ARCOS Presents SHORT FORM: Four Dance Works In April

ARCOS Presents: Short Form will be performed at CRASHBOX (5305 Bolm Rd Unit 12, Austin, TX 78721) Thursday-Saturday, April 17-19, 2025 at 7:30pm.

"In our experience, there is a unique tenderness to a project that is covered in the artist's fingerprints. DIY is sweet, and special." That's what Sarah Smith and Gabbi Melton, known as The Clubhouse, say when asked to consider how to make art more sustainably.

For ARCOS, a "DIY" aesthetic is not synonymous with a lack of resources, but rather a deliberate focus on how to do more with less, to direct the energy towards making the kind of art that we all need in this moment. The Clubhouse joins Anna Bauer, AJ Flores, and Sarawati Nandini Majumdar as the 2025 awardees of ARCOS Presents, a production mentorship program for "emerging-into-self-producing" dance artists based in Austin.

The program serves as a laboratory to prepare artists to be nimble, courageous, and willing to take creative risks by tackling tough ideas in new ways. These four artists will present a bill of new dance works while growing skills and gaining confidence in all aspects of producing art on their own terms.

Anna Bauer's new work, delicates, is a movement study with clothing as an external layer that we don and shed in an attempt to shape our own image, in the eyes of ourselves and others. Using both humor and melancholy, Bauer's work dives into the concept of perception and the many elements, internal and external, that influence the ways we perceive ourselves and the world around us. "Perception is a topic I consider and stress over frequently in my own life: how I hope to appear to others, how clothing frames my body, how clothing presents my gender."

AJ Flores is creating M̶E̶S̶T̶I̶Z̶O̶, a journey of self-discovery to connect with Indigenous ancestors, lost and forgotten in this lifetime. AJ's work, in collaboration with Mario Alberto Ollincoyotl Ramirez and local music producers, begins to dismantle the artist's identity of who he thought he was, using movement and the music culture he grew up around to draw correlations with and unearth the origins of his identity. Flores wants the audience to "experience why the term 'mestizo' no longer resonates, and was a colonialist ideology to separate us from our indigenous counterparts, to forget who we are."

In her piece Empty Beat, Majumdar brings into conversation centuries-old South Asian music traditions with the comparatively new movement modality of contact improvisation (CI). The piece explores concepts of time, and how we may think of improvisation as both an aesthetic endeavor and a radical political stance. In Hindustani music, time is understood to be non-linear, relative, and subject to deconstruction, rather than teleological or fixed. "I and my collaborator Venese Alcantar are interested in the small rituals and everyday moments of improvisation through which we experience the push and pull of our relationships, our histories, and time as revisionary."

Sarah Smith and Gabbi Melton make up the punk duo The Clubhouse, premiering a hybrid of film, animation, and live performance titled The Tale of the Swamp Witch. The work is a queer fairytale exploring themes of otherness, rejection, transformation, community, and rebirth. "Cannibalizing the classic fairytale and reimagining it to include queer representations of femininity, love, and chosen family feels especially poignant in this era of extreme political pressure towards homogenizing the population."

Each of the selected short-form artists are making the most of what the ARCOS Presents program provides: financial support for a production budget, technical inventory access, rehearsal and performance space, and creative thought-partnership from technical production to outreach. ARCOS is delighted to guide these artists through the process of producing their projects for audiences at CRASHBOX in April, as the ARCOS Presents program has previously for Ciceley Fullylove and Kelly Goetz (CRASHBOX, 2024), Angelica Monteiro (Motion Media Arts Center, 2023), Michael J. Love and Kaitlyn B. Jones (Carver Center, 2019), and anxious 20yr olds Gianina Casale, D'Launa Lawson, Oluwaseun Samuel Olayiwola, Lizzette Chapa, and Hunter Sturgis (Museum of Human Achievement, 2017).

About Anna Bauer

Anna Bauer is a person living in Austin, Texas, and wearing the hats of choreographer and dancer. She holds a BFA in Dance from Sam Houston State University and currently dances for the KDH Dance Company and Allysen Hooks Projects. She creates her own work as well and frequently collaborates with fellow Austin artist Jairus Carr. In 2024, her pieces performed at Austin Dance Festival, RAD Fest Midwest Dance Festival, and Texas Dance Improvisation Festival. She also attended residencies with Keshet Makers Space Experience, Whirlwind Dance Company, and Homeport Art House. Right now, Anna's work investigates things like nuance, puzzles, and clothes.

About AJ Flores

Born in El Paso, Adrian José Flores is a movement director based in Austin with a BA in Film from UT. He marries his passion for music and dance by creating films that reflect the culture and climate of today's world. AJ collaborates with local artists on live shows and music videos for major stages, such as ACL and SXSW. He immerses himself in foundational styles of movement: Vogue, Hip Hop, Latin, House, Memphis Jookin, Jersey Club, Baltimore Club, Chicago Footwork, and Afro dance styles. AJ hosts movement exploration classes that cultivate safe spaces where students feel challenged and undergo individual transformational processes.

About Nandini Majumdar

Saraswati Nandini Majumdar is a musician in the North Indian 'Khayal' style, who performs, collaborates, and teaches. She is also a writer and continues to train in dance, including in Kathak and Contact Improvisation. Her work explores the intersections between sound, movement, text, and performance, and gender, race, and class, as well as the meaning of improvisation as not only aesthetic practice but also politics and philosophy for life. As an improvisational artist, Nandini seeks connections with other dancers, musicians, and writers from around the world. She is currently finishing a Ph.D. at UT-Austin.

About The Clubhouse

The Clubhouse is an open-ended dance/film/mixed-media outlet founded by Sarah Smith & Gabbi Melton in 2024. In their first year, they produced three short dance films: I Made You This, Midnight Snax, and Run The Heartbeats, and are currently in process of their fourth film, The Swamp Witch Returns. Through their creative process, they've discovered that there is a unique tenderness to a project that is covered in the artist's fingerprints. DIY is the ethos of The Clubhouse. Combining references that are handmade, nostalgic, digital, and symbolic, they aim to produce work that is simultaneously familiar and disruptive.

About ARCOS

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