APOLLO
About Apollo
Through biomythography, the intergenerational cast of Apollo incorporates dance, theater, and queer history to unearth a repository of missing histories.
Apollo explores a rite of passage that dives into the multifaceted mentor-mentee relationship and the ways art can bridge divides and bind communities. Queer people have been forging their own paths, birthing their own identities, and reshaping themselves, always.This honors queer legacies and confronts ageism, centering the dancers too often overlooked because of it.
The work draws inspiration from Greek mythology's Apollo (god of the sun, music, prophecy, and healing), Balanchine’s 1928 ballet Apollo, in addition to lived experience. Where Balanchine’s Apollo encountered three ageless Muses, our Apollo encounters three queer elders, each a past iteration of Apollo himself. Together, these dancers meet, compete, and find strength in their tensions as they try to understand each other and themselves.
Apollo has taken on many forms. And as his story unfolds, questions of community, queering the classics, HIV/AIDS and the Missing Generation, and the importance of legacy are centered.
In this work, we aim to explore: How does lived experience shape the body? Can the body itself be an archive? How do we reconcile the visible with the erased, the celebrated with the forgotten? Who is the hero here? What does a hero look like? How do we reckon the misfit, the mentor, and the mentee?
Pioneer Winter's Apollo, co-presented by Miami Light Project and set to premiere in April 2025 at Miami Theater Center, has also been awarded support from Creative Capital.
from our work-in-progress performance at miami theater center - december 2024 - photographed by passion ward
From our residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts - April 2024 - photographed by Peter Nieblas
Check out the 2023 Apollo study guide above! We will soon have an update that details how the work has evolved, but in the meantime here is a guide by Jeremy Stoller (PWC Dramaturg 2021-2024), featuring artist interviews, project timeline, behind-the-scenes details, and movement/writing prompts for anyone interested in digging deeper into our early Apollo process.
project Support
