We join Pillow Scholar Maura Keefe in conversation with award-winning Ana Maria Alvarez, the founder of CONTRA-TIEMPO, a multilingual Los-Angeles-based activist performing company dedicated to transforming the world through dance. This is a recast of a PillowTalk presented live on July 11, 2021.
We join Pillow Scholar Maura Keefe in conversation with award-winning Ana Maria Alvarez, the founder of CONTRA-TIEMPO, a multilingual Los-Angeles-based activist performing company dedicated to transforming the world through dance. This is a recast of a PillowTalk presented live on July 11, 2021.
Special thanks to New England Public Media, for their support of this episode of PillowVoices.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to bring you this recast of a 2021 PillowTalk. We join Pillow Scholar Maura Keefe in conversation with dance activist Ana Maria Alvarez, the founding artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO. As a multi-lingual Los-Angeles-based performance company, CONTRA-TIEMPO aims to transform the world through dance.
MAURA KEEFE: Thank you so much for returning to the Pillow with us this week. It’s been great to have you here.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: So great to be here. Thank you.
MAURA KEEFE: I was just saying to Ana Maria we’re going to take it slow> By this I mean like let’s start with the name of the company. I was thinking about, you know, choices you make when you have to sort of say, well this is who I am, and you made that choice 16 years ago, and I think a really thoughtful choice. But CONTRA-TIEMPO has multiple meanings embedded in it and I was wondering if you could talk about what you were thinking in 2005 and how the, the name has maybe deepened and expanded over time.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yeah, so CONTRA-TIEMPO as a title was actually the name of my thesis concert at UCLA. And it was a piece that was really taking on salsa as a form of resistance, the idea of resistance being a critical and fundamental part of being in a democratic society where people actually were in relationship and conversation about things. We, it was during the Bush era, and everybody who was not agreeing with his policy on immigration, which now seems so, you know, not intense compared to the Trump years. But that, that, that, those conversations a lot of times were, were kind of, we were seen as anti-American if you weren’t in, in agreement with what his immigration policy was. And that seemed so counter to what it meant to be inside of a society where resistance and pushback actually was part of, of our, of our history but also a critical part of what actually made us be able to make improvements in that, in that pretty bloody, nasty history. So, so I started off with that piece and then we wound up kind of touring that piece and became a company very soon after, and then, and then the name CONTRA-TIEMPO stuck, it means the off-beat.
MAURA KEEFE: Great, this is the part I really want you to talk about also.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: It means, it means the beat in between the beats. So it’s not a, it’s not, it’s a musical term when you, whenever you meet musicians and talk about the contra-tiempo, it’s dancing on the two, it’s dancing in between the beats. It’s dancing in a way that’s like that, you know, the clave, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap that you just heard us clapping it’s, it’s all of that deliciousness that happens not right on the on beat. And so I loved the idea of it also being a reflection of dancing against the times, dancing against time, dancing also inside of spaces of in between and not existing inside of those delineated boxes, but being inside of the middle, middle places.
MAURA KEEFE: So, so you had clearly thought about the meaning of it because you had investigated it in your thesis. So now when you think about it are you just like like, oh I nailed it. I’m so glad I came up with that, or has it expanded for you?
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: I mean I think that, it was 16 years, or it was almost 17 years ago that I was first coming up with this idea of CONTRA-TIEMPO as a thesis project, it definitely. I feel like I was in a place where I was much more in a place where I was about, you know, resistance. Thinking of resistance as like pushback and fight and engagement and I think as I’ve evolved and grown a little older, I think I’m really clear the power of love and connection inside of that resistance and that resistance is actually, there’s a deep compassion and commitment required for real resistance. And so I think that the nuance of like, what, I think that CONTRA-TIEMPO started out for me a little bit harder and more intense. And that this sense of CONTRA-TIEMPO now for me is, is, is about connection and is about listening and is about engagement from a place of love I think. So that’s, that’s shifted. I never, it’s one of those things that I don’t think about and I, I the name is just the name and I so don’t often imagine that we exist beyond that name. Like that name feels so us, so.
