Ana Maria Alvarez

Voices del Camino: Compassionate Community at NCSU

On the series: Voices del Camino is our series of stories and reflections from the company, while on tour. El camino, in Spanish, literally means "the road"; but el camino is also the journey that we're on towards witnessing, creating, and sharing the beauty and complexity of humanity, and towards transforming our world through love and movement.

Raleigh, NC | Compassionate Community at NCSU, by Ana Maria Alvarez

North Carolina always feels like a bit of a homecoming for me (afterall, my brother and I were born here, my parents met here, and I went to high school in Greensboro). I get excited by coming “back home”, but also a little nervous. I have some violent memories of this place from childhood (enough to fill a whole other blog post or two), and recently North Carolina passed one of the most horrendous pieces of anti-LGBT, anti-worker legislation: HB 2, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. This Act:

  • requires transgender people (and everyone else) to use public restrooms according to the biological sex on their birth certificate

  • strips North Carolina workers of the ability to sue under a state anti-discrimination law

  • bans local minimum wage laws like the $15-an-hour "living wage" ordinances gaining traction around the country. The state minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

Our dancers lead a Salsa Rueda class in the NCSU Commons

Our dancers lead a Salsa Rueda class in the NCSU Commons

The week we were gearing up to come out to Raleigh, the start our four-city tour (supported by the South Arts Dance Tour Initiative), other artists were beginning to cancel shows, boycott and create economic sanctions for NC, to send a strong anti-HB 2 message. Our work has always been about creating dialogue and building compassion and community, though, so we knew that now, maybe more than ever, we NEEDED to be in North Carolina. We rolled our sleeves up and got ready for the work we had ahead of us. 

I had visited Sharon and Stephanie and their team at NCSU in October 2015, to plant seeds for a powerful (albeit brief) residency in Raleigh that included several lecture demonstrations, master classes, community meet-and-greets, lunch meetings and a choreographic lab. 

CONTRA-TIEMPO shares smiles with Dr. Alison Arnold

CONTRA-TIEMPO shares smiles with Dr. Alison Arnold

We found the students that we met on campus to be bright, engaged, politically conscious and fired up. They had so much to share and teach us about HB 2. We learned that the NCSU Student Senate had voted to ignore the legislation, deeming it unconstitutional, against Federal law, and against the anti-discrimination policy at NCSU! We heard about the struggles they were having to advocate for true diversity on their campus. We met future engineers, designers, and architects who will be designing levies and water treatment systems and who felt frustrated that in their chemistry classes, although they were learning the equations for how to measure contamination in water, they weren't talking about Flint. We encouraged them to start those conversations with their professors. It was exciting to meet young people who were so clear about their own personal responsibility to positively impact this world. 

 

The dialogue is happening. The compassionate community exists. And we’re honored to be part of it and help continue to move it forward. Thank you, NCSU!

(Mother Jones article on HB 2)

Voices del Camino: The Struggle within the "Struggle"

On the series: Voices del Camino is our series of stories and reflections from the company, while on tour. El camino, in Spanish, literally means "the road"; but el camino is also the journey that we're on towards witnessing, creating, and sharing the beauty and complexity of humanity, and towards transforming our world through love and movement.

Stop 2: WASHINGTON, DC | The struggle within the "Struggle", by Ana Maria Alvarez

I have always had a tumultuous relationship with our nation’s capital. I am the child of Communist union organizers. I’ve seen the impact that the U.S. embargo of Cuba has had on my father’s patria. I endured years of miseducation from teachers in the South, who only told “his-story” and hid the truths of lies that our country has been built on. There have been times in my life where I have not stood when the national anthem was played, times when abroad that I pretended to not be from this country. …And then there have been those times when I have felt so incredibly grateful to have been born here and to call the United States of America my home. 

Some of the company (and Ana Maria's son) at the Memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, DC

Some of the company (and Ana Maria's son) at the Memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, DC

Being in Washington DC, bringing my son for the first time to our nation’s capital, and especially performing Agua Furiosa, brought up all of this and more. Saturday [our first show there] was a sold out audience, and for me, it felt like one of our hardest shows. Everything that could have gone wrong did (with tech, with space, with hitting choreography…), yet people seemed to still respond well; things resonated, and the piece worked. They didn’t know what went wrong. They hadn’t seen it 30 times. They weren’t the authors, and therefore they weren’t judging it as harshly. 

The second night of our show was an audience full of my parents’ friends—the village that raised me, the community who made me a “red diaper” baby, and the folks who are passing the torch to the next generation of change makers. The Q&A with this audience was one of the most interesting and inspiring for me—to hear their appreciation, but also how they were struggling with how I placed responsibility for this country’s current state of affairs on ALL of us. It was unnerving for some of my folks. They (we) have spent so much of our lives fighting the ‘enemy’, so to have one of their own offspring state publicly that WE are also the enemy, was hard for them to hear. 

I never thought about this in quite the same way until this Q&A —this idea that I am taking a different route than my parents. My village of my parents’ generation weren’t artists, they were revolutionaries, fighting the system. Fighting the system will always be at the root of my work, but as I am growing as an artist, as I continue to age, as I raise my own child (soon to be children), I have become more nuanced about that fight. It’s about resistance as love versus as violence. It’s the idea that pushing back and fighting can be done so much more effectivelythrough the arts, because it’s the ultimate tool to help us feel and remember our humanity.  

Who knew that it would be in DC that I would really find that?! This trip gave me more love for this city, for this nation and for exactly how I was raised to resist it all. 

Voices del Camino: A love note to Robbyne and James

On the series: Voices del Camino is our series of stories and reflections from the company, while on tour. El camino, in Spanish, literally means "the road"; but el camino is also the journey that we're on towards witnessing, creating, and sharing the beauty and complexity of humanity, and towards transforming our world through love and movement.

Stop 1: MIDLAND, TX | A love note to Robbyne and James, by Ana Maria Alvarez

(Editor's note: Robbyne Hocker Fuller and James Fuller are with the Midland African-American Roots Historical/Cultural Arts Council, the presenters who brought CONTRA-TIEMPO to Midland)

To Robbyne:

You are a force of nature! What an inspiration! From one hard working, ambitious, and determined woman to another, you give me LIFE and LIGHT! I knew the minute I met you, we were going to be friends. You have this spirit that gives one the sense that you know something the rest of us yet don’t and that you are floating about an inch off the ground.  You never stop sharing and making connections. It’s the reason we were able to bring our work to Midland – because of the incredible belief you have in others, in building community and in the power of unifying around a cause. I want to be you when I grow up!

Robbyne and James

Robbyne and James

To James (Robbyne’s other half, but also quite a life force, as well):

You are on the other side of the universe from the love of your life. The two of you all are like yin/yang – you complete the full spectrum of energy and light. You move at a different speed than the rest of us, yet you get there at the same time – if not earlier. I learned to stop and breathe and slow down from you – I also learned that you don’t have to invite the Roots Council audience to express themselves – because, goodness me – they DO! You told people to think, think, think and feel before our show. That was so wise, and I have thought about that with every other audience since. How I wish we could have recorded you speaking, to play for every audience we meet. What's funny about this is, I don’t think you had anything written; I believe you just listened and delivered. You spoke truth, and I thank you for that. 

Thank you both. I look forward to staying connected and hopefully finding ourselves out there in TX with you all again soon!