CURRENT PROJECTS

In addition to Ana Maria’s Alvarez work with CONTRA-TIEMPO, Alvarez has engaged in a number of exciting creative projects and continues to find new ways to partner, play and expand the vision of her work. Here are a few:

UCSD Theatre and Dance

In 2023 Ana Maria Alvarez accepted a tenured position in the Theatre + Dance Department at UC San Diego. Together with a number of incredible movement practitioners, embodied storytellers, artists, thinkers and change makers, Ana Maria is leading the dance area into a new time. Their program is training and inspiring the next generation of artists and scholars who are bringing to life a future of more love and justice!

Besides her work in the classroom, she has also started Connection Jam - a weekly community offering that began Spring 2024. Theatre and Dance professor, Ana Maria Alvarez, and a roster of amazing artists from on and off campus lead a weekly gathering space for connection, radical joy and community! In connection jam participants are led through a collective practice of our ancestral technologies movement and play. No experience necessary, this is an open and non-judgemental space. Come ready to move, sweat, laugh and practice joy as if it were a muscle. You will leave feeling more grounded, connected and joyful!

The Body Politic

Cornerstone Theater, in collaboration with CONTRA-TIEMPO artistic director and award winning choreographer and activist Ana María Álvarez, wants to make a new catalog of embodied practices to be used towards social justice with you!

Come move with us!

We want to explore with you how our bodies rise in the streets, in the clubs, on the halls of Justice together with and in motion towards a more just world. There’s music for social change, songs passed down from generations of activists – we want to imagine and create an embodied practice, dances that keep folks together in movements for change.

Bring your presence and the will to gather, move, and experiment around questions of our bodies and our collective liberation in these creative joy filled gatherings.

Let’s learn together what we can do with our bodies when we’re doing the work for change.

Click button below to check out upcoming events!

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Past Projects

CAÑA

A new film commissioned by the Getty connecting the works of painter Nicolas Poussin with contemporary dance, challenging his position of cultural authority by radically reclaiming space in an institution that has often felt inaccessible to artists like Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO.

The film can was featured in the Getty exhibition galleries in February and March 2022 and can be watched online by clicking the button below!

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Urban Humanities: Digital Salon Podcast Season 2

A podcast to narrativize collectivity at various scales within an urban humanist framework: the intimate, the familial, the communal, the urban, the global, the metaphysical.

Artist statement: "I've always seen 'family' as solidly in relationship with the larger framework of society/world. I grew up on picket lines and come from a family rooted in building and sustaining radical transformation for racial and economic justice. I founded a dance company 15 years ago as a way to create my own familia of artists and organizers. I now have my own children (ages 10 and 4) and have built my immediate family here in LA. Being quarantined with my children and husband and across the country from my parents, sibling's family and company members - it has both deepened my belief in family and completely transformed the way I'm functioning, leading and engaging in these familia spaces. How can our understanding and embodiment of familia transform the way we behave, move and engage in society presently and post-pandemic? What are the practices that we are doing virtually and in person to connect and create families that are sustaining us during this time of social isolation? Is family a practice? What does that practice look like, feel like, sound like? How are we practicing already and what are the ways we urgently need to be practicing?".

Listen to Episode 9: Family-ing/Familiando with Ana Maria Alvarez Alvarez today.

Did you move today? Podcast

Listen to Ana Maria’s extended interview with Did you move today, DYMT, as they talk about the intersection of dance, community, resistance, and joy.

DYMT’s mission is to bring movers, doctors, and artists together, and to promote love for movement, art, and science.

Listen to EP 61 Meet Ana Maria Alvarez and move with her!
with Ana Maria Alvarez Alvarez today.

John Kohler Arts Center Residency

The current Connecting Communities project at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center comprises a cohort of artists working together. In this multi-year project, four artists-in-residence work to engage Sheboygan communities in collaborative art-making, creative movement, and ongoing conversation. This project will happen in collaboration with Jannet Galdamez and Ruby Morales from CONTRA-TIEMPO. Due to the pandemic, the project will culminate in August 2021, with a movement film engaging local residents of Sheboygan.

Binational Arts Residency

The Binational Arts Residency (BNAR) began in 2015 with the idea of connecting cultural communities in the Sonoran Desert with issues of social justice and identity through art. Over the course of the residency, artists, cultural leaders, and students collaborate to create artistic workshops, performances, and public talks in their communities to build dialogue around social issues. Each BNAR creates an artistic collaboration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now in its fourth year, BNAR works with communities in: Phoenix (US), Tucson (US), Douglas (US), and Agua Prieta (MX), Hermosillo (MX). Alvarez was honored to be invited as the Artist in Residence in 2018.

2018 Inaugural New Movement Residency Artist

The New Movement Residency at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance aims to support choreographers by providing space for them to explore, create and prepare dance work for future touring and presentations.

Café Vida

Acclaimed playwright Lisa Loomer pens the first production in Cornerstone Theater Company's The Hunger Cycle, Café Vida. Chabela and Luz are rival homegirls ready to leave the life and begin anew at Café Vida- the only place in the city that gives young women and their troubled pasts a genuine second chance to start a new life free of violence. It's here that these former enemies choose "la vida" over "la muerte" as they learn to compost, tend a garden, julienne an onion, and rock your lunch order with a smile and a heaping side of transformation. Directed by Michael Garces. Choreographed by Ana Maria Alvarez

A Space To Be: Internalizing Toxic Capitalism

On this episode I offer some conversation about the signs and signals that toxic capitalism might be making you feel sick about yourself.

As always, I strive to be honest and as unedited as possible. I have only made edits when I actually make sounds that are not audible as words, and you will hear that I am sharing my space with crickets singing into the dawn's quiet. I wrote things down before I recorded, some of what comes forth is in the moment. I share all of this as body-based space-making so that we have more room to consider what it might be like to live without feeling like 'time is money'. Powerful conversation with 4 amazing human/female/firebenders Holly Johnston, Ana-Maria Alvarez, Nicole Atlas Robinson and Cynthia Gutierrez on the topic of ‘how are you dealing with feeling angry?’

Listen to ‘a place to be’ on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/show/4dCfyDEf4kJch28nSc8L9y?si=jl3DIwN5QB6J3AdzXaHfHA

Check out the next episode of “A Space to Be” where I am in conversation with Holly Johnston, Nicole Atlas Robinson, and Cynthia Gutierrez. This episode brings forth a space to feel our anger, rage, and resiliency.