Performance
My 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
To perform the Deer solo from José Limón’s The Unsung is to enter a history that also touches my own. Limón and I share Yaqui ancestry. That connection shaped the nine months I spent reconstructing the solo with Dante Puleio, Director of the Limón Dance Company, bringing the inherited choreography into conversation with my experience as a Yaqui person.
Created in 1970, The Unsung honors the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as builders and defenders of their worlds. The work unfolds without musical accompaniment. Breath, footfall, and the body’s contact with the floor make the performer’s effort audible. Every movement carries its own weight and duration.
For me, reconstruction is an act of return. Learning the solo means attending to what the choreography preserves and what becomes possible when I inhabit it. My body enters the work as both a trained dancer and a Yaqui person, carrying a relationship to the history it invokes.
Performance and costume design: Sam Aros-Mitchell
Choreography: José Limón, 1970
Reconstruction: With Dante Puleio
Duration: 2 minutes, 38 seconds
Presentation: SOLO Concert, McKnight Foundation · O’Shaughnessy Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota
Ania Bwia Bwia Toochia
The world, the land, the soil, the dust
Solo sound and movement work, 2023
Ania Bwia Bwia Toochia grew from my time living in Tempe, Arizona, near Yaqui land, and from the relationships I was building with other Yaqui people. Developed alongside my monograph Performance as Ceremony, the work brings together dance and my love of stringed instruments, including a cello-like instrument I built from a guitar.
The piece also emerged through working with poet Natalie Diaz and takes inspiration from her poem “isn’t the air also a body moving?” These encounters ground the work in a responsibility to the natural world and to community. Sound and movement become ways of practicing that accountability.
Choreographed and performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell.
Presented at Red Eye Theater’s Works in Progress, May 2023.
ash / mother / fire / sister
Developed and performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell and Masanari Kawahara (2026)
Length: 19:08
This duet grows from the women whose spirits move through us. For me, it is my biological mother, Evangelina. For Masa, it is his sister, whose brief life preceded his own and whose spirit continues to live through him.
Working through Yaqui worlds and Butoh, we let these relationships shape our movement from within. We begin back to back in children’s chairs, moving through memory, care, restriction, and release. My score asks me to let the body arrive a few seconds after itself, to feel fire beneath my skin and to observe a world of flowers around me.
Music: The Peanuts;“Koi no Fuga”, Vicente Fernández;“Payaso”, Brian Eno; “Here Come the Warm Jets”, Yeah Yeah Yeahs; “Maps”, 紅髮少年殺人事件; “YES,We Love Number Girl”.
Center for Performing Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota
New Works Festival, April 3–4, 2026
WISH | BODY | TRACE (2026)
Choreography: Sam Aros-Mitchell
Performed by Chloe Jung, Lina Morhai, Tvesha Gupta, Lem Nguyen, Erin Soko, Kathryn Hocker, and Timaa Kamar
Sound design: Belu-Olisa Sarkissian
Sound and Technology Dramaturgy: Raymond Simmonds
Lighting design: Rembrandt Pieplenbosch
Costume design: Lia Wallfish
Dance Captains: Erin Soko and Kathryn Hocker
WISH | BODY | TRACE explores how attention, repetition, and relation shape the body over time. Rooted in my practice of performance as ceremony and developed with my longtime friend and collaborator, physicist Ray Simmonds, the work unfolds through three shifting states: the quiet readiness before movement, the gathering of bodies into shared patterns, and the traces that remain as those patterns dissolve.
Drawing on Butoh image scores and Indigenous understandings of relation and continuance, the dancers respond to breath, light, distance, and one another. Movement passes between bodies, returns in altered form, and lingers as an afterimage. The work invites audiences into a shared experience of listening and presence, where what has passed continues to move through what is happening now.
First developed for Danceworks 2026: Semiquincentennial
Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
March 13–15, 2026
Finding Aniam
Created during a two-week residency at Rosy Simas Danse’s three thirty-one space in Minneapolis, Finding Aniam brings together movement, original music, and my own lighting design to explore the Yaqui worlds, or aniam.
The work begins with a teaching that guides my relationship to these worlds: as Yaquis, we pray to Creator for permission to move between them. That act of asking shapes the performance. What does it mean to approach a threshold, to listen, and to enter with permission?
I developed the movement, music, and lighting together as a way of working through that question. The body’s passage through space becomes inseparable from the responsibility of entering it. Finding Aniam places this relationship between prayer, permission, and movement at the center of my practice of Performance as Ceremony.
The nine worlds are:
• Sea Ania — Flower World
• Yo Ania — Enchanted World
• Tenku Ania — Dream World
• Tuka Ania — Night World
• Huya Ania — Wilderness World
• Nao Ania — Corncob World
• Kawi Ania — Mountain World
• Vawe Ania — Underwater World
• Teeka Ania — Sky World, extending through the universe
Creation, original music, and lighting design: Sam Aros-Mitchell
Developed at three thirty-one, Rosy Simas Danse, Minneapolis.