RELATIONSHIP
Our power comes from the relationships that we have with each other as human beings. Our art, engagement, and education work seeks to build, grow, and strengthen these relationships and to help people find human connections. Dance becomes a passport that allows us to navigate multiple worlds and perspectives, strengthening relationships across and within communities. This is the crux of our work.
ARTISTIC RIGOR & CREATIVITY
Our work is grounded in artistic rigor and creativity that involves intentional and innovative applications of existing knowledge and skills to generate new art and knowledge. This process leads us to create dance that is cross-genre, innovative, and stimulating. We are committed to challenge and provoke ourselves and our audiences to question and experience deeply, continuously seeking to perfect our understanding and our craft, remaining open to the world, claiming and centering joy in our work, and remaining unafraid to imagine and explore beyond the known.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Community engagement and artistic production are inextricably linked. We cannot authentically exist outside of the communities that we inhabit. The experiences, cultural creations, and “we- stories” of our communities are the inspiration and motivation for our dance making. We intentionally and intensely engage diverse audiences to inform, inspire, ignite, question, and continuously re-fuel our creative process.
ACTION
Each of us lives and expresses within the varied and infinitely complex political and personal landscapes of our lives, oftentimes resisting against injustice and inequity. We live and express those struggles as authentically as possible and celebrate them as points of opportunity, learning, growth, and community. Art and action are two sides of the same coin, as they both require the ability to imagine new possibilities and then create what does not yet exist. Our dance is steeped in a tradition of activism and resistance.
IDENTITY
Each of us has multiple identities, including those tied to culture, language, and history. These identities both define us and liberate us, make us unique, and connect us to a larger community in ways that transcend time and space. We support each other, our partners, our audiences, and our communities in fully exploring, connecting, and transcending these identities as essential to our development as powerful human beings. We recognize that part of what sustains systemic inequity is the privileging of some identities and narratives over others, and we strive to teach context and history through our dance, raising up those narratives and identities that may have been silenced.
SPACE
We operate in the in-between, boldly claiming physical and metaphorical space to create, perform, nurture, and connect within and across communities. We create joyous, vibrant, safe, accepting spaces where we can come “home,” free to express the fullness of our humanity and tell our narratives through dance, in all its historical and cultural forms.
Care
Imagining radical futures, resisting oppressive systems, and practicing joy is laborious and rigorous work. By practicing care, we are reminded that our bodies are not instruments of aggression, nor are we industrialized tools for productivity, but vessels of empathy, understanding, and love. We are reminded that power lies not in domination, but in the delicate act of tending to one another. When a person or entity is under-resourced their ability to love is severely impacted. By having care at the root of how we engage within our organization and within our communities, we are better equipped to advocate for and build a more loving and just future.
Spirit
We all inhale spirit differently, and we exhale resilience. Spirit thrums through our bodies, urging it to move, to speak, to stand in defiance of the status quo. It’s a primal energy, a connection to something larger than ourselves, that manifests in the fluidity of our undulations, the rhythm of the drums, and the power of our laughter. Spirit is not confined to the church or the stage - it spills out onto the streets, fueling protests and lending grace and power to the fight for justice. We are not simply bodies moving on a stage, but vessels of power, vessels that can move mountains and change the world, one stomp, one undulation, one tear, one touch at a time.
ENGAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
CONTRA-TIEMPO seeks to change the way that artists exist and function within communities. For us, community engagement and artistic production are inextricably linked. We cannot exist outside of the communities that we inhabit. The experiences, cultural creations, and “we-stories” of our communities are the inspiration and motivation for our art making. And it is our duty as artists to share our creative power to help grow the creative and social power of our communities.
CONTRA-TIEMPO believes that art and action are two sides of the same coin, as they both require the ability to imagine new possibilities and then create what does not yet exist. Both operate in the “in-between”. By engaging communities as participants and witnesses of arts experiences tied to their beautiful humanity, we endeavor to simultaneously awaken their sense of themselves as artists and as social change agents.