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Legacy in Motion: Pioneer Winter Collective’s Apollo Centers Mentorship, Memory, and Movement
April 11, 2025
By Juan C. Sanchez
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In Apollo, the latest dance-theater work by Pioneer Winter Collective, mentorship is not a ladder — it’s a circle.
Co-commissioned by Miami Light Project, Carolina Theater of Durham and National Performance Network (NPN), Apollo reimagines the myth of the Greek god not as a solo figure ascending to greatness, but as a lineage of queer bodies passing down knowledge, care, and survival. Through movement, video, text, and sound, the piece becomes a living archive, honoring both the mentors who shaped us and the ones we never got to meet.
Apollo explores “mentorship as a dynamic exchange rather than a rigid hierarchy,” Winter says. The piece challenges the idea that older bodies are less vital, or that experience means you’ve peaked. It interrogates how knowledge is transmitted across generations — and what happens when that chain is interrupted. The loss of a generation of artists during the AIDS epidemic looms in the work, a silence the piece seeks to name and redress. By centering older performers and their lived experiences, the piece challenges ageism and pushes back against the dominant cultural narratives that define youth as potential and age as decline.
Choreographed by Pioneer Winter, Apollo features performances by Clarence Brooks, Frank Campisano, and Octavio Campos as the older Apollos, with Winter performing as a younger Apollo. The production includes original music by Diego Melgar and video by Dimitry Saïd Chamy. Olga Saretsky designed costumes, with lighting by Leonardo Urbina. Dramaturgy is by Karina Batchelor-Gomez, who shaped the emotional and thematic framework, with text by me, playwright Juan C. Sanchez, developed in collaboration with the performers.
Funded by a 2022 Creative Capital Award, the piece was originally conceived as a solo set in a leather bar in Hades, but the project evolved into an ensemble work during an early developmental residency. “We realized the story and themes would be better served if it wasn’t one character onstage,” says Winter. “And if it was more autobiographic.” That collaborative process became the heart of the piece, as the artists explored their personal stories through movement and storytelling.
During residencies at Miami Light Project, The Carolina Theatre of Durham, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Atlantic Center for the Arts, and The Movement Lab at Barnard College, performers shared memories, experiences, and reflections on mentorship, aging, and legacy. As playwright, I shaped these conversations into text for performance. The language in Apollo is drawn directly from the performers’ lived experiences, reflecting the piece’s commitment to honoring real lives rather than imposing a fictional narrative.
The piece blurs the lines between archive and present, memory and immediacy. Archival video of the older Apollos at various stages in their careers plays alongside their live performances, allowing them to be in dialogue with their past selves onstage. Media & Video Designer Dimitry Saïd Chamy created these visual elements that, combined with live feed operated by the performers, serve not simply as background, but as a second skin — echoing, reframing, and layering the movement.
Sound Designer Diego Melgar’s original score offers a similarly layered approach, creating a sonic environment that shifts between intimacy and grandeur, grounding the piece in emotional textures rather than narrative cues. The soundscape supports the performers as they move through the piece’s layered structure.
Though it shares a title with George Balanchine’s ballet blanc Apollo, Winter’s version is not an adaptation. It pushes against the assumptions embedded in that earlier work — particularly the emphasis on youth as a symbol of ascension, and the marginalization of the muses or mentors who guide the titular figure. “It’s a correcting of the lens,” Winter says. “There are assumptions in Balanchine’s version — that youth equals potential, that a guide can’t also be the center, that after ascension there’s nothing left. None of those things are true.” In this Apollo, the guides — each an iteration of Apollo — have their own stories. They’re not background. They’re the foundation. They are not anonymous muses in support of a singular hero; they have stories, scars, and substance.
This is a work that honors what it means to pass something on — not just steps or stories, but a way of being in the world. By inviting older queer artists to bring their full selves to the stage — not just as bodies, but as bearers of memory and meaning — Apollo offers a radical vision of mentorship as reciprocity, of legacy as something both fragile and urgent.
When asked why the piece centers older performers, Winter offers a simple, powerful answer: “I create for my future body.”
The development and presentation of Apollo is supported in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation; the National Performance Network (NPN); TD Charitable Foundation; South Arts and Miami Shores Community Alliance.
Pioneer Winter Collective’s Apollo is made possible by a 2022 Creative Capital Award. Apollo is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project in partnership with Carolina Theatre of Durham and NPN. This project is also supported by a National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). Apollo is co-presented with FUNDarte as part of Out (Loud) in the Tropics, in partnership with Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s Away From Home series.
Author
Juan C. Sanchez
Juan C. Sanchez is a Cuban-born Miami-based playwright dedicated to writing stories that explore the cultural diversity and social issues of Miami. He has written plays for a variety of platforms – from traditional theatre stages to immersive, site-specific performances set in historical motels, virtual stages, climate-change themed productions, and radio plays. Plays include the Miami Motel Stories series, Long Distance Affair, Versace Era, A Grey Divide, Paradise Motel, and others.
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