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, confidence, and joy.

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

Much like the communities we reach, CONTRA-TIEMPO is itself a tapestry. Our 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 our work.

CONTRA-TIEMPO is being presented in San Diego by ArtPower at UCSD

Class with CONTRA-TIEMPO
Ages 18+
6:30-8:00pm

CONTRA-TIEMPO’s ¡azúcar! is a courageous naming of, confrontation with, and intentional obliteration of the often unspoken undercurrent of anti-Blackness in latinidad. Questions are continuing to drive the process as we begin to understand the complicated history of sugar and the messages from our ancestors. What does it feel like to individually and collectively heal, what does it move like? Twenty brilliant artists and collaborators take audiences through a journey of Celia Cruz’s vibrations, unearthing history embedded in our bodies. Through ¡azúcar!, CONTRA-TIEMPO explores ancestral wisdoms about a plant that once aided in our healing, used as a way to sweeten medicinal concoctions, now extracted, refined, and used as weaponized poison. This courageous work is rooted in and inspired by the sacred feminine, personal narratives of food, labor, community, sabor, and explorations of “familying” and healing as practices.

See ¡azúcar! April 11 at 8pm