About
Research Cycles
The works of Sam Aros-Mitchell unfold through evolving research cycles rather than isolated projects. Each cycle investigates questions of embodiment, relation, memory, and ceremony across performance, installation, sound, writing, and collaboration.
Rather than concluding with a finished work, these cycles continue to develop across time, locations, and institutional contexts, allowing Performance as Ceremony to remain a living and adaptive practice.
Juya Nokakamea
An immersive performance environment rooted in Yaqui cosmologies and the story of the talking tree. The work explores thresholds between worlds, activating performance as a shared ceremonial encounter between performer, audience, and space.
This work emerged from my research on the Yaqui creation story, where Juya Nokakame reached from earth to sky, resonating with a humming that could only be understood by Yomumuli, a young girl. The girl recounted the warning of the tree, speaking of colonization's arrival and the importance of living with the natural world. By embodying this story, I avoided mimicry and tried to create an immersive environment that I could live in, that reached back to this time. A portal door marks the beginning of the piece, and as the light from that projection scans me, I am cleansed as I enter into ceremony. The soundscape was written for the “guello”, a hybrid instrument I built, which was run through a loop pedal as part of my process to reimagine Indigenous presence. There are three sections to this score, which include emergence, the talking tree and living in relationality to the natural world.
March 2024, RSD Studios, Minneapolis, MN
WISH | BODY | TRACE
An investigation into attentional emergence and collective form. In this cycle, choreography arises through sustained listening and non-forcing compositional structures rather than predetermined movement. Performers engage states of attention shaped by emergence practice, Muscle/Bone activation, and relational awareness, allowing form to appear through shared presence over time.
The work explores how choreography can function as an unfolding process rather than a fixed object, emphasizing persistence, perception, and collective embodiment.