APOLLO
digital program
For an in depth look at Apollo, check out our study guide developed by Apollo dramaturg Karina Batchelor-Gómez; based on a 2023 version by Jeremy Stoller.
Photo by Passion Ward.
About Apollo
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.
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
Press
The Jitney - Pioneer Winter Collective’s ‘Apollo’ Drops a Mic on Legacy - April 2025
Artburst miami - Of Gods and Man: Pioneer Winter Collective finds brotherhood in ‘apollo’ - April 2025
too much love magazine - Becoming apollo: a conversation with pioneer winter - April 2025
Axios - Pioneer Winter Collective debuts ‘Apollo’ at Miami Theater Center - April 2025
Dance Magazine - Season Preview: 28 Must-See Shows in 2025 - September 2024
creation Support
Apollo, co-commissioned by Miami Light Project in partnership with Carolina Theatre of Durham, is a 2024 National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Project made possible with generous support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
This work also received a 2022 Creative Capital Award and support from Alternate ROOTS, whose belief in artists and communities rooted in justice has helped carry this project forward.
Apollo was shaped through a series of short, intensive residencies at Miami Light Project, Carolina Theatre of Durham, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Movement Lab at Barnard College, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, and The Ringling.