MAURA KEEFE: No I was thinking about it and as I was doing research and thinking about the, what I was going to write for the program essay and reading from a musician’s perspective and how they define the term and what kind of musician is, is declaring the absolute essential critical definition versus how I think you understand it’s nuance. The thing that I also was thinking about is that from the beginning even before CONTRA-TIEMPO that, that your dancing history has always been tied up with your understanding of how dance and politics might be related. That was, that was your major as an undergraduate. How did you know, like, these things have, are, are paired.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Well, my father is sitting in the audience right now who is, who is. I’m a red diaper baby and grew up, you know, with union organizing parents and very much a, my sibling and I laugh, we grew up underneath the union organizing tables while people were sitting around talking about revolution and how they were going to, you know, change the world. And we were just hearing all of this and absorbing it as kids and, and I think that there’s a way in which, I grew up in a family where it wasn’t a choice, it wasn’t necessarily a choice to be, being in action about the future in your life. Like, to choose a path that was going to make a more loving and just world was just an expectation, not, not you’re gonna get to do that or not, you’re gonna get to do that or not. It was like, no, to be alive and to be a human means that we’re going to leave the place that we’re living here a better place for our, for our next generation. And so there was a sense of the politics of, of art making I think was, I, I always understood and knew that politics and community organizing had to do with love, and had to do with people, and had to do with community, and had to do with family. I think when I met the Urban Bush Women and I met Jawole, she was someone who I think really like solidified that for me. That I, that I felt like oh I actually can be an activist. I can be a, someone who really transforms the world and I can also be a dancer and move. Because before then I, I felt in my body that they were connected, but I hadn’t seen an example of the ways in which that, that worked. And I also think that there were ways in which my parents’ generation, they fought so hard and so intensely, and sometimes I think they forgot the joy part and the, and the love connection like beauty part that is part of art making and part of being a, a cultural worker, and part of being a narrator in terms of storytelling. I think that there’s a way in which they’re learning that from my, my siblings who also wound up being a composer and an artist.
MAURA KEEFE: Good, I’m going to ask you about your collaborators in a moment. You know, but I was thinking about one of the things that you have talked about is back to your, your notion of resistance and that, that it’s fundamentally for you built into partnering. And specifically coming from social dance traditions. Could you tell us a little bit about, about that discovery. Because that feels like a kind of physical realization that then gets theorized in a different kind of way.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yeah, I mean I think dancing and salsa and all of that, it was a social dance form or a social practice before it was ever something I was understanding or picking apart or theorizing about. In graduate school is when I started to really pick apart and understand the power of both resilience building practices ancestrally, you know, there are these things that we do in our families, or we do in our social situations that we take for granted, but that are actually lifelines. You know, these, these things that keep us, remind us that we are, remind us of our greatness, remind us that we’re connected, remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. And for me salsa was very much that. I, I definitely, I studied in Cuba for quite a bit starting at the age of 18, I went back almost every year for about a decade. And being inside of this, like, coming in with salsa experience and knowing the form, but also then like really understanding the way and the history of song and the history of Danzon and those lyrics that were about working class struggle and those lyrics that were about telling stories and passing down information generation after generation. That were really about resistance, that transformed the way that then I thought about salsa when I then came back to the United States. I’m not sure if that answers your question.
MAURA KEEFE: Yeah, no I think, I think it does cause I’m also thinking about, and I’m gonna ask you about, you know, your choices about music. But it does feel like there’s something about the built into salsa and the relationship between the music the singing and the dancing which feels like it feeds into your work.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: That’s, that’s the lyrics are, yeah. They’re revolutionary songs often that are getting embedded into stories of metaphor and hidden.
MAURA KEEFE: So you also, I, I think you make a great distinction between sort of that kind of dancing that is a community building that everybody just learns to do potentially in a, in a certain community that you would be dancing and you would grow up doing it. Very different from the training you were doing going to ballet classes. In 2005, when you were putting these forms together onstage and sort of navigating what’s it like to have this, this body of codified, you know, a classically trained body and then a social dance life, how, in 2005 people were much less maybe comfortable with the hybridization of forms. And I was looking at the dancers this week and thinking how is their movement history been opened by the work that you've been doing?
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Well I feel like it’s important to say that the last ballet class I took was when I was 15 years old. So that I don’t come from like the canon in that way. I, I studied dance and ballet very intensely until I was 15 when I was told by a professor that my butt was too big to be a real dancer. And I was like, thank you for sharing and I am going to find some other kind of dance to do. So at that point I discovered, I went to A&T State University in North Carolina and I started dancing with an incredible woman named E. Gwynn who has the company called E. Gwynn Dancers at A&T. and she exposed me to Dunham.
