CONTRA-TIEMPO Presents Full-Length Dance Work About The Power Of Joy

CONTRA-TEMPO, the critically-acclaimed Los Angeles-based urban Latin dance company, presents joyUS justUS, an evening-length work that celebrates the power of joy to overcome inequalities, on Friday, January 17, and Saturday, January 18, 2020, 7:30 pm, in the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts' Bram Goldsmith Theater. Set to the music by the band Las Cafeteras, the powerful work fuses Salsa, Afro-Cuban and contemporary dance styles with theater, offering stories of hope, faith, family and joy collected from communities of color in South Los Angeles.

A deeply collaborative effort, joyUS justUS includes choreograph by CONTRA-TIEMPO Founder/Director Ana Maria Alvarez as well as company members. Alvarez says, "It celebrates our capacity to come together and be connected and see ourselves in one another." Backstage proclaims it, "A joyous performance that comically explores the diversity of Salsa dancing, while also using the dance form to portray the thorny social and political issues facing Latinos in America today!"

"CONTRA-TIEMPO is known for compelling choreography steeped in social justice," says The Wallis' Artistic Director Paul Crewes. "This engaging work beautifully showcases the troupe's unique style and vision."

The Wallis' 2019/2020 dance programming features Los Angeles-based companies exclusively, marking the first time a major Southern California performing arts venue has presented an all-local dance line-up during a single season. Dance @ The Wallis is sponsored, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

CONTRA-TIEMPO'S performers and musicians, who share ties to South Los Angeles, "upend conventional notions of minority communities in the United States" (Sheppard Express). The company, founded in 2005, creates an invigorating blend of physically intense and socially astute performance that pushes the boundaries of Latin Dance as an expressive cultural and contemporary form. It takes Salsa back to its roots as a mode of expression for the struggles of the working class. CONTRA-TIEMPO, says Alvarez, "exists in the in-between space of leader/follower, immigrant/American, English/Spanish, performer/listener." Many of the company's professional dancers and performers, who are trained in a variety of dance styles, are immigrants or first generation North Americans, living within the varied and infinitely complex political and personal landscapes that CONTRA-TIEMPO addresses in its work.

Tickets, $29 to $79, are on sale now. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase tickets and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 or visit TheWallis.org/CT.

For more information about The Wallis, please visit: TheWallis.org.