CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater Choreographed by Ana María Alvarez & holly johnston
📍 Epstein Family Amphitheater, UC San Diego
🗓️ Friday, October 16, 2026 · 7:30 PM
About the Work
What does it mean to build a family - and to choose love, again and again, across generations? Roots of Loving Us is CONTRA-TIEMPO's world-premiere evening-length work, uniting the artistic visions of Founding Artistic Director Ana Maria Alvarez and Responsive Body's holly johnston. Both women of color, mothers, activists, and community leaders, they've come together to create a multimodal choreographic journey through somatic healing and the ancestral technologies of dance, music, and imagery.
Rooted in real conversations with adoptees, foster families, bioadaptive families, queer parents, single-parent households, and people with diverse birthing experiences, the work traces origin stories shaped by biological uprooting, unchosen separation, and the re-rooting of bodies - reshaping what a family tree can mean. Brought to life by CONTRA-TIEMPO's dancers through their embodied knowledge of Afro-Latine movement practice and the contemporary dance movement of holly’s Responsive Body, Roots of Loving Us is a testament to lives transformed by the enduring choice to love.
This first iteration also marks a striking collaboration with performance artist and fashion designer Yozmit The DogStar, blending fashion and dance into extravagant, cross-sensory costumes that embody the piece's themes. Built through community workshops and storytelling circles - including partnerships with Echoes of Hope, Community Coalition, and pre/perinatal somatic psychologist Mary Jackson - the costumes carry the written stories of participants, disintegrating over the course of the work into new sculptures that symbolize transformation and healing.
Event Details
📍 Epstein Family Amphitheater, UC San Diego, 9480 Innovation Ln, La Jolla, CA 92093
🗓️ Friday, October 16, 2026 · 7:30 PM
🎟️ $30–55 · Limited free tickets for UC San Diego students via SSO