MAURA KEEFE: Dunham technique from Katherine Dunham.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yes. Dunham’s legacy. I learned Afro-Haitian, I learned Guanan, West African, I was exposed for the first time to Afro-Cuban. I, I had had, you know, salsa was in my family spaces, but Rumba and all of these kinds of forms that were connected to me culturally but I had never actually had access to them in the same way. My whole world just exploded. And I feel like my then training of rigor and, and training in the dance studio became about these forms that crossed over the world of social dance practice inside of also, you know, Dunham was the pioneer of that. So bringing these like, these practices that were, vernacular practices that happened inside of community but turning them into these incredibly staged beautiful ballets, right? Or these beautiful shows. So learning about her legacy I think definitely was the like precursor to sort of making some of those connections for myself. Again with the Urban Bush Women, Liz, too, Liz’s work too was something I was looking at, the, the New Dance Group. Multiple sort of like legacies and learning about that through the University. Of first, understanding there were people that were doing work where they were placing social dance practice inside of the concert stage, but I always still in the University that, they got separated out. And I think that, going to UCLA and having to do my thesis, there was a way that I was still being asked to separate them, and that, that made me mad. And it made me mad because I was like, I’m finally at a place where I’m supposed to be able to design things in the way that feels right and real to me and you’re still telling me to stop using facial expressions when I’m making a piece of art. And I’m like, but that’s, that’s crazy. My face is a part of my expression. So I started purposefully bringing more of my social dance practice on the concert stage and into the, into the studio spaces at that moment and that was in graduate school that I think that I really felt emboldened to really do that. And to back up again, and I can, this is my.
MAURA KEEFE: Why not go straight through, we’re good.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: One thing that I also feel like was a huge influence of that, was right out of college I went to Oberlin, right out of college I went into a, a job that was a social service job. Lifelines Community Arts Project, so I was dancing professionally, but during the day I was teaching these incredible 7th and 8th graders in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. And I was creating, they were asking me to create pieces for their dance company and their, you know, their after school programs and I was making these narrative pieces about these, the lives of these students and getting to know them and getting to know their families and hearing about their stories and, and finding that they originally hired me because they, they had all these different practices that I had in my tool belt. But the thing that they really wanted to do was hip hop and salsa. So I was like ok.
MAURA KEEFE: The, the kids did.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: The kids, yeah, absolutely. So I’m like, ok that's what we’re going to do, so then how do we incorporate those forms that you already really want to do into this storytelling. So I think that was also the time I started learning how to like deconstruct narratives inside some of these social dance practices as not going and doing the salsa congress typical, you know, like that thing that people expect you to do with those dance forms on a stage, but how are those dance forms actually incredible storytelling practices. How can they, yeah.
MAURA KEEFE: I think that’s a great thing to recognize that moment cause I think that sometimes we don’t notice oh you were already doing your research. That, that sort of openness of what you were seeing before and, and hearing form the people you were working with which has become now a through line for your work. So, so what about the dancers. Now they, we expect that of you now. We, we saw it a little bit here in 2009, you’ve had a really impressive career since then, so now a young dancer coming to the company knows that those, that, that the variety of forms are gonna be welcomed. Do you think that in, in the growth of the company that dancers have been more insistent on that? Or is it less radical and not, not, less angry and more like, oh great here’s a home for me.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: I think many people find CONTRA-TIEMPO, when they find CONTRA-TIEMPO, feel like, there’s a place where I can actually exist in my fullest self. And that’s definitely an experience that I hear over and over and through our artists that have come into our company, left the company, some of them come into the company and stay. Is that this community creates a space where whoever you are and whatever you bring is welcome and, and there’s space for it, and actually it’s a huge asset the more, the more that you can bring and the more honest you can be and the more fully expressed you can be. And that, it’s really, it’s important to acknowledge that like the work that I, I make is not, I’m not interested in like teaching a bunch of people to move like me. I’m really interested in what happens when we all show up with our fullest selves, when all the things that, whether it’s stepping that you do, or whether it’s breakdancing competitions that you’ve been a part of, or whether it’s, you know, you’ve been dancing Folklorico your whole life and then, then you started practicing you know, release technique. Like, what are all the things that people can kind of bring and that it’s not, it’s not that you have to leave anything at the door. That you can actually bring it all in and be a part of this process where like your full humanity is can, can stay intact. Because I think as a, as a dancer that’s what I didn’t find. I didn’t find a place where I could be my fullest self, and so I’m really interested in creating work that, that does that. So you'll see, I feel like the dancers are really, sometimes need coaxing or like permission, sometimes I’ll literally like hire someone and think that this is what they do and then all of a sudden they’ll turn around and they’ll start beatboxing. And you’re like, what? You beatbox? Like, what is happening, are you serious, I never knew that!
