Pillow Lab:
CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater
At Common Room at Zion Lutheran Church Pittsfield, MA: Feb 23
Event Dates
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About
Pillow Lab:
CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater
Residency: February 14 – 25, 2024
Showing: February 23, 2024 at the 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival
During their Pillow Lab, CONTRA-TIEMPO will continue to develop their newest work, ¡azúcar!. Led by the vision of Alvarez, founding Artistic Director, alongside twenty artists and collaborators from across the country, ¡azúcar! brings to life the vibrations of Cuban musician Celia Cruz, and embodies personal narratives about sugar, Afro-Latin ancestral technologies, dance, music, and healing as a community practice. The development of ¡azúcar! is driven by questions of unearthing the history embedded in the artists’ bodies to courageously name, confront, and intentionally obliterate the often unspoken undercurrent of anti-Blackness in Latinidad. In CONTRA-TIEMPO’s residency, the artists will be deepening the narrative physicality and expanding the piece of ¡azúcar!.
About Ana Maria Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater
Artistic Director Ana Maria Alvarez is a prolific choreographer, skilled dancer, masterful teaching artist, and movement activist. A 2020 Doris Duke Artist, an inaugural Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and a two-time grantee of NEFA National Dance Project, Alvarez has achieved multiple accolades for her dynamic works. In 2005, Alvarez founded CONTRA-TIEMPO, a Los Angeles-based activist theater dance company that draws upon salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip hop, and contemporary dance to awaken audiences and create communities. Alvarez recently joined the faculty of the Theatre & Dance Department of UC San Diego as she continues her research through her work with CONTRA-TIEMPO. The company has been celebrated by the Los Angeles Times as a company that “represents the kind of socially aware contemporary work that only a few dance artists such as Bill T. Jones reliably provide…” Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO were invited for multiple tours in Central and South America as cultural ambassadors through the U.S. State Department and have toured their work for almost 2 decades.
Location
Common Room at Zion Lutheran Church Pittsfield, MA
This Pillow Lab showing is part of Pittsfield’s 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival. Visit our page below to learn more.
Want to see the work? Jacob’s Pillow Members at the $500 level and above, as well as our College Partners, are invited to Jacob’s Pillow to attend an in-person, COVID-compliant showing by the artists at the end of the residency. Video livestreams may also be available for certain showings. This opportunity is offered by email invitation in advance of the event.
Please consider making a donation. Your contribution supports Jacob’s Pillow’s mission in dance creation, presentation, education, and preservation, and in harnessing the community-building power of dance.
Lead support for the Pillow Lab is provided by the Mellon Foundation
