CONTRA-TIEMPO: ¡azúcar!
Directed and conceived by Ana Maria Alvarez In collaboration with Afro-Cuban Master Teacher Kati Hernandez and a team of 20 brilliant artists.
📍 Bram Goldsmith Theater, The Wallis — Beverly Hills, CA
🗓️ Thursday, December 17 @ 7:30 PM
🗓️ Friday , December 18 @ 7:30 PM
🗓️ Saturday, December 19 @ 2:00 PM
About the Work
¡azúcar! is CONTRA-TIEMPO's courageous naming, and intentional obliteration, of the undercurrent of anti-Blackness so often left unspoken in Latinidad. Directed and conceived by Founding Artistic Director Ana Maria Alvarez in collaboration with 20 brilliant artists from across the country, including Afro-Cuban Master Teacher and guest artist Kati Hernandez, the work moves through the vibrations of Celia Cruz to unearth history embedded in our bodies.
At its center is sugar itself: a plant once used to heal, to sweeten medicinal remedies, later extracted and refined into an instrument of the transatlantic slave trade and its enduring weight on Black and Latino communities. Through athletic, emotionally charged movement, CONTRA-TIEMPO's dancers confront that history while celebrating resilience, joy, and the sacred feminine - asking what it feels like, individually and collectively, to heal, and what that healing moves like.
The experience begins before the curtain does: performers move through the audience, transforming the theater into a shared, immersive space where the line between spectator and participant dissolves. You are not watching this story from the outside - you're inside its rhythm, its memory, its healing.
Rooted in personal narratives of food, labor, community, and sabor, and in ongoing explorations of "familying" as practice, ¡azúcar! is truth-telling and celebration in motion.
About CONTRA-TIEMPO
CONTRA-TIEMPO is a Los Angeles-based, multilingual activist dance theater company known for socially conscious work that fuses Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop, and contemporary dance with theatrical storytelling — creating work that invites connection, reflection, and collective imagination.
Event Details
📍 Bram Goldsmith Theater, The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90210
🗓️ Thursday, December 17 @ 7:30 PM
🗓️ Friday , December 18 @ 7:30 PM
🗓️ Saturday, December 19 @ 2:00 PM
