Agua Furiosa

Agua Furiosa challenges audiences to confront harsh realities of race in our country. The work was inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Oya, the Afro-Cuban deity of wind and storms. Led by artistic director and choreographer Ana María Alvarez, the work utilizes the company’s unique, unapologetic movement work rooted in Afro-Latin Diaspora. Through a collaborative process of generating movement in relationship to the company members' unique skill sets and personal narratives, Alvarez and the company create a visually stunning and thought provoking evening of dance theater performance. Agua Furiosa merges call and response, a live vocalist, storytelling, water themes and fierce physicality. Audiences walk away from Agua Furiosa, impacted and inspired to locate themselves inside the complex and transforming conversation of race in America. Creative collaborators include the original cast of Agua Furiosa in addition to sound designer d. sabela grimes, vocalist Pyeng Threadgill, lighting designer Masha Tsimring and dramaturg Michael Garces.

She Who: Frida, Mami & Me

Through generous support of the Princess Grace Foundation, Choreographer Marjani Forté set an original new work on the company called SHE WHO: Frida, Mami & Me. SHE WHO: Frida, Mami, & Me is a dance work looking at the life, mythology, and properties of Mexican Visual Artist Frida Kahlo and Mami Wata, a powerful water deity found across the African Diaspora. Their stories, timeless and provocative, have spurred a nuanced and multicultural dialogue between African American choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders and CONTRA-TIEMPO. Together, they traverse the turbulent waters of protest, feminism, resilience, and identity through these earthly and mystic beholders of culture. The work received humbling praise as part of the Ford Amphitheater's summer 2016 Signature Series in a shared evening with the Urban Bush Women. This ‘premiere’ was thought of by the artists as a first public showing, with hopes of continuing to develop the work.

Full Still Hungry

Full Still Hungry, premiered September 23, 2011 to a sold out Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, CA. Artistic director Ana Maria Alvarez states, "Food is not just the material I put in my body to sustain life - but a web of relationships, histories, choices, decisions that all impact the world around us." These complexities are brought to life through the company's evocative and eclectic movement approach with original music composed by founding member and resident composer, César Alvarez, and is performed live with a six piece band, of all star musicians. Whether you are devouring the fruit of Carmen's headpiece, indulging in Moros Y Cristianos (the Cuban version of black beans and rice), or tasting each performers' deeply personal connection to food and family, Full Still Hungry serves up a blend of both physical intensity with invigorating contemplation about food justice and our relationship with sustenance.

I Dream America

I Dream America is a 40-minute movement opera, which primarily seeks to engage the tensions, commonalities, strains and histories between the Black and Latino communities. Traversing the political landscape of immigration and Hurricane Katrina, I Dream America will investigate compassion and peace and paint a disarming and thought-provoking critique of contemporary life and injustice. Parts of the piece were debuted in Mexico as part of the Festival Internacional de Teatro de Los Ángeles (FITLA). The first full performance of this work debuted in Los Angeles at the Unknown Theater in July 2007. Between 2008-2010 the company performed the work in North Carolina, Georgia, New York, Washington D.C, Virginia, California, Washington DC, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Minnesota.

Against the Times

Ana Maria Alvarez’s first evening length piece, grew out of her thesis work at UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Cultures and gave root to CONTRA-TIEMPO as a socially engaged dance company. Salsa is a dance form that is rooted in Cuban and Puerto Rican cultural tradition. It is laden with social and political contradictions; a dance of resistance. Salsa is an improvisational form that is created and recreated with every new combination of people that dance it; a dance of change. Born from the fusion of African and Spanish musical influences, Salsa was originally created as a cultural voice and form of expression for working class people; a dance of the times. Salsa has always been a patriarchal dance form, in that men are leaders and women are followers. In more recent times, the over sexualized representations of women have gotten more extreme, especially in styles that have been popularized by ballroom dancing and Hollywood films. The cast of CONTRA-TIEMPO flips the script on who leads who... Together they move resistance from being adversarial to being the fundamental key for communication and empowerment between partners and for a people.

Duet

The Duet is a piece about power. An audience favorite, it captures beautifully the humorous and sometimes frustrating opposition between fighting and giving in.

Brackish Water

A work commissioned in 2008 by New Dance at Saint Joseph Ballet in Orange County. This piece is set on the MEN of CONTRA-TIEMPO and is a fierce display of physicality and strength. Six men dance, crash, lift, fall, throw and explode the intersections and contradictions of manhood, survival and community within the context of war.

Plástico

A work premiered in 2008, at the Alex Theater in Glendale, produced by Jamie Nichols and was later performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in New York City. This piece is a comic and grotesque commentary on the 'Plastic' facade of Salsa. A dance form that started as a voice for regular people and an expression of history, power and opinions, has been transformed into a depoliticized, hyper-sexual exaggeration of the Latino body. Behind the smiles and flash there are stories of struggle, pain and resilience.

This is 15 years of creative collaborations, If we missed a name, please help us to correctly credit the artists who are a part of this work by sending an email to info@contra-tiempo.org. we will ensure to make the correction as soon as we receive it.

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