OurSPOT
CONTRA-TIEMPO has partnered with OurSPOT, an after school program with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation for youth ages 12-18. Joining a program focusing on youth development and youth leadership, CONTRA-TIEMPO is leading students to engage in a comprehensive collaboration, combining arts instruction, discussion circles, health workshops, and social action projects to increase self-confidence, community connectivity, and a collective well-being. Within this full-year program, we will engage in a strength-based approach combined with social dance practices rooted in the African and Afro-Latinx Diaspora to discuss mental health, social justice, bullying, Black history, LGBTQ+ struggles, and marginalized communities.
For more information about the OurSPOT program, please click here. To register for the OurSPOT program, please click here.
Community Power Collective and CONTR-TIEMPO: Movement For Movement
Our first official collaboration with Community Power Collective whose mission is to build power with low-income tenants and workers through transformative, cross-sectoral organizing. Together we are building and designing a program that we are naming movimiento para el movimiento. This program is a part of CPC's propagating cultural power program area which involves embedding Arts & Culture as a daily organizational practice and lifting up Arts & Culture as a viable resource to meet needs. Together we will create a program where women, men and children have a space to “reclaim their bodies” doing physical activities together in a physically distanced and socially connected way. Together we will explore the ways in which people have learned to dance/move as sites of power.
Program outcomes: Developing a “vocabulary” of movement that can be used in social justice spaces (i.e. marches, actions, manifestations etc.) while leveraging dance and movement as mechanisms to explore “the body politic”, systems of oppression and moments of resistance and regeneration.
Where: Salazar Park, 3864 Whittier Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90023
For details about how to participate in the program, click here.
*** Please Note: This will be a Spanish-Speaking event.
2021 Council District 8 Residency
Since June 26, Los Angeles City Council member Marqueece Harris Dawson in District 8 has celebrated two newly built pools and facility restorations at Argin Sutton Park in Vermont Vista and the Vannes Recreation Center in the Crenshaw district. In part of restoring the social infrastructure of the South LA neighborhood, the South LA parks offer summer camp experiences for children ages 6-14 with classes where CONTRA-TIEMPO currently serves as an artist in residence. Come join us in promoting community life, increasing your self-awareness, and establishing a foundation for students and children of South LA.
Sabor Sessions
(sabor: Spanish word for "flavor")
In this session, we will guide participants in social dance practices rooted in the African and Afro-Latine Diaspora. These ancestral movement practices were designed and passed down to build resilience, affirm joy, instill hope and to strengthen social and political resistance. From line dancing to comparsa processions; from freestyling to Salsa; from cyphering to partnering - CONTRA-TIEMPO's sabor session will give participants an experience of themselves as strong, complex, powerfully expressed, moving beings who are a part of a community. Words or phrases that we often hear at the end of the sabor sessions, when reflecting as a group are: belonging, power, resilience, my ancestors dream, future, possibility, this is the movement, unapologeticallytaking up space and more!
Each Friday night, since April 2017, CONTRA-TIEMPO has been hosting "Sabor Sessions" or "Get Downs" in South L.A. Sabor Sessions are FREE community dance classes, where community residents can learn Urban Latin Dance, Hip-Hop, House, Afro-Cuban, Salsa, and Salsa Rueda from our company's teaching artists. These sessions are designed to allow participants to groove and move, explore new dance forms, gain confidence, build community, and move with JOY! They are open to anyone in the public, and most specifically, those families living in the community of South Los Angeles.
Our work in South L.A. is generously funded, in part, by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the California Arts Council.
Artivist Leadership Institute
CONTRA-TIEMPO has partnered with Community Coalition's SCYEA program to bring a summer experience to young leaders ages 13-18. Artistry and activism will come together to create what does not yet exist. We will dance, we will share stories, and we will strategize how we can use our creative expression, whatever that looks like, to advocate within and for our community. At the completion of this program, students will be awarded a $50 stipend and leave with tools to better serve their community.
Click below to view the Artivist Leadership Institute in action as well as voices from the community and our teaching artists!
Testimonials
“I have more of a sense of the importance of solidarity in solving issues because the program emphasized how community is crucial to moving forward on a larger scale”
“Because of ALI I am braver, more knowledgeable, inspired, hopeful, excited for the future”
“I recommend ALI to others, because it opens your mind, keeps you informed, cleanses your soul and gives you hope.”
