Johnny Blazes

Pluto Return will collaborate with local artists and dancers to investigate themes of “rewilding” in their evening-length show in May 2025. Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration that aims to restore natural processes and return land to a resilient ecosystem – lands as they would have been before humans ever intervened.The concept of “Rewilding” offers us a prism through which to explore what it means to be dancers entering middle age who are becoming the best athletes & artists we’ve ever been, but in the wilderness of bodies that we’ve never known. What have we been forced to cultivate - our hairstyles, our mannerisms, ways of presenting our “professional” selves, of interacting with power – and what would happen if we allowed ourselves to be unkempt, unmanicured, unshorn? What does it mean to rewild ourselves as we rewild the land, and all of the implications of dancing in and through bodies unworried by concrete expectations or paved roads to aging "gracefully"?