CONTRA-TIEMPO is a bold, multilingual Los Angeles-based activist dance theatre 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 theatre, 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 María Álvarez seeks to address in our work.

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