Staging the Dance of Coalition with Versa-Style and CONTRA-TIEMPO
Staging the Dance of Coalition with Versa-Style and CONTRA-TIEMPO
This chapter puts race in a transnational context in the Americas, expanding their framework to the context of dance, music, and performance. It addresses the ways that two Latina-originated dance companies in Los Angeles stage coalition from the placeless realm of the undercommons. Ana Maria Alvarez's CONTRA-TIEMPO Urban Latin Dance Theater and Miss Funk Jackie Lopez's hip-hop and house-based Versa-Style theorize the complex dance and musical migrations that underscore their experiences and visions of latinidad in coalition. Both companies have a foundational connection to dances of the African diaspora. Using choreographic analysis of dance and performance studies as well as interviews with the choreographers, the chapter examines the coalitional dimensions of their works. At the heart of this work is the question “In this contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter, how do these Los Angeles-based companies cultivate alternatives to racialized violence”?
Keywords: race, Los Angeles, Latinas, dance companies, Ana Maria Alvarez, Jackie Lopez, African diaspora
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