MAURA KEEFE: Because maybe they’ve been told by their professors…
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Don’t do that. Yeah, don’t do that.
MAURA KEEFE: Show your, show your alignment and your sense of the music.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Or even just that this is an Afro-Latin company, or this is going to be that, that's something that doesn't have anything to do with that. And, and we've found over and over in our creative process that so much of it's about excavating. It's about excavating, like, what are the things that we are showing up with, what are the things that we can really like, like to really train us to play. To play and explore and, and just throw the ideas out there that many of them won't land and many of them will just be a moment and, and an exploration for that day, but many of them wind up completely transforming the direction we wind up going. So, so I think a lot of my work as a choreographer is also as a community organizer, and like pulling the, the like, the just like the, the incredible power out inside of the space when we're all there together and collectively together.
MAURA KEEFE: So you write about the company, you say, we are taking salsa back to its roots as a mode of expression for the struggles of the working class, and therefore are committed to making our high quality, professional performance work accessible for all, regardless of race or class. So talk about what, like, why you want to affirm that so directly.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yeah, I think, again, you know, I mentioned the beginning song, that song, like a lot of these forms that were the, the root of and also bomba like, you know, it's not only Cuban, but Puerto Rican, like, and jazz, you know, Black jazz musicians in New York, and like, all the sort of like roots of what created salsa. It's not, it's not singular, right? It's not one thing. And so, I think the, for me, like taking back to its roots means actually acknowledging the history and where things come from. It's an acknowledgement of the African diaspora inside of Latinidad inside of, you know, like, all of these forms are rooted back to the continent, like and understanding that lineage and being really clear about that intentional about that lineage, both in movement, but also an understanding of history. And so think the, the ways in which, you know, we're rooting back as these forms are not commercialized forms that are the purposes of making money or selling records, or, or making the music industry a lot of money, or all of those kinds of things, which I think sometimes our art forms have moved in that direction, like to be more valuable or palpable for, for audience, like general audiences are the all of those things, what are the ways in which these practices can go back to the space of what they were originally intended, which was to tell stories, to re-narrate our future to like, give us hope and, and power inside of spaces that sometimes felt really disempowering, and really helpless and hopeless? To connect us to one another when we felt really alone, like all of the like, roots of where those forums started, is what I'm really interested in both choreographically but also as an, as an organization, like, how are we continuing to, like, root back into where are these practices began.
MAURA KEEFE: So I think it's a fascinating thing to imagine, you know, being in the south, finding, discovering something in North Carolina, Ohio, then, then to New York for a stint. But you've stayed in Los Angeles, you went there for graduate school and stayed there, which is a very different, Latinx culture is very different on the west coast, from the east coast and from the south, and how has being in Los Angeles, and the changing nature of Los Angeles and the diverse communities. How do you think that's, that that place has had an impact on your development as an artist?
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Well, it's, it's interesting. I mean, in LA. In New York, if I speak Spanish people immediately speak Spanish back to me or even assume that I speak Spanish in LA people are like, I don't know. Like, what? You speak Spanish. You don't look like you speak Spanish, right? Because I don't look Mexican. I don't like Central America. And there's a, there's a way in which, but like my whiteness is seen way more than my Latinidad in LA. And that's that was like an adjustment because I was like, what, like, what is happening? The way that I was I'm viewed inside of spaces in LA, sometimes it's very different. With that said, I think there's a way in which building the work in Los Angeles, there's, there's a huge, there's border communities, there's the idea of like the Chicano movement, where like the border across them, you know, like it was the border was not in the same place that it is right now. And so you have generations of people who have grown up with, like, Latinidad inside of their culture, but also have been born and raised in America for many, you know, for the United States for many, many generations. The there's, there's the whole, you know, just just the community in terms of like South America, Central America, which, again, all of that work and those stories and those narratives have influenced our work because that's many of the people who have come through the company have been with those narratives. So it's not just the Puerto Rican, Cuban, kind of salsa world. It's very much has, I think, expanded, though, my work to be Latinidad as a much more bold and encompassing sort of idea. For sure. I also think, you know, Los Angeles is like, one of the, one of the birthplaces of Black Lives Matter. It's one of the places where there's incredible radical work happening around defunding police. There's like work happening around housing and union movements. And there's, it's, it's a city where there's a lot happening. Where we're passing legislation that seems really like unimaginable to some of the other people in the room around the country. But it feels like a very exciting, vibrant place right now, especially and has been for the last few decades, where there's just real incredible change and organizing happening. And so I think that's also influenced and affected the work to be in those environments to be inside of spaces where they're just really powerful conversations about futuring that are happening.
