective reckoning with how society responded to HIV at the height of the crisis. Treatment advanced, but the prejudice and persecution of that period were never fully confronted. There were families who allowed their sons to die alone, and a culture that blamed the ill, yet little of that has been publicly processed. Without that reckoning, there is no reason to assume we would respond differently if another lethal disease were to disproportionately affect a marginalised group. Tell Me places the events of the 1980s alongside the present, in the hope that honest confrontation can shift perspectives and heal. We’re delighted it’s been so well received.”
