The choreographer Pioneer Winter’s “Apollo” begins with a curtain call. Three men perform a luxuriant sequence of bows, their glittery white costumes complementing the gray and white in their hair.
They are at home in the applause. Earlier in their careers, these artists — Clarence Brooks, 65; Frank Campisano, 69; and Octavio Campos, 58 — performed with some of the world’s foremost dance groups. “I am Apollo,” each one declares into a microphone. Photos from the past, projected on a large screen, show them as young gods.
After a few minutes, Winter, 38, enters — an Apollo in training. As he dances with his elders, there are whispers of George Balanchine’s ballet “Apollo,” in which three female muses instruct a coltish sun god.
But while Winter’s “Apollo” is in some ways a queer revision of Balanchine’s, the guides in Winter’s work aren’t there just to assist. They are living archives, members of a dance generation devastated by AIDS. “I have survived things that have killed most,” Campisano says in an “Apollo” monologue. (Three of the work’s four cast members are H.I.V. positive.)
And even as they look back, these veteran Apollos — all real-life mentors to Winter — are still discovering themselves.
“I believe that potential isn’t only tied to youth,” Winter said in a video interview from Miami, where his company is based. “Emergence can happen at any age.”
Professional dance tends to promote a narrow view of the dancing body: young, lithe, virtuosic in a gymnastic way. One of the goals of the Pioneer Winter Collective, which will soon observe its 10th anniversary, is to invest in bodies that this definition excludes. Winter’s works have featured senior dancers, disabled artists, drag queens, a transgender actor, a bodybuilder, a basketball player.
“Every body is a dancing body,” Winter said.
Winter’s collective is small. It has no full-time dancers, and its performance of “Apollo” this month at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., is a rare appearance outside Florida. But the collective’s expansive, service-oriented mission makes it seem bigger than it is. In addition to performances, the collective has multiple development programs that offer financial support and mentorship to dance artists. Recovery in Motion, its movement workshop series for people in addiction recovery, has served hundreds of dancers and nondancers.
“Onstage, offstage, it’s really just about filling the world with dance,” Winter said, “and then seeing the ripple effects that creates.”
Jodee Nimerichter, the executive director of the American Dance Festival, admires Winter’s spirit of generosity. “Instead of, ‘I want to make work and have it seen,’ he’s ready to really listen to what the community’s needs are, and then figure out how to best fit that,” she said in a video interview. “He is committed to embracing humanity.”
Winter grew up in Miami. Pioneer Winter is his given name, not a stage name. He was raised Jehovah’s Witness, a religion that calls its full-time evangelists “pioneers.” Also, he said, “my parents were hippies.”
Some of his first dance memories are standing on his mother’s feet as she took tap classes, getting the rhythm into his body. He began training at the Edwin Holland School of Dance, and later studied at the Miami City Ballet School and the North Carolina School of the Arts.
But even as Winter began performing professionally while still in high school, he didn’t envision a dance career. “I think I hadn’t yet experienced dance in a way that made me feel like it could do enough for the world, if it was the only thing I was doing,” he said.
Academically gifted, he earned both an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in public health and epidemiology from Florida International University by the time he was 21. He began working as a grant writer and project director at a clinic that offered H.I.V. testing and counseling.
Winter, who had come out as queer in his late teens, said he was shocked by how much stigma remained around H.I.V. That inspired him to choreograph his first work, “Reaching the Surface” (2010), featuring dancers with the virus or those affected by it. (One performer tested positive during the making of the piece.)
Winter had an epiphany. “I realized art was not a decorative thing, but a way to make sense of the chaos of the world,” he said. “When I created dance, I could rehearse the future that I wanted to be in.” Ten years later, when Winter learned he was H.I.V. positive, he revisited conversations he’d had with the work’s cast, finding solace in their reflections.
After “Reaching the Surface,” Winter began choreographing more frequently. He built a repertory that now includes more than a dozen dances. The collective emerged organically, he said, as he connected with like-minded artists.
Campos, a frequent collaborator, worked with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass early in his career. Now a community organizer, he met Winter in 2013, and the two soon became close. In an interview, Campos credited Winter with helping him emerge from drug and alcohol addiction several years ago.
“He has become like my son, but also he has supported me at times when I’ve felt broken and insecure,” Campos said. “He constantly and naturally invests in others.”
From the collective’s earliest days, its work included community outreach, which Winter sees as directly connected to dance creation. Recovery in Motion, for example, grew out of a dance-theater piece about addiction by Andréa Labbée, a participant in one of the collective’s artist development programs. Struck by the positive response — many in the audience had been affected by addiction — Winter proposed a movement program for recovering addicts.
The idea made immediate sense to Campos. “I’ve seen how powerful dance can be as medicine,” he said. “If I hadn’t had the ballet barre — not the bar bar, where I drink — then I’d be dead now.” Since 2024, Campos and Labbée, have helped lead the workshop series, which returns to the Miami Theater Center in July.
Campos said the Recovery in Motion format is partly based on 12-step meetings. Each session begins with a discussion of how participants are feeling, held in the familiar circle of chairs. Then it progresses to simple movement exercises and, eventually, the composition of short dances.
The workshops have attracted a broad range of participants, including professional dancers, members of the Miccosukee Tribe and patients from local rehabilitation centers. “It’s this incredibly diverse group of people all working and laughing and crying together,” Campos said. “And then you look at what they’re making in the studio, and you think: This is the best theater I’ve seen all year.”
“Apollo,” too, considers the beauty that can emerge from suffering. The work is more somber than Winter’s original vision, a cheeky allegorical play. “I think we started off with the god Apollo in a leather bar in Hades,” Winter said.
The piece headed in a more ruminative, autobiographical direction as Winter had extended conversations with his Apollos. Though the final dance includes moments of winking humor, it also references the dancers’ experiences with ageism and the scars they bear from the AIDS epidemic.
“I think people hear ‘Apollo’ and think of an abstract ‘ballet blanc,’ like Balanchine’s ‘Apollo,’” Winter said — an austere, elegantly removed work, danced in white costumes. “But a ballet blanc tends to sublimate tension or sublimate conflict. We face that conflict head-on. We’re a ballet blanc that gets real flushed.”
It is both an exciting and worrisome time for the collective. The American Dance Festival is its largest stage yet, and Nimerichter, the festival’s executive director, hopes the engagement will lead to more and bigger opportunities for Winter. “I think he’s just touched the tip of his potential,” she said.
But it is also a complex political moment to be making work that is, as Winter described it, “queer, experimental and fluid.” Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts revoked the collective’s grant for “Apollo” — part of a sweeping wave of award terminations under the current administration.
Winter said losing the grant only spurred him on.
“Now I feel an extra urgency,” he said. “At a time like now there’s an obligation, almost, to share this work as broadly as possible.”
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