caña
"caña" is a visceral, dream-like dance film that moves through memory, grief, ancestry, and the complicated sweetness of survival. Conceived and directed by Ana María Alvarez, founding artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater, the film weaves together the stories of a group of women across the sun-drenched landscapes of Los Angeles - from the rooted trees of Kenneth Hahn Park to the open skies of Topanga Canyon, from a 1950s kitchen fragrant with browning sugar to the wild freedom of an open field.
At the center of "caña" is sugar - not simply as an ingredient, but as an archive. Once a plant revered for its healing properties, sweetening medicinal remedies and carrying the wisdom of the earth, sugar was extracted, refined, and weaponized through colonization, slavery, and the brutal economics of the transatlantic world. The film holds all of this at once: sugar as tenderness and poison, as grandmother's flan and as forced labor, as the caramel that transforms in heat and the white granules poured in grief over a woman's body.
Originally commissioned by The Getty Art Museum in 2022 to connect the works of painter Nicolas Poussin with contemporary dance, "caña" invites us into an intimate, unselfconscious world of women in community. But where Poussin depicted myth at a distance, Alvarez locates the sacred in the living and the lost. Each performer embodies a distinct ancestral frequency: one woman is rooted in the soil, channeling the voices of lineage; another carries the exhausted grace of motherhood; another is the bold, luminous possibility of a future her grandmother dreamed into being. Together, they spiral - never arriving, never truly finished - through a movement language drawn from salsa, son, flamenco, and improvisation, all rooted in the clave's unrelenting pulse.
Sugar cane is ripped, bitten, swung, and poured throughout the film - a meditation on indulgence and destruction, on the way sweetness has been both gift and weapon to communities of the African and Latin diaspora. Blue macaws take flight. Children run free. A daughter browns sugar in a cast-iron pan, watching it transform from solid to liquid to something new. The film does not resolve this tension - it dances inside it, insisting that complexity can nourish, that the heat of grief can change our shape without destroying us.
"caña" is dedicated to the memory of María Antonia Álvarez (1930–2020), Ana María's grandmother — the woman who taught her to make flan, to love fiercely, and to understand that losing everything, more than once, can be a kind of freedom.
This film was featured at the Getty Museum from February 15th-May 8th 2022.
CREDITS:
Direction and choreographic vision Ana María Alvarez
Cinematography and editing Meena Murugesen
Musical composition, writing and arrangement Anaïs Maviel
Featured artists and improvisors Ana María Alvarez, Bobbie Bell, Dr. Shamell Bell, Jannet Galdamez, Liliana de Leon-Torsiello, Ruby Morales, Jasmine Stanley, Shantel Ureña, Dr. S. Ama Wray
Youth performers Luca Alvarez-Lowe, Sidney Alvarez-Lowe, Seijani Goodin, Iyannah McClendon
Birds Ana, Bella, Bruno, Roxy, Rudy, Sunshine
Musicians Anaïs Maviel, Rashaan Carter, Aruán Ortiz, Angel Lau, Jaimie Branch, Michael Pallas
Color correction Anastasia Shepherd
Community and production team CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater, Jessica Amaya, Rashaan Carter, Dolores Chavez, Jannet Galdamez, d. Sabela grimes, Vinkya Hunter, Gabriel Ibarra, Jolieba Jackson, Yolanda Keh, Jared Kok, Chan Quach, David Reynoso, Emmanuel Ruffler, Riley Shen, Farah Sosa
press
“…a dialogue that transcended centuries of distance, radically separated by cultural contexts and artistic tools, yet found compelling resonance in their mutual investigations of the distinct emotion and meaning that only dance can elicit.”
Getty Exhibition Brings Together 17th-Century Painting and Contemporary Dance
“…sugar cane is ripped, bitten, and swung about as a meditation on this indulgent substance—echoing themes of vice and virtue, and the pitfalls of bacchanalia that were investigated by Poussin.”
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