Preview: Feb 18 @ 7PM

Fri, Feb 20 @ 7:30PM

Sat, Feb 21 @ 2:00PM

Sat, Feb 21 @ 7:30PM

Thu, Feb 26 @ 7:30PM

Fri, Feb 27 @ 7:30PM

About The Choreographer

Ana María Álvarez, a 2020 Doris Duke Artist and an inaugural Dance/USA Artist Fellow, is a prolific choreographer, skilled dancer, masterful teaching artist, and movement activist who has achieved multiple accolades for her dynamic works. Her thesis work explored the abstraction of Latine dance, specifically Salsa, as a way to express social resistance as related to the U.S. immigration battle. This work became the impetus for founding CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in 2005 in Los Angeles. Her most recent work with the company, ¡azúcar! was commissioned by APAP Arts Forward and NC State Live in Raleigh, NC. She will continue to work with CONTRA-TIEMPO on further developing the work as part of Jacob's Pillow, Pillow Lab, in February 2024 and will work with local dancers as part of WinterWorks 2024. After this, ¡azúcar! will be shared as part of the 20th season of Art & Power at UCSD in Spring 2024. 

Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO have continued to tour “joyUS justUS” (2017). This signature work is a radical celebration of humanity and the feminine, centering joy as a more loving and just future is imagined. Herwork has been presented in theaters across the country and the world, including in Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and El Salvador.  She was selected as the 2018 BiNational Artist in Residence, connecting communities in the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix (U.S.), Douglas (U.S.), Tucson (U.S.), and Agua Prieta (M.X.), through leading artistic workshops, collaborative performances, and public talks, and concluding with a performance at the U.S.-Mexico border. Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO were also invitedto represent the best of American Contemporary Dance Abroad through The Obama Administration’s U.S. Department of State cultural exchange program, produced by BAM, DanceMotionUSA. In the Fall of 2022, Alvarez was invited to join the UC San Diego Theatreand Dance Department as a tenured faculty member. In this exciting new chapter of her career, Alvarez, in collaboration with her colleagues and students, is imagining and designing a new future for embodied performance and practice at UCSD. 

Alvarez has been recognized with a number of awards and grants including NEFA’s National Dance Project, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, LA City Department of Cultural Affairs,  Los Angeles County and the California Arts Council among others.  

About The Dramaturg

Dr. Mysia Anderson-White (she/her) is assistant professor of Black Performance Theory in the Department of Theatre + Dance at UC San Diego. Dr. Anderson is from Miami, Florida. She earned her PhD from Brown University’s Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department and BA from Stanford University’s African and African American Studies program. Her work engages the fields of Black feminisms, Black Studies, Black Performance Theory, and Environmental Humanities, and draws upon critical ethnography, embodied practice, and archival methodologies.

Her forthcoming manuscript, “Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability,” is an ethnography that examines performances of Black sustainability in the city of Miami. Research for this project has been supported by a Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, a Joukowsky Research Award, and several Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards. Her work is published or forthcoming in Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Theatre Symposium, and M(O)ther Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance, an edited anthology.

Professor Anderson’s commitment to service stretches across university departmental work, leadership in the broader fields to which her scholarship belongs, and community-engaged research initiatives. She is the elected 2023 president of the American Society for Theatre Research’s (ASTR’s) Graduate Student Caucus, and an appointed member of ASTR’s 2023 Conference Planning Committee. A winner of the Black Theatre Association’s (BTA) 2022 Debut Scholar Panel, she now serves as a BTA Member-At-Large. She is also actively involved in Black historical preservation efforts in South Florida, and has successfully secured funding for community-facing institutions.

As a scholar-artist, Anderson desires to tell stories grounded in African Diaspora world-making. She is a graduate of the Atlantic Acting School’s Global Virtual Conservatory. She has worked as a dramaturg in collaboration with playwright Nkenna Akunna at Brown University and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon at The Cherry Arts, Inc.