ARCOS Presents: Creative Resistance

Join us for the 7th edition of ARCOS Presents! This year's supported artists responded to our open call for works of creative resistance. We are honored to walk alongside this year's awardees as they hone their self-producing skills so they can continue making vital art on their own terms. Read their full project descriptions below or here.

LICHEN BOUBOUSHIAN for their project Rupture: Sneak

In a work that lives between dance, performance art, and oral history, Lichen navigates a perilous set while telling the story of their Armenian, Lebanese, and American heritage.

VENESE ALCANTAR + OMAR MOUSA for their project SalSāl (clay that makes sound)

A dance/film investigates the body as landscape, malleable, marked by history, and in constant transformation in this collaboration by Mexican-Indigenous movement practitioner Venese Alcantar and Palestinian-American filmmaker Omar Mousa.

🗓️ Performances:

Friday, September 4 @ 7:30p

Saturday, September 5 @ 7:30p

Monday, September 7 @ 7:30p (industry night - from $10 with code INDUSTRY)

Thursday, September 10 @ 7:30p (ASL-interpreted)

Friday, September 11 @ 7:30p (masks required)

Saturday, September 12 @ 7:30p

📍CRASHBOX

5305 Bolm Rd. Unit 12

Parking on site and free street parking along Bolm Rd and surrounding side streets

🎟️ Tickets sliding scale from $15

If cost is prohibitive, please email a@arcosdance.com for assistance.

Lichen Bouboushian on Rupture: Sneak - In this work, I share stories across three generations: my grandfather’s childhood in occupied Armenia after the genocide, my father’s life after forced migration to the US due to the Lebanese civil war, and my life as a first-generation American. Through vocal and movement explorations of compression, I posit our socially “small” positioning (our less “valuable” social role as victims of empire) as a tool for navigating oppressive structures. I build an unstable nest in the set - a pile evocative of a disaster zone or refugee camp - and slowly unravel it to glean what it may offer me. It is both a home I return to, and an obstacle I must face. Throughout Rupture: Sneak, I highlight the simultaneous existence of multiple emotions as my body alchemizes a complex inheritance. I teeter on the edges of sincerity and irony, humor and desolation. Ultimately, these nonlinear paths lead me to assert that the blighted inheritance of survivors in Diaspora is more than tragedy. Instead, it affords us a special resilience we all share.

Venese Alcantar and Omar Mousa on SalSāl (clay that makes sound) - This is a surrealist dance-for-cinema that emphasizes the body as the site for change. In this process, we are inviting volatility through rupture and repair, slippage, and coming to shape as counterpractices to the heartwrenching silence (represented by the American Lawn™/sod) and immobilization against the ongoing genocide, abduction, and violence of folx living at the access of difference. We ponder what it means to be a criminalized body by default through the rejection of prescribed American normalcy. What does it mean to be an ungovernable body? How are we refuting erasure through our artistic stance? SalSal is a contemplation on the body in protest as well as a celebration of our collective resiliency. We hold the core understanding that we all come from the clay; we are relatives. Just as a body would not ignore a hurt limb, a society shouldn’t ignore immense suffering and must move towards change.