New York Times Critic’s pick by Brian Seibert - Resisting Oppression With Creativity, Two Ways. The Out-Front! Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday featured thrilling works by Angie Pittman (“Black Life Chord Changes”) and Kyle Marshall (“Joan”). ‘The end of the world and a martyred saint might sound bleak, but the program — part of Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out Front! Festival — was a thrilling combination of different approaches to resisting oppression through creativity’. (2025)
The Brooklyn Rail - Out-FRONT! Festival 2025 review. A double bill of Miranda Brown and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss plus Nattie Trogdon and Hollis Bartlett opens a week of LGBTQ+ and feminist voices. ‘Sitting beneath the arched dome and stained glass of Judson Church in Greenwich Village, I can’t help but consider the venue’s storied past, here, where the postmodern dance movement took root in the 1960s. Today, instead of church pews, seating for Out-FRONT! Fest. 2025 is a double row of folding chairs bordering the immaculate wood floor on three sides. Curated by the artist collective Pioneers Go East, the festival celebrates LGBTQ+ and feminist voices, a mission the earlier dance pioneers would surely applaud’.By Karen Hildebrand (2025)
Dance Magazine Festival Pick 2025! 8 Performances Heating Up Stages This January – Treading New Grounds by Courtney Escoyne (2025)
Fjord - Fighting Spirit. Curated by the artist collective Pioneers Go East, Out-FRONT! Fest, now in its third year, celebrates LGBTQ+ and feminist voices. Out-FRONT! has quite a discerning eye for new talent’. By Karen Hildebrand (2025)
TimeOut Festival Pick (2025)
The Observer interview and Out-FRONT! Festival featured article by Caedra Scott-Flaherty (2024)
TDF Festival Pick - Out-FRONT! Fest. (2024)
New York Times Critic’s Notebook by Siobhan Burke: “The interdisciplinary Out-FRONT! fills a gap in the dance calendar, showing incandescent works…” (2023)
Forbes interview with Pioneers Go East Collective by Risa Sarachan, contributor (2023)
The Brooklyn Rail interview with Pioneers Go East Collective (2023)
Hyperallergic listing Out-FRONT! Fest. (2023)
New York Times: 5 things to do this weekend! Our critics have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually. Features a photo from Lucky Star at The Exponential Festival - New York Times (2021)
The New Yorker “Goings On About Town” - Brian Seibert highlights Pioneers Go East Collective (2021)
Dance Enthusiast highlights Lucky Star as Top Performance Pick (2021)
Culturebot - “Lucky Star: superstar works like a time capsule. The film holds past, future, and present in an intimate, luscious spacetime loop. Fact and fiction, inseparable, blur and tease. Cut to disco ball, still swinging. Slow down and watch the air sparkle. Time swirls here, queerly, as fabulous histories and alien futurities shimmy together.” - Dot Armstrong - Culturebot (2021)
“New York artists, cowboys, you must go see Virgo Star at La MaMa while you can for a stunning 360 take on the LGBTQ+ experience through a cowboy lens. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get turned on.” - Sophie Saint Thomas (social media post in 2019 - author and writer Forbes Magazine)
Gothamist highlights Virgo Star in their “The Best Things To Do In NYC This Week (2019) "Queer up the Western at Virgo Star, which “explores and explodes” the myth of American cowboys and cowgirls. Created and performed by Pioneers Go East Collective, a collective of LGBTQ and feminist artists, the work of dance theater fuses storytelling, movement, and video, recreating classic Western tropes from a queer and satirical perspective." - Oriana Leckert - Gothamist (2019)
Dance Enthusiast highlights Virgo Star as Top Performance Pick (2019)
“Blacklight Burlesque, Queer Cowboys, Space-Age Late Night” - New York Magazine’s Bedford + Bowery highlights Virgo Star as a Performance Pick! (2019)
“Virgo Star explores the myth of the American cowboy, an exciting queer party, I enjoy the mood and the love they put into their shows.” - Lindsay Barenz - Maxamoo (2019)
“Pioneers Go East Collective harnesses a very successful experience that’s equal parts wondrous and strange. (CowboysCowgirls) is a strong gesture about collective queer yearning on a deeply microcosmic, personal level. Agosto’s personal histories are enrapturing, but his recorded stories feel most alive when in direct juxtaposition to the younger performers’ personal accounts of lust, love, dating, and intimacy. When the tension between young and old feels tightest, the performance shimmers.” - Culturebot (2018)
American Mill is “a true story and a wonderful rendition about the American Labor Movement and a woman who found herself at the forefront of the protest movement. The music (is) beautiful, touching” – Lindsay Barenz - Maxamoo (2017)
“Gemini/ Scorpio...with poignancy enhanced by spirited, if easy-going, presentation.” - Eva Yaa Asantewaa at InfiniteBody (2017)
Time Out New York Critics Pick! (Hildegard Vision -2015)
“S16 knocks down the walls between expressive genres and amalgamates music, video, and acting into an adrenalizing, dramatic experience. This poetic multi-media production is an intense, heavily atmospheric theater art installation from Pioneers Go East Collective.”- Backstage (2012) - Lisa Jo Sagolla