In this world-premiere dance work, CONTRA-TIEMPO Artistic Director Ana Maria Alvarez and choreographer holly johnston of Responsive Body explore what it means to create, sustain, and redefine family in the 21st century. Drawing from conversations with adoptees, foster families, chosen families, and support networks, Roots of Loving Us examines how love, connection, and belonging shape our lives.
Blending contemporary dance, storytelling, and multidisciplinary research, the work invites audiences to reflect on the many ways people create a sense of home. Returning to ArtPower for its third appearance, CONTRA-TIEMPO offers a powerful exploration of resilience and the many ways people show up for one another.
In its 20th year, Los Angeles-based Versa-Style Street Dance Company celebrates the pioneers, artists, and communities that have shaped West Coast Hip Hop and street dance. Tribute: Guardians of Street Dance blends dynamic choreography with multimedia elements to honor influential figures whose impact continues to resonate throughout Hip Hop culture.
Featuring styles including popping, locking, house, and Hip Hop freestyle, the performance showcases the people and movements behind the art form. Spotlighting pioneers including Rennie Harris, Damita Jo Freeman, Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez, Stephen “Twitch” Boss, and Marjory Smarth, Tribute invites audiences to discover the rich history, creativity, and community at the heart of West Coast street dance.
Tony Award-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh brings her singular vision to The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor, a world-premiere dance-theater work inspired by her uncompromising spirit. Set to O’Connor’s iconic music and featuring narration from her memoir Rememberings, the performance explores protest, faith, vulnerability, and the courage to defy expectation.
Performed by a company of ten women with more than five hundred years of collective experience, The Surge challenges fear around aging and honors the beauty, strength, and perspective that come with time. Fierce and tender, this evening of dance honors O’Connor’s legacy through artists whose lives bring depth, wisdom, and lived experience to the stage.
In a scorching post-apocalyptic world without ice or music, two skaters survive on what remains: humor, love, and each other. Eerily observed by a gas-guzzling musician, they navigate a strange new reality where the familiar has melted away.
Created by Le Patin Libre, the company known for transforming figure skating into a contemporary art form, Melt blends movement, theater, and live music into a work that is playful, surreal, and unexpectedly moving. Beneath its dystopian premise is a celebration of resilience, imagination, and the enduring human capacity to adapt, create, and find meaning in uncertain times.
Created by Latin Grammy–nominated choreographer Siudy Garrido and award-winning composer and guitarist José Luis de la Paz, Flamenco Íntimo draws from traditional flamenco forms while embracing a contemporary vision. Combining dance and live music, the work explores the rhythm, artistry, and emotional depth that have made flamenco one of the world’s most enduring art forms.
Recognized as one of the leading voices shaping flamenco today, Garrido brings together an ensemble of dancers and musicians for an evening of movement, live music, and emotion. Flamenco Íntimo offers an opportunity to experience this tradition through the lens of an artist redefining its possibilities.
In collaboration with Flamenco Arts Festival Santa Barbara.
A weekly community offering that began Spring 2024. UC San Diego Theatre & Dance professor Ana Maria Alvarez and a roster of amazing artists from on and off campus lead a weekly gathering space for connection, radical joy and community! In connection jam participants are led through a collective practice of our ancestral technologies movement and play. No experience necessary, this is an open and non judgemental space. Come ready to move, sweat, laugh and practice joy as if it were a muscle. You will leave feeling more grounded, connected and joyful!
Fall 2025
7 sessions all at Epstein Family Amphitheater (EFA)
Week 2: Oct 8 – EFA – Ana María Álvarez – Ancestral technologies for joy & resilience
Week 3: Oct 15 – EFA – Joseph “Dyno” Corrales – Enter the Cypherst8: Cyphers w/ live DJ
Week 4: Oct 22 – EFA – La Mezcla – A Son Jarocho Fandango featuring live music by local musicians
Week 5: Oct 29 – EFA – Juan Carlos Blanco – Cuban Popular Dance
Week 6: Nov 5 – EFA – Marcos Duran – Improvising / Contemporary
Week 7: Nov 12 – EFA – All Dept Dance Sharing (4pm -6:30pm) followed by Connection Jam with dr. grace shinhae jun and Joseph “Dyno” Corrales
Week 8: Nov 19 – EFA – Daunté Fyall – West African
Chloé Arnold’s Syncopated Ladies Live! is a ground breaking mixed media concert featuring a diverse all-female cast celebrating sisterhood, the power of joy, and tap dance! Created for theatergoers of all ages, it is an electrifying one of a kind dance and storytelling experience. Get to know the ladies as they each share their inspiring journeys to reach for their dreams through the art of tap dance. With fierce footwork and spectacular pop concert production, the ladies leave audiences motivated to pursue their dreams with courage, determination, and love, no matter the obstacles.
Founded by Emmy Nominated Choreographer, Chloé Arnold, who was discovered at a young age in Washington, DC by Debbie Allen. Her choreography has been featured on hit television shows such as So You Think You Can Dance, Good Morning America, The Ellen Show, The Talk, and over 30 episodes of The Late Late Show With James Corden. Syncopated Ladies’ viral videos have amassed over 200 million views, and they have worked with Mega star Beyonce, FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance, Good Morning America, the James Corden Show, the US Open, and most recently with Mariah Carey in her Christmas Special and on CNN’s NYE Live . In 2022 Chloé choreographed the feature film Spirited (with Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell, Octavia Spencer).
