Decades of Dance in L.A.: Celebrating 20 Years of Visions and Voices and 10 Years of USC Kaufman

Celebrate 20 years of Visions and Voices and 10 years of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance with a dazzling triple bill of companies from L.A.’s vibrant dance scene. Also celebrating two decades of exciting work, CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater and the Versa-Style Street Dance Company have performed in multiple Visions and Voices and Kaufman School events and workshops. JA Collective was founded by members of USC Kaufman’s inaugural class of 2019.

> Led by founding artistic director Ana María Alvarez since 2005, CONTRA-TIEMPO is a multilingual activist dance theater company dedicated to transforming the world through dance by building community, facilitating dialogue, and moving audiences to imagine what is possible. They will perform an excerpt from joyUS justUS, a powerful work that highlights joy as the ultimate expression of resistance.

> Started in 2018 by Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry when they were USC Kaufman students, JA Collective blends hip hop, theatre, and contemporary dance into a distinctive style that blurs dance and theatre, rehearsal and performance, and reality and dreams. They will perform Castling the Unknown, inspired by the events of Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.

> Established by Los Angeles natives and artistic directors Jackie “Miss Funk” Lopez and Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad in 2005, Versa-Style Street Dance Company seeks to empower underserved and marginalized groups worldwide through the movement and culture of hip hop dance. They will perform an excerpt from Freemind Freestyle, a high–energy, improvised work that features such street dance styles as locking, popping, hip hop, and krump.