Ana María Alvarez didn’t at all times think about herself ending up again on campus. “I’ve had a love–hate relationship with the academy,” says Alvarez, the founding father of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater who joined the College of California San Diego’s Theatre and Dance Division as a tenured college member in late 2022.
It’s true that her journey into dance was intertwined with greater schooling: She double-majored in dance and politics at Oberlin Faculty and earned her MFA in choreography at UCLA. Her thesis work checked out salsa as a technique to specific social resistance within the debate round immigration. The Cuban American daughter of two labor union organizers, Alvarez had additionally seen her mom transition into academia, which made it really feel acquainted and accessible.
It hasn’t at all times felt inviting and inclusive, nevertheless. “I used to be consistently combating to legitimize the ways in which I danced, and the ways in which I moved, and the issues that I used to be all for finding out,” she says. When it got here to exploring social dance practices outdoors of ballet and trendy and the way she wished to maneuver by the world as an artist, Alvarez says, “I discovered myself having to actually push again and advocate and argue with those that it mattered.”
After she graduated, Alvarez targeted on artwork and activism the best way she envisioned it. After some early adjunct-teaching gigs in dance departments, she shifted her focus to cultivating her personal work, accepting occasional guest-choreographer and visiting-artist alternatives as an alternative. “It felt like the sector wasn’t prepared but,” she says.
Years later—after carving her personal path, constructing a thriving firm, and receiving recognition for her work—she discovered the job opening at UCSD. “It actually was describing who I’m as an artist,” she says. “After I received the job description, I used to be like, ‘I believe they’re prepared.’ ”
She’s so glad they had been. “I’ve at all times had deep, deep love for studying, deep love for educating, deep love for inquiry and curiosity,” she says. “A lot of my very own artmaking apply is about asking questions and grappling with the world, and there’s no higher place to be doing that than within a college.”
Making Manner for New Tales
Alvarez’s mother and father instilled in her a drive to make the world “a greater, extra loving, and simply place,” she says, and she or he wished to do it by motion. “I’ve a deep perception that choreography is neighborhood organizing,” she explains. “You’re imagining and creating worlds, and also you’re redefining the methods through which we take into consideration the world and take into consideration ourselves inside the world.”
That, in an oversimplified nutshell, is the philosophy she introduced together with her to UCSD at a second when the “Dance” a part of the Theatre and Dance Division particularly was in transition. “I fell in love with the clean canvas that I noticed,” she says, together with the scholars and colleagues she met. It gave her the liberty to start out constructing one thing new.
In her first 12 months, she taught programs on the politics of partnering, introduction to dancemaking, and what she calls “ancestral applied sciences,” exploring the knowledge of 1’s ancestors embedded in social dance practices. She employed almost a dozen new lecturers to show courses in types as various as conventional hula, flamenco, capoeira, Filipino people dance, West African dance, Afro-Cuban dance, faucet, jazz, contact improvisation, and extra.
She additionally did a number of listening, and heard a typical chorus about folks being remoted in their very own silos. She established a weekly “Connection Jam” the place anybody and everyone seems to be welcome. “We’re gonna get down, we’re gonna dance, we’re gonna sweat, and we’re gonna transfer collectively,” Alvarez says. “We’re gonna apply pleasure.”
One other new custom has all of the method courses collect on the finish of the quarter to share what they’ve been doing with their friends. It was so well-liked the primary quarter they did it, in a small black-box theater, that they moved to the Epstein Household Amphitheater the following time round.
“Ana María’s presence within the division is wholly inspiring and palpably constructive, and she or he has solid a powerful sense of neighborhood,” says college member Jade Energy-Sotomayor, explaining that Alvarez led the best way in cleansing out the dance workplace and placing up new posters everywhere in the constructing, “actually making method for brand new our bodies and new tales.”
Connecting Campus and Firm
The brand new function at UCSD got here with a critical commute and a significant balancing act. Alvarez nonetheless lives in Los Angeles together with her household and continues to work as an artist with CONTRA-TIEMPO and past. It’s solely potential to juggle, she says, as a result of CONTRA-TIEMPO horizontalized its management construction—with Alvarez as inventive director working the group with three different administrators. She splits her weeks between campus and firm and plans intensive tasks for educational breaks.
There aren’t any silos right here, both. “As a result of I’ve this entry and connection to an expert dance firm that’s making work, that’s touring, that’s working summer time packages, that’s doing common native gigs,” she says, “my college students even have entry to that.” Early on, Alvarez invited firm members to San Diego to steer a Connection Jam so her college students might meet and have interaction with the professionals. In latest months, Alvarez has been working with a bunch of scholars to discover and deepen the bodily language of ¡azúcar!, her newest piece for CONTRA-TIEMPO, to culminate in a efficiency with different college choreography at Winter Works on March 15 and 16. When CONTRA-TIEMPO involves UCSD to carry out ¡azúcar! in April, these college students will turn out to be the neighborhood solid that shares the stage with them.
“I’m simply so excited to be anyplace she is,” says Norma Ovalle, who graduated final 12 months however is collaborating within the course of as an alum volunteer. “I didn’t essentially develop up seeing that there’s a risk for any individual like me to pursue this,” she says. However that modified when she met Alvarez. She’s now working towards an affiliate’s diploma and a future in dance.
Arising a number of years behind her, Vrisika Chauhan, a junior who has a background in Indian classical dance and in addition didn’t at all times really feel like she belonged, determined to declare dance as a second main. “My perspective on what dance is has really shifted,” she says, because of Alvarez. “She has helped so many college students, together with myself, really feel seen.”
