Ordway

Dedicated to transforming the world through dance, the social activist dance company CONTRA-TIEMPO takes Latin social dancing to new heights by infusing elements of Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop and contemporary dance-theater in physically intense and energizing performances.

I Dream America (2008) - This piece seeks to engage the tensions, commonalities, strains, and histories between the Black and Latino communities. Traversing the political landscape of immigration and Hurricane Katrina, I Dream America investigates compassion and peace and paints a disarming and thought-provoking critique of contemporary life and injustice. Much of this piece was inspired by a poem written by Melissa Ortiz in 2006, one of Ana Maria’s 12-year-old students at UCLA’s Seeds University Elementary School in Los Angeles. Created from an assignment that directed students to respond to Langston Hughes’ poem Let America Be America Again – Melissa and several of her classmates wrote their poetic responses within the context of major federal and state immigration legislation being debated that year. Melissa chose to respond with a poem written from the perspective of her mother who immigrated to Los Angeles in search for a better life for her family. 

Plastico (2009) - This piece is a comic and grotesque commentary on the “Plastic” facade of Salsa. A dance form that started as a voice for regular people and an expression of history, power and opinions, has been transformed into a depoliticized, hyper-sexual exaggeration of the Latino body. 

contra-tiempo/against the times (2006) - Salsa is a dance form that is rooted in Cuban and Puerto Rican cultural tradition. It is laden with social and political contradictions; a dance of resistance. Salsa is an improvisational form that is created and recreated with every new combination of people that dance it; a dance of change. Born from the fusion of African and Spanish musical influences, it was originally created as a cultural voice and form of expression for working class people; a dance of the times. Salsa has always been a patriarchal dance form, in that men are leaders and women are followers. In more recent times, the over sexualized representations of women have gotten more extreme, especially in styles that have been popularized by ballroom dancing and in Hollywood films. The cast of CONTRA-TIEMPO will flip the script on who leads who. Together they will move resistance from being adversarial to being the fundamental key for communication and empowerment between partners and for a people.

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