APOLLO
What: World Premiere of Apollo by Pioneer Winter Collective
When: Fri, April 25 and Sat, April 26, 2025 at 8 pm
Where: Miami Theater Center - Mainstage
Apollo is a dance-theater work exploring intergenerational queer dynamics, memory, HIV/AIDS, and legacy. This biomythography uses dance-theater to delve into the intersection of personal history, cultural memory, and mythology. Apollo centers on legacy, connection, and features bodies and voices that are left out of the canon. It also confronts ageism and reimagines who gets to be seen and celebrated on-stage. The work we create expands what dance can be, so bodies survive, thrive, and are witnessed.
The Miami premiere of Apollo by Pioneer Winter Collective is commissioned and presented in partnership with Miami Light Project, along with co-presenter FUNDarte as part of Out (Loud) in the Tropics Performance Festival 2025.
Pioneer Winter Collective’s Apollo is made possible by a 2022 Creative Capital Award. Apollo is a 2024 National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project in partnership with Carolina Theatre of Durham and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). Apollo also received support from the National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund. For more information, visit www.npnweb.org.
Photo by Passion Ward.
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
Pioneer Winter Collective’s Apollo is made possible by a 2022 Creative Capital Award. Apollo is a 2024 National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project in partnership with Carolina Theatre of Durham and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). Apollo also received support from the National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund. For more information, visit www.npnweb.org.