CONTRA-TIEMPO

CONTRA-TIEMPO is a bold, multilingual Los Angeles-based activist dance theater company that creates communities where all people are awakened to a sense of themselves as artists and social change agents who move through the world with compassion and confidence.

The company creates a new physical, visual and sonic vocabulary that collages Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop, and contemporary dance with theater, compelling text, and original music to bring dynamic multi-modal experiences to the concert stage.

While their performances are consistently electrifying, what sets the company apart most is their unique relationship to their own community. CONTRA-TIEMPO takes an uncompromisingly radical approach to the ways in which artists function within communities and create their work. They intentionally engage diverse audiences, cultivate dancer leaders, and center stories not traditionally heard on the concert stage, using their engagement process to inform and continuously re-fuel their creative process, and vice-versa.

Much like the communities they reach, CONTRA-TIEMPO is itself a tapestry. The company members are professional dancers, artists, immigrants, educators, activists, organizers, and movers of all types, living and working across Los Angeles and across the country. Each company member lives, expresses, and struggles within the varied and infinitely complex political and personal landscapes that Founding Artistic Director, Ana Maria Alvarez, seeks to address in their work.