Pioneer Winter
(FL)
2024
- Pioneer Winter (he/they) is a Miami-based choreographer and artistic director of Pioneer Winter Collective, an intergenerational and physically integrated dance-theater company, rooted in social practice and community, queer excellence, and beauty beyond the mainstream. Recognized in Dance Magazine's 25 to Watch and a Knight Arts Champion, Pioneer’s work democratizes performance in public spaces, museums and galleries, stage, and film. Selected commissions include Miami Theater Center, Karen Peterson & Dancers, Tigertail Productions, Jacksonville Dance Theatre, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bang On A Can! Productions, the Miami Light Project, Carolina Theatre of Durham, and O, Miami Poetry Festival.
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Pioneer’s work is supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Creative Capital, Alternate ROOTS, National Performance Network. Pioneer is also a proud alumnus of Maven Leadership Collective’s 2022 cohort. An extension of his creative practice, Pioneer has curated and directed ScreenDance Miami Festival since 2017, presented by Miami Light Project; Pioneer’s own films screen internationally. Pioneer’s choreography and writing have been published in Artists on Creative Administration (2024, The University of Akron Press and NCCAkron), Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice (2022, by Cara Hagan), and the quarterly journal Stance on Dance.
Apollo
Visiting Artist | November 1 – 11, 2024
Collaborators-in-Residence: Octavio Campos, Clarence Brooks, Frank Campisano [Performers], Juan C. Sanchez [Playwright], Diego Melgar [Composer/Sound Designer], Karina Batchelor [Dramaturg]
Miami-based Visiting Artist Pioneer Winter came to MANCC for the first time in November with the Pioneer Winter Collective (PWC). While at MANCC, the artists worked to further develop Winter’s latest project, Apollo, in preparation for its spring 2025 premiere.
Apollo is a dance-theater work exploring intergenerational queer dynamics, memory, HIV/AIDS, and legacy. Winter describes their dance project as a “biomythography” as it delves into the intersection of personal history, cultural memory, and mythology, using dance-theater as its foothold. For Winter and the Collective, art-making is not separate from community-making; all activities are braided in support of this mission to bring real bodies and lived experiences to the forefront.
During their residency, the Winter Collective participated in multiple Entrypoints engaging faculty and students from various departments across the University. Prior to arriving in Tallahassee, Winter had a zoom meeting with Professor Amy Dill, Specialized Faculty in the Classics who teaches a course on Greek and Roman Mythology, as well as Professor Paul Renfro, Associate Professor of History and an affiliate faculty and advisory board member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Renfro currently teaches the course “AIDS Ain’t Over: Histories of an Ongoing Epidemic”. While PWC was in residence, each professor came to a rehearsal to share knowledge in their area of expertise, answer questions, and share ideas about the developing work, Apollo.
Also, while in residence Winter met with Professor Chris Martin, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at FSU. The two discussed their research and specifically focused on Martin’s concentration of the cognitive effects of aging on long term memory, an important element of Winter’s research for this project.
Winter invited School of Dance students from Professor Farai Malianga’s Music and Choreography class into a rehearsal so they could observe the way composer/sound designer, Diego Melgar, worked alongside the performers.
During the residency, a public Work-in-Progress Showing was held in the Black Box Theatre. Following the performance, Winter hosted a Q&A session where students, faculty, and community members offered personal observations and asked questions of the performers and collaborators.
Pioneer Winter’s Apollo, co-presented by Miami Light Project, is set to premiere in April 2025 at Miami Theater Center. For more information on Apollo, visit the project page.