CONTRA-TIEMPO

CONTRA-TIEMPO is a 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.

What sets the company apart most is its unique relationship to its own community. CONTRA-TIEMPO takes an uncompromisingly radical approach to the ways in which artists function within communities and create their work. The company intentionally engages diverse audiences, cultivates dancer leaders, and centers stories not traditionally heard on the concert stage, using its engagement process to inform and continuously re-fuel its creative process, and vice-versa.

The company members of CONTRA-TIEMPO 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 the company's work. While the performances of CONTRA-TIEMPO are consistently electrifying, the company's focus on community engagement is what truly sets it apart.