CONTRA-TIEMPO presents joyUS justUS at Portland Ovations!
Dance Workshop with CONTR-TIEMPO
February 4, 2025 • 6:45 - 8 PM
📍 Casco Bay Movers
Los Angeles-based Activist Dance Theater company, CONTRA-TIEMPO will get you moving and grooving with their “Sabor Session” (from the Spanish word for “flavor”) where dancers will guide participants in Afro-Latin social dance forms that are rooted in radical joy and exercises that promote community engagement. Additionally, CONTRA-TIEMPO will share an excerpt of their work.
Appropriate for all ages. No prior dance knowledge necessary.
CONTRA-TIEMPO “joyUS justUS”
February 6, 2025 • 7 PM
📍 Merrill Auditorium
“joyUS justUS” is an evening length participatory Activist Dance Theater experience that takes on joy as the ultimate expression of resistance. Whenever humans have survived immense hardship and injustice, prevailing with their humanity intact, the presence of joy or, the knowingness and celebration of our true beauty and power has always been at the root. “joyUS justUS” reclaims the dominant deficit based narrative of people of color in this country as being underprivileged, voiceless, powerless, and victimized, and flips it on its head by embodying stories of joy collected from communities of color in South Los Angeles. The stories shared in this work are personal truths about the power of hope, faith, and family, the strength of the villages that have raised our children and the wealth that lives in our collective histories of struggle and resistance.
Watch the video below to learn more about our work and what inspires us to keep moving!
"joyUS justUS" could not have been created without the generous support of the following: The James Irvine Foundation, Mapfund, Doris Duke Foundation/DanceUSA, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs, and Ordway Center for the Performing Arts who generously commissioned the work.