Artistic Director Melissa Blanco Borelli

As we mark the 250th birthday of the United States, what do we have to celebrate? The ghosts of our nation’s past—slavery, genocide, extraction—are active forces haunting our burning present. 

Danceworks 2026 gathers choreographers, dancers, and audiences to ask: What does it mean to move together in a time of unraveling? How do we move through a world where some bodies are deemed disposable, where borders harden as seas rise, where the very ground beneath us is contested?

In this space, we don’t promise harmony. We offer the friction of real encounter. Through choreography and improvisation, we explore the politics of presence: the radical act of showing up, in all our differences, when everything tells us to retreat. Can collective movement—breathing, sweating, grieving in rhythm—forge something beyond mere survival?

Guest Choreographers

Shireen R. Dickson

Shireen R. Dickson is a dance artist, educator, and facilitator whose work spans African American vernacular, global rhythmic, and folk traditions. She is the director of Okra Dance Company and a longtime collaborator with choreographer Dianne McIntyre. Shireen has performed and taught at major festivals and institutions nationwide, and consults with organizations on arts-based education and community engagement. A founding member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance at Duke University, she also serves as a producer and facilitator with Slippage: Performance|Culture|Technology at Northwestern University, creating movement experiences that challenge traditional ideas of art-making and learning.

Sam Aros-Mitchell

Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work blends Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, transforming space into sites of ceremony and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025–28), a McKnight Dance Fellow (2023), and founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance.

Aros-Mitchell’s choreography draws from embodied research and ceremonial practice, dissolving boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. His recent works include Juya Nokakamea (2024), inspired by Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam (2023), an immersive sound and movement installation.

He holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre and an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego. As an educator and mentor, he teaches Indigenous performance, somatic improvisation, and land-based research. He is also the founder of NE/X Festival and The Native Joy Play Festival, and co-leads Aros & Son LLC, a Native-owned media and publishing company.

Across all his work, Aros-Mitchell centers kinship, ritual, and the belief that performance is an embodied act of cultural memory and continuity.