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What's on in London: Tell Me

Reimagining the HIV narrative.

Gaydar

02 Dec 2025 — 5 min read

The new production from Sadiq Ali Company is Tell Me - a circus and dance show reimagining the HIV narrative.

Through Chinese Pole, aerial artistry and physical theatre, Tell Me follows a woman navigating her HIV diagnosis; in a world still shaped by prejudice, silence and misunderstanding, the show considers her fears and dreams and the effect her diagnosis has on her relationships and her own sense of self.

Tour Dates

16th - 17th January 2026 The Lowry, Salford (World Premiere)
23rd - 24th January 2026 The Place, London
6th February 2026 Worthing Theatres
9th - 10th February Manipulate Festival, Edinburgh

Cast

Sadiq Ali
Phoebe Knight
Jonah Russell

Sadiq Ali on How To Date Men

For our podcast, How To Date Men, we caught up with Sadiq Ali for a behind-the-scenes look at Tell Me.

Listen to the episode

You've described Tell Me as a reimagining of the narrative associated with HIV. Why was this a show that you wanted to bring to the stage?

Throughout my history, since diagnosis, I've done a lot of work around HIV activism. I've worked with Terrence Higgins Trust and GMFA on a number of different campaigns.

I trained as a circus artist and I work in performance and theatre making.

I've always been waiting for the opportunity for those two worlds to collide - and that's now.

How did you discover that circus was something that you wanted to explore?

I got made redundant when I was 21 and didn't know what to do with myself one summer. I went for a three-month course in Introduction to Circus. I spent a summer learning to juggle, handstand, flip and climb ropes. It was fun and they recommended I audition for the school in London - I had no idea what I was doing.

Somehow, I just fell into this world of performing arts as a fully grown adult-ish and moved to London and 10 years later it is my career and my passion and I wouldn't choose anything else.

What I found in circus - that I didn't know I needed at that time - was an expressive language, a movement language, a physical form to tell stories and journeys and connect with people in a way that I don't always have the words to do.

With this production, Tell Me, you're bringing together the storytelling through circus and the activism that's been part of your life. How do you navigate that - do you have to keep some parts of yourself private and decide which parts of yourself are being presented on stage?

My first work was a show called The Chosen Haram and that was a scream into the void of my personal emotions and experience. It was a show about a gay Muslim coming out, his relationship with another man and his experience of the London chemsex underground party scene. And that one was me purely finding myself both as a human and as a performer.

It was a show I took to Edinburgh Fringe and then it's toured over eight different countries. We've been to Auckland and Sydney and Malta for Europride and all over Europe and it was a wonderful experience and sometimes a slightly cathartic experience and sometimes a traumatic experience.

With this show, Tell Me, I was diagnosed over a decade ago. I've done a lot of activism work about it. I was out from the start because very quickly I was undetectable. I really pushed for medication. I was part of the Proud study, which was PrEP's initial clinical trials. I've been surrounded by peers who are super open. So the stigma that I'm battling in this work, the journeys we're going on, the characters we're creating, while they come from personal experience, they're not always my lived experience.

I think that's a little bit healthier with this show so we can go into what internalised shame looks like. And it's not directly something I'm going through.

This is a show with three people on stage and I'm placing the diagnosis question and dealing with a diagnosis in the character of a female presenting lead. And for me, that's quite important at the moment because it's moving it away from just a gay male narrative. It gives her an opportunity to look into the past, to reflect on a story of a gay man who is diagnosed in around '80 to '84, and to physically have a conversation with the past to bring her into dealing with the shame, the internalised homophobia, the trauma to find self-acceptance through that reflection, to look at where we're actually now.

I'm really inspired by shows like Pose and It's a Sin, of course I am. I often find they still leave us in the past. So I want to make a work that brings us to now, but then also goes, what's next?

I'm a little bit scared of the world at the moment, as I think many of us are. And I see health cuts, budget cuts, and I see a world where zero transmissions is possible or we have a lack of access to health care and the future could look more like the past. And so that's a potentially scary little moment that we live in that also gives me a fire to make this work now.

Could you just talk a little bit more about circus as a vehicle for storytelling? From a simplistic point of view, people think of circus as being a form of entertainment that makes us laugh, but this seems a long way removed from that?

Traditional circus is a form of entertainment that makes us laugh? Yes. Cabaret is full of circus that makes us feel aroused or sexy. And I work in both of those realms and I love to be a little bit of a clown. And so there is humour in these shows.

However, I think that circus is quite a virtuosic performance in the sense that we watch the body do things that we don't quite understand how it's doing them. And often we watch it doing what looks like effortlessly. Physical prowess gives us the ability to tell stories of physical experience and emotion and journey in a way that looks past it.

Circus has a power within it that we don't often recognise because we think of it as the big top, because we think of it as the the troop of acrobats.

I love my circus heritage. However, I live in the contemporary circus world. I'm really inspired by dance. I'm really inspired by theatre. I'm really inspired by creating worlds and environments. And what excites me is how all of the lights and the costume and the music and the design and the world comes together to create another world - circus is my vehicle to do that.

What do hope that people feel when they come along to Tell Me?

I want them to cry. I want them to feel a little bit inside them that's been loved and held by us, a little bit of joy, a little bit of hope and a little bit more togetherness than we have at the moment.

I really enjoy if I get that through a single tear. That life-changing moment - we're after that.