Since 2005, our mission has been

To create a future where all people are awakened to a sense of themselves as artists and social change agents through engaging community in the creative process, facilitating dialogue, and creating physically intense and politically astute performance work.

CONTRA-TIEMPO is a bold, multilingual Los Angeles-based activist dance theater company that creates communities where all people are awakened to a sense of themselves as artists and social change agents who move through the world with compassion, confidence, and joy.

We create a new physical, visual and sonic vocabulary that collages Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop, and contemporary dance with theater, compelling text, and original music to bring dynamic multi-modal experiences to the concert stage.

While our performances are consistently electrifying, what sets the company apart most is our unique relationship to our own community. CONTRA-TIEMPO takes an uncompromisingly radical approach to the ways in which artists function within communities and create their work. We intentionally engage diverse audiences, cultivate dancer leaders, and center stories not traditionally heard on the concert stage, using our engagement process to inform and continuously re-fuel our creative process, and vice-versa.

Much like the communities we reach, CONTRA-TIEMPO is itself a tapestry. Our company members are professional dancers, artists, immigrants, educators, activists, organizers, and movers of all types, living and working across Los Angeles and across the country. Each company member lives, expresses, and struggles within the varied and infinitely complex political and personal landscapes that Founding Artistic Director, Ana Maria Alvarez, seeks to address in our work.

We aim to accomplish our mission through 3 programmatic trunks: Artistic Production, Community Engagement, and Dance Education and Leadership Development. We operate within these 3 trunks separately, AND each trunk informs another. At the intersection of all of these trunks lie our company values.

We work intensely with communities, especially low income communities and communities of color in Los Angeles and nationally to co-create movement and generate dialogue about issues and themes embodied in our creative work.

Through our FUTURO program, our new Artivist Leadership Institute and school residencies, we have developed a multi-day curriculum that includes movement and age appropriate conversations reflecting our company values and the topics often discussed in our creative work.

Artistic production includes creating and presenting Afro Latin Activist Dance Theater work for national and international stages.

““...represents the kind of socially aware contemporary work that only a few dance artists reliably provide...in heart, mind and soul this is the real thing!””

— Los Angeles Times