Pioneer Winter Collective Flies High With Personal New Work

Pioneer Winter in a work-in-progress performance of “In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother.” (Photo by Passion Ward, courtesy of Pioneer Winter Collective)

It starts as a melancholy tale. A woman dies in her prime, and her impressionable young son—already prone to flights of fancy—imagines his mother’s pet African Grey parrot, which was gifted away, has taken off with her voice.

Would he ever find that dear sound again? His search was on, propelling him through regions of dance and poetry and song. And what seems like fable is in fact autobiography, now being told in a multi-art performance by South Florida dancer-choreographer-director Pioneer Winter alongside special members of his collective. 

“In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother,” the staging of an incident in Winter’s early life and the ripples of yearning it sent down the course of his artistic journey, comes to  the auditorium at Miami Beach Regional Library on Thursday, Oct. 9, presented by the City of Miami Beach OnStage! in partnership with O, Miami, a promoter of collaborative poetry projects.

Pioneer Winter and Andréa Labbée appear in the foreground with Lisa Nalven in the background in “In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother.” (Photo by Chantal Lawrie, courtesy Pioneer Winter Collective)

  “This is really a celebration of all types of mothering,” says Winter, who has reached the same age his mother was when she died at 37 and he was just nine years old. “The older I get, the more I realize that it’s been women who have had the biggest influence on my life, especially in dance.” That began with his mother, who introduced him to the magic of movement and music—the sounds of her favorite female singers flooding the house.

“I started taking dance because she attended weekly tap classes,” says Winter.  “I would stand on the top of her feet while she practiced the Shim Sham, a tap standard.”

Beyond personal memories. Winter has gone all the way to the eminent presence of dance trailblazer Isadora Duncan, not just incorporating her signature moves into this piece but feeling empowered enough to perform them himself, quite a rarity for a man.

“Isadora made sense to me here since she’s a mother of modern dance, deeply flawed but also a revolutionary without whom we wouldn’t be where we are,” explains Winter as he considers the base of unconditional love—familial and artistic—that nurtures his project. “I always talk about not being able to separate the wound from the gift, and this dance is honoring all the mothers that have given us gifts though leaving us with an absence or a wound.”

And the historical model proves irresistible. Rebelling against the strictures of ballet, barefoot and in loose, flowing tunics, Isadora would strike ancient Greek poses and sway and turn to-and-fro as if driven by currents of wind and ocean, a force of nature herself. Her movements alternately seemed to come from a concentration of spirit and its release. 

Despite a personal life unsettled by missteps and darkened by tragedy (car-related accidents cut short the lives of Isadora’s children and, thirteen years later in 1927, her own at 50), this San Francisco-born rebel forged a world-acclaimed career after which Western dance would never be the same.

Portrait of Pioneer Winter, holding a notebook and a photo of his mom with her African grey, for “In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother.” (Photo by Chantal Lawrie, courtesy Pioneer Winter Collective)

“Isadora was not all frolicking and skipping,” emphasizes Winter, correcting a wildflower-wreathed cliché of her dance image. “She put much deep feeling and maturity in her work—emotion before motion, she’d say—especially in her mother pieces, which for me were an aha! moment.”

That artistic connection spurred Winter—after a preliminary showing of “In the Belly … ” in April with improvised movement—to seek expert training in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Duncan scholar Andrea Mantell Seidel, a former colleague of his at Florida International University, who for years directed the Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble in Miami.

Winter tuned up his body through Duncan-style exercises—energy radiating from his solar plexus out to his limbs—at the dance barre. He learned to adopt the Tanagra poses, based on ancient Greek terracotta figurines that once inspired Isadora at the Louvre.  And he improvised on these foundations alongside Seidel, finding revelations whether in the charged intimacy of eye-contact or in the opening of his arms and chest as if to welcome the universe. 

In addition to setting Isadora’s angel-winged “Nocturne” (to Chopin) on Winter, Seidel also “committed ‘Mother’ really well in my bones,” says the artist about an iconic dance where Duncan responded to the loss of her children.  These choreographies are shown throughout “In the Belly … ”, albeit with movement adaptations and novel musical treatments by local composers Juraj Kojš and Laurah Merisier, her live vocals in the mix.

Back in Miami, Winter finessed his preparation with former Duncan Ensemble dancer Ivette Sotomayor. “Having this movement ingrained in her, she could tell me what was reading well and what wasn’t,” says Winter, who has nonetheless researched different versions of Duncan works filtered down to us through generations of interpreters.  

The absence of strict codification has allowed him freer agency in a creation he personalized taking on movement traditionally assigned to women. In this effort, he recognizes a significant antecedent in the Japanese modern-dance artist Satoru Shimazaki, who in the 1980s gained attention interpreting Duncan solos.

Pioneer Winter, Andréa Labbée, Lisa Nalven in a work-in-progress performance of “In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother.”

The power of an abiding trinity is also not lost on Winter, who will be interacting with three women in their sixties and beyond, the ardor of long lives adding dimension to the dance. There’s Andrea Labbée, a motivational speaker with a theater background; Gaile Holland, for decades a local ballet teacher whose former students include Winter; and Lisa Nalven, a veteran of notable modern dance companies, now a photographer impassioned by human diversity.

Sources of succor and disquiet—currents which Winter has ridden in life and art—each female elder is a maternal presence who offers complementary textures to the tapestry Winter has woven from threads of experience and sheer imagination. 

“For this I wrote different poems assigned to each one of the dancers,” says Winter. “While Gaile is dancing a solo to my mother‘s voice, I am doing the poetry, and my musical collaborator Laurah is singing to different parts of Gaile’s body, much like a vocalist invading the dancer’s personal space and treating her like a harmonica. Lisa is dancing the Godmother, a kind of a midwife crone who puts other people before herself, always beside them. I based her off my mom’s best friend. Then there’s the voice of the bird from all, with Andrea dancing to it.” With the addition of community-sourced storytelling, this brings forth a hybrid form of word and physical performance Winter calls a “somapoem.”

Fittingly, in one of his poems, the artist seizes upon a vivid artistic legacy—in harmony with the likes of Isadora—where the misplaced maternal voice has been present all along. He writes:

    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.

WHAT: Pioneer Winter Collective, “In the Belly of the Bird/Godmother”

WHERE: Miami Beach Regional Library, 227 22nd Street Miami Beach

WHEN: 4 p.m; 7 p.m (sold out but wait list available), Thursday Oct. 9

COST: Free, with RSVP

INFORMATION:  https://pioneerwinter.com/

A dress rehearsal can also be attended for free at the same location on Wednesday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m.

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