Co-presented by the Arts Research Center and the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities
Choreographies of Space | Tuesday April 21, 2026 | 3:30 - 5pm | Bancroft Dance Studios
Hosted in collaboration with TDPS Chair SanSan Kwan and her Choreographies of Space course.
*Masterclass is open to Berkeley dance students, closed to the general public. Please email Professor SanSan Kwan if you would like to attend, at sansankwan@berkeley.edu.
Thursday April 23, 2026 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Bancroft Dance Studio
*free & open to the public, seating limited and 1st come 1st served
Sam Aros-Mitchell will offer a lecture–performance hybrid, aligned with his ongoing work in Performance as Ceremony. This format weaves together short movement passages, video from recent works, and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies. He will perform two short Limón solos — El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung).
Artist-in-Residence plus invited guests
Monday April 20 through Friday April 24, 2026
Bancroft Dance Studios, UC Berkeley
*closed to the general public
Sam Aros Mitchell, still from performance, Danzas Mexicans (El Indio)
Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025–28), a McKnight Dance Fellow (2023), and the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance. For over eight years, he has also been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse.
Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. Rooted in Indigenous ontologies and land-based practice, his performances emerge from embodied research and ceremonial methodologies. He is among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these historic modernist works with Indigenous embodiment and critical recontextualization. Recent original works include Juya Nokakamea (2024), a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam (2023), an immersive sound and movement installation.
Born in Imperial Valley, California, Aros-Mitchell’s early life was shaped by the foster care system, adoption, and the borderland geographies of the Southwest. These experiences inform his work, which often engages the complexities of being a Native adoptee—displaced from, but never disconnected to, cultural knowledge and land. His choreography insists that the adopted Indigenous body is not incomplete but encoded, carrying ancestral memory and reanimating what was obscured. He holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre from UC San Diego/UC Irvine and an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego. His dissertation, W/riting Indigeneity; Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body, theorizes performance as ceremonial code, where the body becomes an archive of survivance, memory, and cultural transmission. His current book project, Performance as Ceremony, extends this research, offering a framework for Indigenous performance theory grounded in fieldwork, rehearsal practice, and Yaqui epistemologies.
As an educator, Aros-Mitchell teaches Muscle/Bone technique (inspired by Min Tanaka’s Body Weather), somatic improvisation, and interdisciplinary courses on Indigenous performance and design. He has been a guest artist at Colorado College, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Carleton College. His mentorship emphasizes Indigenous pedagogy, land-based research, and somatic justice. Aros-Mitchell is also the founder of the NE/X Festival (North East Experimental): A Festival of Indigenous Performance and The Native Joy Play Festival: A Celebration of Indigenous Creativity and Community. He serves on the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Council and is the founder of Aros & Son LLC, a Native-owned company he co-founded with his son to support Indigenous publishing, collaborative media projects, and mentorship.
His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Metro Regional Arts Council, and the Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Festival Activation Program. Across all projects, Aros-Mitchell’s practice is guided by kinship, ritual, and the belief that performance is not merely art—it is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.
Read more about and watch performances of Aros-Mitchell's work at his website, https://www.samarosmitchell.com/
In all his work, Aros-Mitchell is guided by kinship, ritual, and the assertion that performance is not merely art—it is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.
Sam Aros-Mitchell, performance still from The Unsung, 2024
Juya Nokakamea, Sam Aros Mitchell, March 2024
The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) in collaboration with the Arts Research Center (ARC) have created a multi-year Indigenous Performing Artist Residency Program, which allows us to host a performance by emerging Indigenous performing artists yearly, along with a visit to campus by the artist for a public talk and an opportunity to work with students in class visits. Beginning the 2025/26 academic year, IPAR will support performing artists in dance/choregraphy. This builds on the prior years success of the IPAR program to support playwrights with Alternative Theater Ensemble.
The mission of the artist residency program is to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and to create ongoing financial and material support for upcoming Indigenous performing artists so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. The program stems from the idea that embodied theater and performance practices are a site of historical remembering and knowledge production. The Indigenous Performing Artist Residency builds a relationship with a performance company for multiple years, to premiere Native or Indigenous creative works in their theater/performance space. ARC and TDPS will then collaborate to reprise those artistic works in one of our campus performance spaces. During the presentation of the performance, the artist(s) will be invited to campus to meet with our community, give talks, engage with our students in a variety of ways that best support the artistic production. It utilizes the longstanding collaborative partnership that ARC and TDPS have established with each other over many years, and utilizes both our units’ connections to theater and performing arts organizations off campus.