MAURA KEEFE: So I asked you about ‘joyUS justUS,’ which is the work the company performed here this week, a version created just for the Henry J. Leer stage. And if you did not see the full performance today, or you are just here for the pillow talk, it will be available online in the online Jacob's Pillow season. So…
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: If you only saw the text part today, we do dance, I promise.
MAURA KEEFE: And I want to talk about it, because people have seen it and experienced it. And it's freshest in your mind, also. But it's also, I think, a great example of the way that you build work. So maybe you could tell us about the and also for me connects to my question about Los Angeles, because you're very specific that you did a series of workshops in South LA. So that, that even as your definition of the, what Latinx communities are has expanded, you also are delving deep into specific communities. So tell us about how you started to build the work?
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yeah, well, I think it's important to go back to the piece that before ‘joyUS justUS,’ which was ‘Al Fiosa.’ And that piece there, you know, multiple pieces that had we had created as a company, there was always a sense of like, the transformation that the artists would go through from making the piece, like, we would start off in these conversations. And two years later, when we had the work, it was like, people were different people, right, like we had literally all, and myself included, like transformed in terms of the ways that we were thinking about the issues that the work was bringing out and I was really interested about, how can we expand that outside of the the dancers in the company? How can like the larger community or the larger framework of audiences be a part of that, like, how could people be transformed by our process of making art.
MAURA KEEFE: So not just the ten of you in the studio.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: Yeah, not just the ten of us in the studio, or even seeing the show, and like there’s like level of impact that you get, but like, how can we actually have this creative process that we go through be something that can exponentially grow outside of, you know, us as as artists and a studio. And so that was originally the like, the, the sort of the semiya, the seed of the choreographic laboratory. And, and so we built all of ‘Al Fiosa’ with this idea, you know, that's a little Pollyanna. The idea of like, you know, Los Angeles is so spread out there, all these neighborhoods where people, we are a part of many of these neighborhoods, but people in the neighborhoods don't leave their neighborhoods, and it's so siloed. And so we did, we did 11 choreographic labs all over different neighborhoods, and all over Los Angeles. And what those labs look like is we would perform, we would perform a little bit of the pieces, it's being developed to get audience feedback, like real raw, what do people think, what are they seeing? What are the questions that they have, we would sit in counsel with people and have them share their stories, and we would share our stories around the themes of the work. And then we would dance and we've moved together and we create together. And we did this in all of these different locations. And at the end, we did have a ton of people come and be a part of it. But there was still a way and they, they stayed in their own silos like there was still a way that it that people really did stay in their own neighborhoods and didn't venture very far out. But we had this huge amount of community that were, were invested in the work and saw themselves in the piece. And it was really successful in that way. We decided for the next piece, which is ‘Joyous Justice,’ that we really needed to root down we needed to like stay in one place and continue to be working in one community and South LA was a really natural place many of us live close to there. It's also you know, you all probably know it as the LA riots, we call it the uprising. It happened you know, like the the place that where, where community coalition, which is the organization we partner with began was is, is right in the heart of Black and Brown Los Angeles. It is it is the neighborhoods in which the the so much of the resistance movements around that what I'm talking about with Black Lives Matters with, you know, bus, bus, the bus strikes with labor movement, all of that is happening in South LA in such a powerful way and Community Coalition started by Karen Bass. This is an incredible community organization that really was dealing with all kinds of different issues and they were so excited to partner with us and we said, if we have you as a partner, then it'll give us the capacity to have a home in South LA where we can then run these choreographic labs out of the same space every, every week. And for two years, every single Friday, we showed up and did sabor sessions, which are these, like community get down jam sessions, even when we felt like we didn't want to be practicing joy, we would show up and we would dance and we would get together and we would, you know, be together with community. And the practice of that for two years is what really was the heart of what you saw on stage, you know, with or what we have wound up creating, I shared and during our q&a, we did the story circling practice. And every single time we told stories, people always talked about their family. And they always talked about their mothers and grandmothers and matriarchs of the family. And so that wound up then moving the direction of the work. It wasn't like we were, you know, having people tell a story and be like, oh, that story is gonna be on stage at all. That's not what we're doing. What we were doing is creating space for, for people to share themselves and their truths. And then the relationships that we built, then like helps to direct the direction that we went with the work. And so, you know, we have, we have so many people who are in that community now who feel ownership over this work and feel like they were a part of, you know, generating this work. And so, yeah, it's been South LA is still I just moved my whole family there. And so now, now we're, we're living in that neighborhood. And, and I just feel like we're gonna continue to like, have that be our home base, and continue to build off of that work for future works.
