What Remains, What Becomes

April 28, 2025

BY PIONEER WINTER

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2025 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

My work begins with the body – a container for what is nearly lost.
Queer histories that vanish without mentors.
A mother’s voice lingering without a body.

Through movement, text, and performance, I explore how the body holds, remembers, and transforms what it inherits.

While in residency recently, I began to understand my own process differently – how what I inherit is not just something I hold, but something I must learn to release. This shift informs both Apollo and In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother, two distinct yet intertwined, current works that ask:

How do we carry what was given to us? And how do we let go?

Apollo is an intergenerational, devised dance-theatre work. It is a way into my own process of mentoring and being mentored.

Through biomythography, an intergenerational cast of queer dancers unearths missing histories, embodying a rite of passage that reveals how one may reconcile divisions. Queer people have always been birthing their own identities, reshaping themselves, forging their own paths.

Rebirth and rejection in the same breath.

Our Apollo does not encounter ageless muses. Instead, he meets three queer elders, each a past iteration of himself. They compete. They resist. They try to understand each other and themselves. At its core, Apollo confronts the ways legacy serves us and fails us. What do we take from those who came before us? What do we leave behind?

In performance, we conjure memory. We speak the names of the Apollos who lived and died from HIV/AIDS – the Missing Generation. Their names are written on the roadie trunk that represents one’s life’s work.

Patrick, Sam, David, Joey, Michael, Craig, Devon, Kristian, Alejandro, Aaron, Frank, Kaden, Alonzo, Tony, Carl, Alan, Kevin, Adam, Willy, Mack, Nathan, Matt, Guiseppe, Simon, Arthur, Raul, Thomas, Henry, Mitchell, Chase, Andrew, Eddie, Rey, Shane…

This list of past Apollos goes on and on.

If Apollo is about learning to hold, then Belly of the Bird/Godmother is about learning to let go.

In Belly of the Bird/Godmother, the memory is trapped. Held inside a body that cannot release it. A bird swallowing its own song, a voice locked behind a beak.

Where Apollo speaks the names aloud, Belly of the Bird traps the voice inside. Where one work is about carrying, the other is about release. But what happens when holding becomes a cage? When the weight of memory devours its vessel?

My mom died at the age of 37.
I am 37 now.

I wonder if the African grey parrot my dad gave away soon after she passed still carries her voice. A wonderful mimic, I have dreamed of finding that bird and that it remembers my mom’s voice. It could still be alive today. They live as long as most humans…so I ask, “What if?”

In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother is a poetic theatrical movement experience about what lingers after loss. It explores how a mother’s voice lives on, even when her body is gone.

An intergenerational cast of women over age 55 represents my mother’s present-day self. The work asks:

Who would she be today? Together, these women become a living archive, flesh-sourcing the mother I never got to see age, imagining who she might have become if she had lived, if she had grown into the years they now hold.

~~

It was not always like this.
Once, the voice lived in my mother.
It was full of heat, full of breath, full of weight.

It sang when it pleased.
It broke down when it had to.
It lived.

But a voice is fragile.
When her body failed her,
When the breath left but the words remained,
The bird was there.

It did not mean to steal the voice.
It did not mean to take it.

It only opened its beak and the voice, unanchored, rushed inside.

Maybe the bird thought it was saving her.
Maybe it thought it was something alive.

A reflex.
A gasp.
A thing caught between worlds.

Or a body afraid of emptiness.

Maybe it simply did not know how to let go.
Maybe my mother’s voice begged to stay.

~~

But the bird cannot eat.
Its belly is full of her.
It has forgotten the taste of seed and sky.

So it plucks its own feathers,
offering them in place of its song.

A trade.
A promise.
A sacrifice.

Out of fear.

Does it know its wings are thinning?
That flight is becoming impossible?
That soon, it will have nothing left to trade?

The bird fights.
Not to keep the voice,
but because it does not know what it is without it.

It has spent too long believing that holding is the same as keeping.

~~

She was delicate and bruised easily.
My mom – made of bone china,
with blue and green veins
that made her hands look like they were holding rivers.
Like you could follow that blue from her knuckles
straight to her heart.

She embraced me,
enveloping with arms and hair that wound tightly.

Slowly, she began to melt –
not like wax, but like honey warmed in the sun.
I didn’t see it coming.

Her form lost its bone and angles,
softened, but her hands laced themselves through my ribs,
fastening me to something that had been waiting.

Her lips barely held their form as she exhaled into me –

“You will last.”

I cannot untangle the wound from the gift.
The same thread runs through both.

I inherited movement from my mother.
It’s through her I’m guided –
not as an icon, but as a way of being.

And so, I make.

Everything I make is for my future body.
For the hands that will know how to carry.
For the bones that will settle into my shape.
For the voice that will no longer catch
when it speaks its own name.

I am stretching toward something that has not yet split open.
It is all waiting in the marrow,
bubbling beneath the skin,
causing my bones to hum
with the tension of what they’re becoming.

I am making for the moment my body stops holding itself like a clenched fist.
I am making for the moment my ribs and throat unlock.
For the moment I step inside my own skin –
and wear it like it was always mine.

And when I meet myself there,
at that stage,
there’s no altar.
No place to leave an offering.
Not even a feather.

Only the space
where my hands finally let go
from my own neck.

An imprint remains –
shallow pools where my own fingers once pressed,
where I once held myself small.

They are now filled,
with what my mom left behind.

~~

I no longer mistake holding for keeping. What was once trapped is no longer just an echo nor a burden nor a relic. It moves through me, unfinished but still changing, still becoming, still alive.

~~

Pioneer Winter is the Choreographer and Artistic Director of Pioneer Winter Collective in Miami, FL. To learn more, visit pioneerwinter.com.