About
SAM AROS-MITCHELL
PERFORMANCE AS CEREMONY
Yaqui choreographer, performer, scholar, and cultural producer
I make performance as a living site of relation, between body and land, memory and time, performer and audience.
I am a Yaqui choreographer, performer, scholar, and cultural producer, and an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. Born in California's Imperial Valley, my early life was shaped by foster care, adoption, and the borderland geographies of the Southwest. I came toward cultural knowledge sideways and late, and I have spent years walking back toward it.
That route is in the work. Much of what I make asks what it means to be a Native adoptee, displaced from land and language but never disconnected from them. I don't believe the adopted Indigenous body is incomplete. I believe it is encoded. It carries ancestral memory whether or not it was ever handed the vocabulary, and performance is one place where I reanimate what has been obscured.
I call my practice Performance as Ceremony. It treats performance as a living site of relation, not a picture of something, but an encounter between body and land, memory and time, performer and audience. Ceremony here does not mean reenactment or spectacle. It means a process through which relationships are renewed.
SELECTED WORK
JUYA NOKAKAMEA / THE TALKING TREE
2024–present
An evolving performance work drawn from the Yaqui creation story of the talking tree, moving between solo and ensemble forms through movement, sound, light, projection, and embodied storytelling.
Most recently presented as an ensemble work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in 2026.
WISH | BODY | TRACE
2026
A performance inquiry into attention, collective form, emergence, and the body’s capacity to listen.
THE WALL IS HIGH: A PERFORMANCE IN FIVE CHAPTERS
2025
A solo performance moving through memory, displacement, Indigenous survivance, and return.
REPERTOIRE / RETURN
I am among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), working with Dante Puleio, Artistic Director of the Limón Dance Company.
Limón and I share Yaqui ancestry. To dance these solos as a Yaqui artist is not simply an act of preservation. It is also a return of the work to the kind of body from which it emerged.
WRITING & RESEARCH
Writing is not separate from the performance practice.
My dissertation, W/riting Indigeneity: Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body, theorizes performance as ceremonial code and the body as an archive of survivance, memory, and cultural transmission.
My current book project, Performance as Ceremony, extends that research into a framework for Indigenous performance theory grounded in fieldwork, rehearsal practice, and Yaqui epistemologies.
ARTISTIC & CULTURAL LEADERSHIP
I founded SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance; the NE/X Festival (North East Experimental), a festival of Indigenous performance; and the Native Joy Play Festival. With my son Max, I founded Aros & Son, a Native-owned company supporting Indigenous publishing, collaborative media, and mentorship.
I serve on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, as Online Editor for Theatre Journal, and on the board of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts.
FELLOWSHIPS & HONORS
Jerome Hill Artist Fellow
2025–2028
McKnight Dance Fellow
2023
Heller Center Indigenous Fellow
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Artist-in-Residence, Indigenous Performing Arts Residency
UC Berkeley Arts Research Center · 2026
My work has also been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the City of Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department.
WORK WITH ME
I work with universities, museums, festivals, arts organizations, and communities through performance, residencies, teaching, and conversation.
Available engagements include performance and commissioning, Performance as Ceremony lecture-performances, Muscle/Bone and somatic improvisation masterclasses, university and festival residencies, and talks on Indigenous performance, embodied archives, and the Limón reconstructions.
Performance is not merely art. It is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.