A collaborative program 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 and the Patrick J. Finelli Speaker Series Fund.
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
Please RSVP here if you are interested in attending this event. RSVP is not required for entry.
Free & open to the public, seating limited and 1st come 1st served.
Sam Aros-Mitchell will offer a public lecture-performance, aligned with his ongoing work in Performance as Ceremony. He will dance two short José Limón solos—El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung)—in a hybrid format that weaves together movement passages and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies. Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art, and his work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing.
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)
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 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.
Sam Aros-Mitchell warming up for his Master Class, Bancroft Dance Studio, UC Berkeley (image: Laurie Macfee)
Juya Nokakamea, Sam Aros Mitchell, March 2024
Sam Aros-Mitchell, performance still from The Unsung, 2024
The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for emerging Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future.
IPAR allows us to host emerging Indigenous performing artists at UC Berkeley for a week, including studio time for development, a public talk or performance to share their work with the greater community, and opportunities to interact with students in class visits, studio visits, or master classes. Beginning the 2025/26 academic year, IPAR will support performing artists in dance/choreography through 2028 This builds on the prior three years success of the IPAR program supporting playwrights along with the non-profit Alternative Theater Ensemble.
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 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 on and off campus.