“By the end of 90 ear-teasing, hip-shaking minutes, two things were clear: La Mezcla Artistic Director and choreographer Vanessa Sanchez ranks among the most singular dance artists to emerge from San Francisco in decades. Second, this defiantly joyous production… deserves to be seen across the country.”—Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle
Ghostly Labor is a multidisciplinary, rhythmic performance that explores the history of labor in the US-Mexico borderlands and the joy of collective resistance. This work brings together Tap Dance, Mexican Zapateado, Afro Caribbean movement, live music and animated archival video. Featuring an all female dance company, spoken word, traditional Son Jarocho music from Veracruz, Mexico and an Afro-Latinx percussive score, this full length dance theater production highlights historical events, such as the Bath Riots of 1917, the experiences of farm workers and domestic workers throughout California, and generations of labor that have gone unseen.
La Mezcla is a polyrhythmic, San Francisco-based dance and music ensemble rooted in Chicana, Latina and Indigenous traditions and social justice. Founded in 2015 by Dance/USA fellow Vanessa Sanchez, their work brings together Tap dance, Son Jarocho and Afro-Caribbean rhythms to bring the often unseen histories and experiences of communities of color to stages, streets and fields. Their production Pachuquísmo, an all-womxn Tap dance and Son Jarocho performance about Pachucas and the Zoot Suit Riots, received the Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Production. The show has toured nationally to venues including Dance Place (DC), Jacob’s Pillow (MA) and the Lincoln Center (NY), and made its international debut at Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico in October 2023. La Mezcla’s new work Ghostly Labor, explores the legacy of labor in the US-Mexico borderlands and the joy of collective resistance, and will tour the US through 2025. The associated film Ghostly Labor: a Dance Film has been screened internationally at film festivals, and was named Best Short Documentary at the Los Angeles Dance Camera West Festival.
Committed to using dance and music for social change, La Mezcla offers paid internships, artist mentorships, and has partnered with organizations including Lincoln Center Education, KQED Arts, and Ayudando Latinos a Soñar Farmworker Fridays to provide educational opportunities and hands-on community engagement. La Mezcla’s program “Connecting Communities” provides free grant workshops and artistic training with master artists to local communities.
joyUS justUS is an evening length participatory Activist Dance Theater experience that takes on joy as the ultimate expression of resistance. Whenever humans have survived immense hardship and injustice, prevailing with their humanity intact, the presence of joy or, the knowingness and celebration of our true beauty and power has always been at the root. joyUS justUS reclaims the dominant deficit based narrative of people of color in this country as being underprivileged, voiceless, powerless, and victimized, and flips it on its head by embodying stories of joy collected from communities of color in South Los Angeles.
Conceived and directed by Ana Maria Alvarez the piece includes choreography by Alvarez and each company member who contributed their unique ideas and richly diverse movement styles, music by Las Cafeteras, whose powerful East L.A. sound and socio-political message closely compliment our own, d. Sabela grimes, whose soundprints were the heartbeat of Agua Furiosa, Charlese Antoinette, whose costumes help our dancers radiate joy and power, Emily Orling whose altar quilts create a beautifully sacred visual environment and Tuce Yasak, whose technical direction has literally brought light to so many of our stages.
ArtPower and the Basic Needs Center are teaming up to host a Personal Hygiene Drive at upcoming ArtPower events in support of Hunger & Houselessness Awareness Week (Nov. 18–22).
Bring a personal hygiene product to donate at these shows at the Basic Needs table. Each donation gives you a chance to win tickets to future ArtPower events and other exciting prizes—and the more you donate, the better your chances.
Personal Hygiene Product List: Toilet tissue, laundry pods, dish soap, pocket tissue, bar soap, hand sanitizer, sunscreen, deodorant, infant formula, diapers (any size)
joyUS justUS is an evening length participatory Activist Dance Theater experience that takes on joy as the ultimate expression of resistance. Whenever humans have survived immense hardship and injustice, prevailing with their humanity intact, the presence of joy or, the knowingness and celebration of our true beauty and power has always been at the root. joyUS justUS reclaims the dominant deficit based narrative of people of color in this country as being underprivileged, voiceless, powerless, and victimized, and flips it on its head by embodying stories of joy collected from communities of color in South Los Angeles.
Conceived and directed by Ana Maria Alvarez the piece includes choreography by Alvarez and each company member who contributed their unique ideas and richly diverse movement styles, music by Las Cafeteras, whose powerful East L.A. sound and socio-political message closely compliment our own, d. Sabela grimes, whose soundprints were the heartbeat of Agua Furiosa, Charlese Antoinette, whose costumes help our dancers radiate joy and power, Emily Orling whose altar quilts create a beautifully sacred visual environment and Tuce Yasak, whose technical direction has literally brought light to so many of our stages. ArtPower and the Basic Needs Center are teaming up to host a Personal Hygiene Drive at upcoming ArtPower events in support of Hunger & Houselessness Awareness Week (Nov. 18–22).
Bring a personal hygiene product to donate at these shows at the Basic Needs table. Each donation gives you a chance to win tickets to future ArtPower events and other exciting prizes—and the more you donate, the better your chances.
Personal Hygiene Product List: Toilet tissue, laundry pods, dish soap, pocket tissue, bar soap, hand sanitizer, sunscreen, deodorant, infant formula, diapers (any size)
