Roots of loving us

“Roots of Loving Us” is a multi-year community engagement, collaborative research project and performance “Roots of Loving Us” with holly johnston of Responsive Body and Ana Maria Alvarez of CONTRA-TIEMPO. This project examines the impacts and outcomes of adoption, foster families, and chosen families on 21st century family structures. The project will utilize practiced-based research to engage multidisciplinary integration of dance movement, body based healing, art making and social impact. We are committed to listening and affirming the unheard stories of adoption that are triumphs of love. Ana Maria often shares a framework about family not as a noun but as a verb, it is the active state of creating families-”family-ing”. DNA is not what makes a family. Our bodies can thrive from the ongoing foreverness of actively creating conditions of love - this is family. Our survival in a world racked by mounting violence and narratives of domination, both of people and of the earth, weighs heavily on our capacity to articulate and practice these connections. This work sets to remind us of these truths and give us a framework to practice and share these ideas within our bodies and our belonging to one another.

“Roots of Loving Us” is dedicated to exploring the 21st Century family and their home lives and uplifting these stories and lived experiences. We are grounding our conversations around adoption and foster care as examples of bioadaptive families with diverse ancestries as well as chosen families and families retaining cultural and/or racial homogeneity. We are combating the systems that tether family or children to an economy of dollars - the belief that we need the right job, enough money, stability. What if the ideal conditions for “family-ing” was love? We are interested in the familial structure but also how and where they live. How do their conditions impact how they can thrive as families and communities?

Support

Responsive Body and Roots of Loving Us is funded in part by donors to Emily Lobba’s Radical Body Memorial Fund. This project is also supported by the radical partnerships with Community Coalition, Echoes of Hope, CONTRA-TIEMPO staff and artists, Responsive Body leadership circle and ecofamily, the Alvarez-Lowe family, the Johnston-Volk family, and Cornerstone Theater - our Village of Love.

Support was also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation in support of “Roots of Loving Us” and to address continued sustainability needs.

Join our Family Village of Love

If you are interested in supporting this project via non-monetary or monetary means, please contact holly@contra-tiempo.org