Performance
Sam Aros-Mitchell’s performances emerge from the framework of Performance as Ceremony, presenting choreography as a lived encounter between body, space, and audience. Works range from solo repertoire and ensemble performance to lecture-performances and site-responsive environments.
Each performance functions as both artistic event and ceremonial gathering, inviting audiences into shared processes of attention, relation, and presence.
Juya Nokakamea Highlight Reel 2026
The Wall is High: A Performance in five Chapters
Juya Nokakamea, The Talking Tree, is an Indigenous interdisciplinary performance that unfolds as an act of listening, exploring memory, land, and the intelligence of the living world. Built from movement, original sound, and projected light and fog, the piece invites the audience into an immersive environment that is alive and unsettled.
Using moving platforms, portals, and the presence of bodies inside a shifting architecture, the work asks the elements to listen to one another rather than to illustrate an idea. Light moves. Air moves like a hawk riding a thermal. Water carries memory. Nothing explains itself, and the room accumulates.
Concept, direction and performance by Sam Aros-Mitchell
with performers Masanari Kawahara, Dameun Strange and Caroline Trindade, Original sound design and composition by Dameun Strange and Sam Aros-Mitchell, Creative consultation by Masanari Kawahara, Lighting design and photography by Heidi Eckwall
Developed with support from the Minnesota State Arts Board FY2026 Creative Individuals Grant and the City of Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department Bridge Fund for Dance
Thursday, July 9, 2026 Red Eye Theater
The Wall is High: A Performance in five Chapters is a solo movement theater piece that unfolds across five chapters, exploring memory, brevity and wry comic wit. Set to Patti Smith’s Kimberly, the piece invites reflection through a stripped-down sense of physicality, ephemeral text, and stillness.
Using only handwritten posters and the raw presence of my body, the work draws on Brechtian performance strategies to challenge immersion, calling the audience into a state of witnessing rather than consuming. There are only written words and the lyrics that Patti sings, often in juxtaposition with each other.
This performance exists between liminal spaces and chance happenings, The Figure is an enlightened idiot who is stuck between riot and rupture, between a landscape of nothing and everything. Each chapter marks a shift in energy and form, asking: What burns? What remains? And what has remained after the barn has burned down?
Music by Patti Smith, Kimberly from the 1975 album, Horses
I shared the stage with other soloists, Gayatri, Scott Stafford and Parisha Rajbhandari for this evening of Tiger Balm
PROCESS DANCE PROCESS
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Red Eye Theater
Juya Nokakamea 2024 Solo
This work emerged from my research on the Yaqui creation story, where Juya Nokakamea 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
Danzas Mexicanas
(El Indio)
Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell
Choreography: José Limón (1939)
Costume design: Sam Aros-Mitchell
Length: 3:15
José Limón and I share Yaqui ancestry. I am among the first Yaqui artists to dance this solo, which I reconstructed and restaged with Dante Puleio, Director of the Limón Dance Company — a first for the company as well.
Indio is one of five solos in Danzas Mexicanas, alongside Conquistador, Peón, Caballero, and Revolucionario. Limón drew the work from Mexico's history, land, and people, and the solos move through destruction, redemption, triumph, and despair. Indio carries the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. To dance it as a Yaqui person is not preservation. It is a return of the work to the kind of body it came from.
O'Shaughnessy Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota · SOLO Concert, McKnight Foundation
The Unsung
Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell
Choreography: José Limón (1970)
Costume design: Sam Aros-Mitchell
Length: 2:38
The Deer solo comes from Limón's The Unsung, made to honor the true heirs of the Americas — builders and defenders, not noble savages. It is danced in silence, with nothing to hear but feet and bodies meeting the floor.
Reconstructing it took nine months of work with Dante Puleio, Director of the Limón Dance Company, and I built it from my own experience as a Yaqui person rather than from the archive alone.
O'Shaughnessy Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota
SOLO Concert, McKnight Foundation
Ensemble & Research Performances
Collaborative works emerging from ongoing research cycles investigating collective attention and relational choreography.
Finding Sentience
Performed by Semaphore Dance Company at Carleton College
Lighting Design: Tony Stoeri
Costume Design: Mary Ann Kelling
Finding Sentience explores somatic movement expression derived from focusing on central, peripheral, and fringe vision. By dividing dancers into quadrants, we considered ways to challenge and refine their visibility of one another. I aimed to unravel the complexities of perception and interaction by cultivating a practice between introspection and extrospection. The deliberate pacing invited an immersive experience and emphasized each gesture’s subtleties. This quiet and ceremonial atmosphere encouraged the dancers to sense each other profoundly in a world of light, sound, and ephemerality.
My goal was to transcend conventional perception by offering viewers a transformative encounter with dance as a medium for introspection and communal connection. Through somatic exploration, spatial activation, and deliberate pacing, I aimed to evoke a profound resonance between each audience member and each performer. The sound design incorporated elements including bass guitar, electric guitar, and the guello. The score expressed sub-bass rumblings, haunting, whining melodies, and deliberate, meditative silence.
Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
November 2023
Lecture-Performances & Public Engagement
Hybrid presentations combining performance, discourse, and embodied demonstration within academic and public contexts.
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talks
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lecture performances
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hybrid presentations
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academic performance formats
Presenting & Collaborations
Performance works are available for presentation in theaters, galleries, universities, and site-responsive environments. For inquiries regarding performances, residencies, or collaborations, please visit the Contact page.