MAURA KEEFE: So you know, I love to talk about a name, let's talk about ‘Joyous Justice.’ Yes. How did you discover that?
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: I think I always name things in the shower. So I'm probably that's when that happened. But I think the US the collective, the we the like, nosotros, the mucho somos, you know, it's a beautiful poem about that we are many. There's this, just this sense of the, we felt like, a critical piece to talking about joy. And and also just talking about, as we've been building work over the years, I feel like I've been getting closer and closer to this, like, idea of the we and understanding the we and understanding what is, what is really us and especially inside of so much division, I mean, we we made this piece in 2018. It was a world that felt like, you know, a lot of division and a lot of division, specifically in even our city. And so what did it. What would it mean to conjure a piece that was really delving into an embodying and feeling the the collective we and the us and so joy, us, just us, but also I think us as in us, like, you know, it's obviously those like United States felt also an important this idea of talking about justice with with the US like that we have such a history of injustice and in genocide, honestly, that, that we are all like holding up these these ideas and principles, but we've never gone to the like, the root of our system, and how many of us weren't even considered human when the system was designed. And so, you know, I just think the us felt like it was, it was screaming out,
MAURA KEEFE: To just remind us who us is. I think my last question before I open it up for some of your comments and questions is to ask you about collaboration, obviously, an essential part of your practice, rooted in labor organizing and community activism, which is fantastic. I think when we think about choreographers and their collaborators, it might be the dancers, which yours certainly, it might be the musician. It may also be a lighting designer or scenic designer, but you also have some, some ones that feel different so maybe you could say something about some of your kind of less common collaborators whom you name.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: I could have Shimelle Bell is one of my, we always laugh because we made up her title, is our radical joy advisor because she really is somebody who, throughout the entire piece, really became someone who would visit us in rehearsals who I would just have late night conversations with who, you know, she and I just became kind of like, we really our relationship developed around the making of ‘Joyous Justice.’ And so, so for sure, like I don't know how many other pieces have radical joy advisors. We had a radical joy advisor for this piece. I also feel like you know, the I mentioned Community Coalition by Carlos de Leon was our community liaison part of with Community Coalition showed up to every single support session for two years, was just like our community heart. The person who both worked for Community Coalition but grew up in that neighborhood and understood in his bones the power of dance and his own saving of his life through dance. He was an organizer, but he's also a dancer. And so he really became a huge part of the project as well. Jacqueline Barrios, who's a teacher at Foshay Learning Center, who has you know, brought her students to see contract samples work in 2007, or eight, like she had been, you know, a long, long, long time teacher in South LA and at public high school in South LA. And she brought her students as we kept making new work and would incorporate our work into her teaching in terms of like, she would use our work as an example of, and how to connect to the literature that she was teaching as an English teacher and how she was to storytelling and narrative building and incredible ways. And she was somebody who brought her students to many, many choreographic labs in South LA. So, so you know, like those, those collaborators feel like critical parts and hearts and veins of the work as well. But I do have to say, too, that our company members are such a critical part of what make the work work. And, and they bring so much of their hearts, so much of their ideas, so many of their just their truths, to the space and the, and the cast changes and things, you know, kind of get recreated. And we don't, the show never stays the same. It's not like you, somebody leaves and someone comes in and like just learns that part.
MAURA KEEFE: Yeah, we need to recast the short answer to do that. Yeah.
ANA MARIA ALVAREZ: It is that that someone comes in, and they are now a new, new narrative line or a new truth that that needs to be told, and that every single person on that stage, their story is inside the piece, they're not. Even if they are maybe learning, learning a piece of choreography that existed before them, there is a way that we won't ask them to do that if there's not some truth in there for them, and that it doesn't make sense for them, their own story. So that's a, that's just a critical part of the work. I couldn't do it without our cast.
MAURA KEEFE: It’s, I just wanted to make sure we had time for you to say radical joy, that you have an advisor for that, because don't we all just need that.
[Music begins, composed, and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.