The 2019 MAP Fund has awarded FIU faculty member, Pioneer Winter, with a grant for his Birds of Paradise performance project.
Birds of Paradise is a new ensemble-driven performance work by Pioneer Winter Collective, enacted in the form of a tropical militia. “It interrogates agency, power, celebration, and rage through a lens that draws imagery from military and pride marches, drag pageantry, and radical forms of assemblage. Its development stretches across the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the 50th anniversary of the first pride parade to force a platform for typically unheard voices and experiences to be witnessed. Subsequently, this resists an abridged narrative, which memorializes efforts of young white men above all others. Birds of Paradise uses the memory of these events as embodied landmarks and impetus for a dance-theater work aiming to gain control over both the story and rhythm by which we march – or fly.”
Directed by choreographer Pioneer Winter, the Pioneer Winter Collective is a group of allied bodies, who democratize performance through the unexpected – freed through an ethos that is tied to sharing the human experience as wholly as possible.
The MAP Fund is presenting grants to 42 original, live performance projects. Totalling $1.3 million in direct support for development and production, the MAP fund recognizes exceptional artists grappling with the most difficult and joyous aspects of creating and living in the United States today. At a time of deep division, the grantees seek to interrogate marginalizing structures in the United States while asserting new possibilities for thriving interdependence.
