Dance Like Your Life Depends On It is a moderated conversation with the Arsht Center's artist in residence, Pioneer Winter, and an invited panel of dance artists who will reflect on memory, mortality, urgency and intimacy in the time of pandemic. World AIDS Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and mourning those who've been lost guides this panel's exploration of the dancing body and radical survival.  

The Dance Like Your Life Depends On It panel will include choreographers and dancers from different walks of life: Frank Campisano, Octavio Campos, Gabri Christa, Leonard Cruz, Keith Hennessy and Ishmael Houston-Jones.  

Pioneer Winter is the Arsht Center's artist in residence, and has been commissioned to create a new work titled Birds of Paradise. Directed by Winter, Birds of Paradise is a dance-theater piece enacted as a “tropical militia” of queer-identifying artists. Motivated by the forced anonymity of queer resistance, it rejects an abridged gay history that memorializes efforts to some and erases others. Birds of Paradise seeks a new mythology to gain control over the story and rhythm by which we march or fly. Birds of Paradise premieres at the Arsht Center September 2021. Birds of Paradise is made possible thanks to the generous support of Knight Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts and MAP Fund.