Panoramic Dance Project Concert

Ana Maria Alvarez, Founding Artistic Director of CONTRA-TIEMPO, 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. Alvarez is a two-time grantee of NEFA National Dance Project and was honored to be selected as the 2018 BiNational Artist in Residence, connecting cultural communities in the Sonoran Desert. Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO were also invited for multiple tours in Central and South America, as cultural ambassadors through the US State Department. Alvarez received a BA in Dance and Politics from Oberlin College and an MFA in Choreography from UCLA. Her thesis work exploring the abstraction of Latin dance, specifically Salsa, as a way to express social resistance as related to the U.S. immigration battle, became the impetus for founding CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in 2005 in Los Angeles, CA. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

CONTRA-TIEMPO is a bold, multilingual Los Angeles-based activist dance theater company that creates communities where all people are awakened to a sense of themselves as artists and social change agents who move through the world with compassion and confidence. 
CONTRA-TIEMPO creates a new physical, visual and sonic vocabulary that collages Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop, and contemporary dance with theater, compelling text, and original music to bring dynamic multi-modal experiences to the concert stage. 
While their performances are consistently electrifying, what sets the company apart most is their unique relationship to their own community. CONTRA-TIEMPO takes an uncompromisingly radical approach to the ways in which artists function within communities and create their work. They intentionally engage diverse audiences, cultivate dancer leaders, and center stories not traditionally heard on the concert stage, using their engagement process to inform and continuously re-fuel their creative process, and vice-versa. 
Much like the communities they reach, CONTRA-TIEMPO is itself a tapestry. The company members are professional dancers, artists, immigrants, educators, activists, organizers, and movers of all types, living and working across Los Angeles and across the country. Each company member lives, expresses, and struggles within the varied and infinitely complex political and personal landscapes that Founding Artistic Director, Ana Maria Alvarez, seeks to address in the work.

Matthew A. Wright is a professional artist and current NC State graduate student in Art+Design. Matthew was a member of Panoramic Dance Project as an undergraduate student from 2014-17 and returned to the company this academic year as a member and guest choreographer.

Ife Michelle Presswood (she/her) is a Choreographer, Dancer, Black/Queer Culture Educator, and Artistic Spacemaker. She is a graduate of the Duke Dance M.F.A. program and engages dance praxis as a means of exploring individual, communal, and cultural identity. She is currently teaching at Duke University, Fayetteville State University, and North Carolina State University.

Jasmine Powell, MFA, is a creative expressionist from Hillsborough, NC who is thrilled to create an artistic commission for NC State Dancers! Her artistry joyfully teaches cultural history, technique, and the creative process at Elon University as a Performing Arts Professor. Jasmine’s career has led her to work with PHILADANCO, Dianne McIntyre, Milton Myers, Ronald K. Brown, Okwui Okpokwasili, Justin Tornow, Culture Mill and currently performs locally with KT COLLECTIVE dance company. Alongside her largest choreographic premiere, Approximation of a Woman, her work has been featured in performance theaters, international festivals, dance films, music videos and most recently the North Carolina Dance Festival 2022-23 season. Authenticity makes her smile at the opportunity to share her work rooted in conceptual storytelling and is always relating to others through a creative expressionist lens.