Contra-Tiempo aims for Joy and Social Justice

By Julia Stier

Contra-Tiempo: Photo, courtesy of the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

This weekend, Contra-Tiempo – which is celebrating its 15^th anniversary in February – is bringing its latest show, joyUSjustUS, to The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Stage Raw spoke with the company’s founder and director, Ana María Alvarez, about creation and engagement.

Alvarez is of Cuban decent. Her father was a labor organizer. In other interviews, she’s talked about her grandfather being her first dance partner. Not surprising, then, that she majored in dance and politics at Oberlin College in Ohio, before receiving her MFA in Dance from UCLA (’05).  The title of one of her early works became the name of her company.

Anna Maria Alvarez

STAGE RAW: Let’s start with origins. What led you to create Contra-Tiempo?

ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: My master’s thesis at UCLA was about tackling the idea of salsa as a metaphor for resistance, and looking at dance really as a way to transform the way we were having conversations about politics and pushing back and engaging, specifically around the ideas of immigration. So that really led me to create this piece called “Contra-Tiempo,” that then wound up becoming a company because I was touring it and performing places. It wasn’t that I went into school thinking I was going to create a company, it’s just this piece kind of blew up. I wound up finding that it made more sense to create a company rather than continuing to do this work without an infrastructure to support it. Now I have several large bodies of work and smaller pieces touring all over the country and the world. We do summer intensives for young people, and tons of arts education and residency work all over the country.

SR: What do you hope audiences take away from a Contra-Tiempo performance?

AMA: I hope that the audience sees themselves in the work, no matter who they are or where they come from. What I love about our company is that we’re an incredibly diverse group of movers, dancers, humans. The idea is that even though we are speaking about specific issues or specific ideas from our own personal lives, these ideas, these experiences, these stories connect, and can relate to many different kinds of people. Connection is what I desire to create for audiences. I’m also really interested in people seeing themselves as a part of something bigger than themselves. That idea of hope and resilience and the power of people, and the power of people working and connecting together meaningfully is what I hope they get.

Contra-Tiempo: Photo, courtesy: The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

I’m [also] really interested in reframing narratives. I think we have a lot of ways that we think about the world around us that are shaped and framed by patriarchy and racism and these larger systems that sometimes feel like they’re not in alignment with how we feel or how we want to live our lives, but they absolutely control us in many ways. So I’m really interested in interrupting that, and really proposing that we can generate and recreate narratives, and also re-educate ourselves to be able to make new and more powerful decisions about the future, and not be at the mercy of these systems.

SR: I read somewhere about the “Contra-Tiempo engagement methodology.” What does that mean?

AMA: We use the word engagement specifically because it’s about connection. Many companies think of their engagement work or their outreach work as something separate than their artistic work. For us, our artistic practice, our art-making, is intrinsically linked with the ideas and values of our engagement pedagogy. They’re not separate. Our engagement is the art-making, our art-making is the engagement. The art-making is really a tool to connect. Art has really this powerful capacity to change the way we think, to change the way we behave, to change the way we relate to one another, and to ultimately really transform the world as we know it.

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Contra-Tiempo: Photo, courtesy The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

SR: The press materials say that this particular show is about embodying stories of joy and justice. Where are these stories coming from?

 AMA: I’m very interested in building the work from the micro to the macro, so coming from a place of personal stories is always my interest as an artist.

When we created this work, we created it inside of a partnership with Community Coalition in South LA. Every Friday night we did these sabor sessions, which were these radical joy sessions that we did for two years. We threw these workshops, but they were really more like experiences. We connected with community members around stories of joy and justice and community, and there are these things called choreographic labs, where [throughout the two years] we would bring pieces of the work, get feedback, and engage the participants in their own creative process to generate work, and then do what we call council, which is a story circling practice

Courtesy: The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Several of our dancers are trained to lead council, which means they get to facilitate these story circles, practiced by indigenous peoples all over the world – where there’s a talking piece and people speak from the heart and listen from the heart. It’s an incredible mechanism to build community, but also to hear one another’s stories and share each other’s stories. Through council practice, we kept hearing stories about mothers. We kept hearing stories about family, specifically around grandmothers and mothers. So that helped us to drive the direction of the piece towards our own mother and grandmother stories. 

Contra-Tiempo Dance Company’s joyUS justUS will be playing at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. Fri-Sat., January 17-18, 7:30 p.m. Visit thewallis.org Audience members are welcome to join Alvarez for a pre-show talk about the creative process behind the show at 6:15. After the Saturday performance, audiences are invited to a toast to celebrate the company’s 15^th anniversary.