As the number of young people in the United States diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is on the rise, three island artists are participating in a national campaign to stem the tide of this tenacious but mostly preventable epidemic.

Leah Mann and Ela Lamblin — the husband-and-wife team behind the performance art of Lelavision — and composer Jason Staczek are creating a live performance and video aimed at education and prevention. With funding coming from the Elton John AIDS Foundation and a Kickstarter campaign that will begin next week, the works are slated to premier on World AIDS Day in December. “It’s all so preventable,” Mann said, noting that unprotected sex continues to be the leading cause of HIV infection. “We have to be able to normalize these conversations and lessen the stigma for young people.”

Locally, King County has experienced a decrease in new youth (specified as ages 13 to 24) diagnoses, with 33 in 2013, down from 42 in 2012 and below 40 for the first time in over five years. But this is an anomaly compared to the national statistics.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 9,961 youth were diagnosed with HIV in the United States in 2013. More than 8,000 of those cases occurred in those aged 20 to 24 — the highest number of HIV diagnoses of any age group. At the end of 2012, it was estimated that 62,400 youth in this country were living with HIV, and over half of them were undiagnosed.

With the highest increases seen across the southern states, the Elton John AIDS Foundation chose to partner with the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta (CFGA) to fund youth-oriented intervention programs, some of which will have a national reach. That’s where Mann comes in.

In January, the CFGA dispersed some of the money it received from the Elton John foundation to a youth outreach organization called Moving in the Spirit — a program that integrates dance instruction with performance, leadership and mentoring opportunities for kids ages 3 through 18 in the Atlanta area. Mann co-founded the program over 20 years ago and is still involved as its artistic director emeritus.

“They basically commissioned a (performance) work as an intervention piece,” she said. “Something that could travel and speak directly to young people. So they called me.”

The challenge was a steep one, but Mann was undeterred.

Just one month into the project, however, her own nephew died of heart failure resulting from undiagnosed AIDS.

“It came as a total shock,” she said. “He was a young, gay man living in rural Virginia. But he hadn’t felt comfortable telling his doctors that or that he hadn’t been tested (for HIV/AIDS) recently. If he had, or if the doctors had recognized the classic symptoms of AIDS much sooner and treated him, he would still be alive.”

It was then that Mann’s commission became more of a mission.

Dubbing the project GTZ or Getting to Zero (new HIV diagnoses), she soon discovered how big the task ahead of her was.

When she first began working on the piece with the teens from Moving in the Spirit, she found that they were more concerned about getting Ebola than HIV, and they knew nothing of the initial outbreak in the early 1980s that began the epidemic. Most felt that AIDS was only a concern in Africa, she said, completely unaware of a death toll that topped nearly 600,000 Americans by 2005 and continues to climb. The CDC has reported that 13,712 people in the U.S. died of AIDS in 2012 and that factors such as low perception of risk, declining health education and inadequate HIV prevention education all play a significant role in the increase of new cases.

Lending a hand to Mann’s mission are both Staczek and Lamblin.

To provide a musical framework for her choreography for the performance piece, Mann brought in Staczek, a musician, composer and former engineer, who has played with artists such as Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and has created the musical scores for several films.

“Ela (Lamblin) and Leah have invited me to participate in many Lelavision projects,” he said in an email, adding that his involvement in Getting to Zero came out of discussions the trio had during rehearsals of their latest show.

Given that the funding for the GTZ project was coming from Elton John’s AIDS Foundation, Staczek’s initial idea was a re-write of John’s well known song “Candle in the Wind.” But copyright issues prevented them from using it, so Staczek set to work on an original.

“It turned out to be more difficult than I thought, because it was very hard to let go of the re-written lyrics to Candle,” he explained. “They (the words) were married to the melody of that song, so they didn’t really want to break out into a new one.”

But with the encouragement of a producer-friend in Los Angeles, Staczek started from scratch, and musicians in California recorded the new song. His second contribution was a hip-hop song with an Austin, Texas-based producer and rapper who goes by the name Click-Clack.

“I had seen him perform at SXSW (South-by-Southwest) several years ago,” he said. “I knew he would bring something special to the project, and he did. He was able to take ideas from the project and deliver them from a powerful, personal perspective.”

Lamblin, for his part, is creating an art-intervention video that will broaden the reach of GTZ and is to be streamed along with videos created by the CDC for its Let’s Stop HIV Together campaign. The video will include interviews Lamblin has conducted with a pediatric HIV specialist from Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, as well as young adults living with HIV both there and in Seattle.

The Moving in the Spirit performance will open on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, at Morehouse College in Atlanta — a private, all-male, historically black school — as young, gay or bisexual black males account for the highest percentage of new HIV diagnoses. From there, the show will go on tour through 2017.

Staczek has high hopes for the project beyond its commission.

“I hope it (the music) will have some life after the performances to help spread positive messages about the importance of protecting everyone’s sexual health,” he said.

Mann’s goals for her mission are far-reaching and clear as well.

“Kids aren’t using condoms; they aren’t taking care of themselves. Why not?” she said. “Ela’s video will be shown in biology classes at some of the colleges we’ve been working with, and it could be used across the country. Knowledge is power, so we need to get all of them the information they need and get rid of the stigmas and judgement.”

In addition to the Kickstarter campaign that will begin next week, the artists will perform two benefit concerts in November to help raise $10,000 more for the project.