ARCOS Presents: Creative Resistance

ARCOS Presents: Creative Resistance, the seventh edition of the mentorship program that walks Austin-based independent dance artists through self-producing, brings a double bill of new interdisciplinary work to CRASHBOX September 4–12. Rupture: Sneak by Lichen Bouboushian is built inside an unraveling nest that evokes a disaster zone or refugee camp. SalSāl (clay that makes sound) by Venese Alcantar and Omar Mousa is a dance/film that stages a choreographic confrontation between American lawn sod and the clay beneath it. Rupture: Sneak moves across three generations: Lichen Bouboushian’s grandfather’s childhood in occupied Armenia after the genocide, their father’s life after forced migration due to the Lebanese civil war, and Bouboushian’s own life as a first-generation American. The artist builds an unstable nest inside the set, then slowly unravels it to see what it may offer them. It acts as both home and obstacle as they transform being made small by empire into a survival tactic in Diaspora. Bouboushian is a hybrid artist straddling the worlds of dance, theater, and performance art. While they have presented their work through festivals and residencies throughout the US and Canada, this is their first opportunity to learn the ropes of self-producing, an important step in their artistic trajectory that inspired their application to ARCOS’ program. Alcantar and Mousa’s SalSāl (clay that makes sound) is a surrealist work combining live dance and film, casting “the American LawnTM/sod” as a symbol of silence and immobility in the face of imperial violence. The work asks what it means to be a criminalized body by default, contemplating the body in protest and celebrating collective resilience. “We hold the core understanding that we all come from the clay. We are relatives,” the artists say. “Just as a body would not ignore a hurt limb, a society shouldn’t ignore immense suffering and must move towards change.” Alcantar and Mousa have a deep, ongoing relationship rooted in protest and activism, making SalSāl a natural creative extension of their existing work together. Bridging their worlds of site-responsive dance and film, respectively, they have embraced the challenges of self-producing work that evades categorization. The full run includes an ASL-interpreted performance on Thursday, September 10 and a masks-required performance on Friday, September 11. Monday, September 7 is a reduced-price industry night. LICHEN BOUBOUSHIAN is a trans non-binary performance artist originally from rural Texas, with a history of practice in Chicago and New York City, and family ties to Lebanon and Armenia. Their transdisciplinary practice spans postmodern dance, noise/experimental music, social practice, and performance art. Bouboushian creates emotionally jarring juxtapositions of text, experimental voice work, and somatics-based movement practices, as a means to dive into ethical quandaries and critical dialogue about complex social histories. They seek to trouble and uncover what is unsaid and untouched, but often shared and understood. They have shared work in NYC at Danspace Project, Issue Project Room, & Queens Museum; in Chicago at Elastic Arts, Constellation, and Co-Prosperity Sphere; domestically at the New Genre Festival (Tulsa) and Miami Performance Festival; and internationally at Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Queer Zagreb. VENESE ALCANTAR is a Mexican-Indigenous movement practitioner, scholar, and educator researching transgressive rituals through embodied practice. Their work challenges gender norms and femme archetypes while expanding perceptions of the body as landscape, engaging themes of corporeal wit, anthropomorphic expression, and birthing/composting. Alcantar’s work has been presented at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Elisabet Ney Museum, MASS Gallery, and The Blanton. They’ve collaborated with Angelica Monteiro, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, ARCOS, Performing Justice Project, and Girl Forward. As a Pantera artist-in-residence, they taught at Kazan University of Culture and Art in Russia. Alcantar holds an MFA in Dance and Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin and has published writing on embodied ritual as an interventional tool for the violenced body. OMAR MOUSA is a Palestinian-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. Before settling in the United States in 2010, he served as media coordinator for UNESCO in Paris, worked on arts and cultural festivals in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Poland, and chaired the jury of the Malta International Dance Folk Festival in 2009. He makes personal and artistic short films for the festival circuit, and through Omar Mousa Picture Production Company, which he founded in 2015, he provides comprehensive media services across Central Texas. His debut feature-length documentary, Izzy Cox: Fragments of a Life, presents an intimate portrait of the outlaw singer-songwriter.

Event Links

Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3766873-0

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3766873-2

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