At this kickoff event with live music, ARCOS Presents artists Venese Alcantar, Lichen Bouboushian, and Omar Mousa share a preview of their work, including a premiere screening of the film portion of SalSāl (clay that makes sound), a reading by Bouboushian, a conversation with the artists, and a preview of a documentary following their processes.
ARCOS Presents: Creative Resistance is a double bill of interdisciplinary performances: Lichen Bouboushian’s Rupture: Sneak lives between dance, performance art, and oral history, with the performer navigating a perilous set while telling the story of their Armenian, Lebanese, and American heritage. Venese Alcantar and Omar Mousa’s SalSāl (clay that makes sound) is a dance/film that investigates the body as landscape: malleable, marked by history, and in constant transformation.
PERFORMANCES
Friday 9/4 at 7:30pm
Saturday 9/5 at 7:30pm
Monday 9/7 at 7:30pm (industry night)
Thursday 9/10 at 7:30pm (ASL interpreted)
Friday 9/11 at 7:30pm (masks required)
Saturday 9/12 at 7:30pm
Tickets - Sliding scale, from $15 (9/7 industry night from $10)
Runtime: Approximately 2 hours, including a 10-minute intermission
ARCOS is committed to relational, rather than transactional, practices of sharing resources, knowledge, and care in artmaking. ARCOS Presents awardees receive financial support, including an artist stipend, production budget, studio rehearsal space, technical inventory access, and performance venue. Additionally, mentorship provides awardees creative thought-partnering, production and technical support, and community outreach guidance.
ARCOS Presents 2026 supported artists are Venese Alcantar and Omar Mousa, for their project SalSāl (clay that makes sound), and Lichen Bouboushian for their project Rupture: Sneak. This year’s finalists were Leo Briggs, Angel Cadavid Hernandez, and TeeDee Simons.
venese medovich 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.
SalSāl (clay that makes sound) 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 LawnTM/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? SalSāl 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.
Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
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.
Rupture: Sneak shares stories across three generations: my grandfather’s childhood in occupied Armenia after the genocide, my father’s forced migration to the US due to the Lebanese civil war, and my life as a first-generation American. Through embodied 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 bombed-out building in Beirut, and slowly unravel it to glean what it may offer me; it acts as both my home and obstacle.
2026 external application reviewers are alums of previous production mentorships who are no longer based in Austin:
Lizzy Tan is a dance artist and movement director based in London. Her creative practice and solo performances centre on the philosophy of image and representations of the femme performing body. Her solo and collaborative works have been performed in the US, UK, and Germany at The Place’s Resolution Festival, Assembly Festival at the Edinburgh Fringe, London’s VAULT Festival, Camden People’s Theatre’s ‘Calm Down, Dear’ Festival, Cohen New Works Festival, and Dance Source Houston’s ‘Mind the Gap.’ (IG @liztan_)
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist who critically engages Black cultural pasts to “rhythm dream” of futurity. His work has been supported by NCCAkron (OH), FringeArts (Philadelphia), and Fusebox. In New York, he’s performed at Carnegie Hall with quartet Sō Percussion, presented at Amant with rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr., and shown at the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art with artist Aryel René Jackson. Love was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. (IG @dancermlove)
Past ARCOS Presents awarded artists include:
- Sanchita Sharma for Routing and Al Hamauei for My Body, Your Choice (2025)
- Adrian José Flores for
MESTIZO, Anna Bauer with Celeste Camfield for delicates, The Clubhouse (Gabbi Melton and Sarah Smith) for The Tale of the Swamp Witch, Saraswati Nandini Majumdar and Venese Alcantar for Empty Beat (2025) - Kelly Goetz for Menstruator and Ciceley Fullylove for Rhythm & Grooves (2024) at CRASHBOX
- Angelica Monteiro for Narratives of the Migrant Body (2023) at Motion Media Arts Center
- Interdisciplinary tap artist Michael J. Love for The Auralvisual Mixtape Collection, Part II: Dope Fit! (2019) at Carver Museum and Cultural Center
- University of Texas at Austin alums anxious 20yr olds (Gianina Casale, D’Launa Lawson, Oluwaseun Samuel Olayiwola, Lizzette Chapa, Hunter Sturgis, Lizzy Tan) for This Isn’t New (2017) at Museum of Human Achievement
These projects are supported in part by an Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music, & Entertainment.