A legacy-bearing institution in Los Angeles, was established in 1997 by Co-Founders/Co-Artistic Directors Linda Yudin and Luiz Badaró. Viver Brasil creates culturally rooted and aesthetically bold Afro-Brazilian dance theater with its signature blend of ancestral practices, street styles, and live music–addressing contemporary issues of racial and social inequity towards a radically reimagined future.
Rezas e Folhas - In progress
…offered a magical journey through movement that celebrates the deep bond between life and the earth. The vibrant costumes amplify themes of nature, spirituality, and community, echoing throughout the performance. Together, these aspects enchanted the audience. creating a truly unforgettable evening at Dance@TheHolden.
Gayle Hooks, General Manager, Ebony Repertory Theatre
In 2024, Viver Brasil received its second National Dance Project Production Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts to create Rezas e Folhas. The work is a genre-defying original performance ritual by Co-Artistic Director/Choreographer Vera Passos that posits Afro-Brazilian traditions of sacred herbalism as urgently necessary interventions against ever-growing acts of climate injustice. Rezas e Folhas seeks to act as a ritualized intervention within this reality, uplifting our sacred connection to earth–and the Black and Indigenous knowledge from the Caboclo and Orixá practices that preserve this wisdom–as key to our collective reimagining of alternate life-affirming futures that have the power to heal in Passos’ contemporary gestural language.
Celebrating Samba
This was edutainment at its best and the audience of families in attendance loved every minute of it.
Leah Bass-Baylis, LA Dance Chronicle
Viver Brasil’s signature community program takes audiences on a cultural journey to Salvador, Bahia, in an electrifying Afro-Brazilian dance and music performance with narration. Experience a jolt of joyful color, thrilling rhythms, and communal celebration in this 40-minute interactive performance. Celebrating Samba includes the royal Orixas in vibrant costumes, the joyful samba, and the social justice dances of the Bahian Carnaval in Bloco Afro Motumbaxé. A demonstration of traditional and contemporary instruments is included and Viver Brasil’s interactive dance workshop.
disney ¡viva navidad! street party
The show looked beautiful and Viver Brasil performers were stunning!
Susana Tubert, Creative Director at Disneyland Resort
Since 2013, Viver Brasil has performed in the Disney California Adventure Park’s winter season’s Viva Navidad Street Fiesta Parade with an extended cast of 30 performers. The company recently completed its 11th year testifying to the parade’s popularity and appeal. For ten years, this seasonal parade was performed 6 times per day, 7 days per week. In 2024, the show is currently being performed on the weekends.
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In 2013, Co-Artistic Director Linda Yudin engaged with company member Katiana Pallais to create the company’s Afro-Brazilian samba choreography with music coordination by Ethnomusicologist Beto Gonzalez reimagining Bahian samba chula into a parade spectacle that honors its roots with a fresh contemporary look providing a portal for thousands of Disney guests to learn about Afro-Brazilian diasporic dance and music. Both Bahian and US-based costume designers have worked with Yudin on the signature look for Viver Brasil. The company has performed over 4000 shows since the parade’s inception!
The Disney project has also allowed us to develop leadership within the company as dance and music captains and costume coordinators, including Michela Melone, Amainary Contreras, Laila Abdullah, Nagode Simpson, Jahanna Blunt, Simon Carroll, Henry Castro, Fabio de Souza, Suellen Ferreira, Ysaye McKeever, Malia Henderson, and Monica Moskatow.
residencies, masterclasses, and education
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Viver Brasil received Dance/USA’s Engaging Audiences Grant and toured the Samba in the Streets program (2018, 2020, 2023) with performances of Celebrating Samba and Afro-Brazilian dance and music workshops for all ages and all levels, to the birthplaces of the civil rights movement in Alabama, creating roots in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, Tuskegee, Lowndes County and in Holly Springs, Mississippi at Rust College. Viver Brasil joyously and humbly has processed across the Edmund Pettus Bridge twice with Bloco afro drumming, song, and movement with the Selma community of over 10,000 participants.
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Include master dance and percussion classes in orixa dance movement and rhythms, Silvestre Technique, Dança Afro, Samba de Roda, and Dances of the Blocos afro. Viver Brasil also remounts our work students. A university residency can be conducted as part of a VB tour and has a stand-alone experience with 2-3 VB members. Additionally, Viver Brasil also provides a lecture component that delves into a variety of topics, including an introduction to Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice and its relationships to contemporary artistic practices and technologies; origins of samba; and the arts and its relationships to race and social justice movements in the Afro-Brazilian diaspora.
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Viver Brasil has created deep roots in its Los Angeles community and beyond. Since 1997, Viver Brasil has offered a weekly Afro-Brazilian dance class with live music taught by our artistic directors, company members, and guests from Bahia and beyond. VB Community Class, as it is called, continues to be a safe place for community connection for all with a grand dose of joyful Afro-Brazilian dance and drumming.
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The company’s arts education includes in-school and after-school residencies for K-12 students to learn Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion taught by our Viver Brasil teaching artists.
The company also conducts professional development workshops for teachers, administrators and staff.
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Viver Brasil’s signature community engagement program, Samba in the Streets, offering Afro-Brazilian dance and drumming workshops, was developed in LA’s Leimert Park with filmmaker Ben Caldwell in 2016 and has since established a community presence in the Hyde Park neighborhood in partnership with the Destination Crenshaw project. This program is funded by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and is free to all.
Artistic Vision
Since its inception, Viver Brasil has fostered a spirit of collaboration by amplifying the voices of Bahian masters and its company members in Los Angeles. Viver Brasil has presented work by Luiz Badaró and Vera Passos, and Rosangela Silvestre, Shelby Williams-Gonzalez, and Marina Magalhães. Viver Brasil has collaborated with musicians/ composers Jose Ricardo Sousa, Kahlil Cummings, Cody Perkins, Bobby Easton, Kevin Roosevelt, Viviam Caroline, and filmmakers Cari Ann Shim Sham and Paula Walker. Elder wisdom is an essential pillar of Viver Brasil’s research practice led by co-artistic director Linda Yudin The company continues to engage with Bahian wise elder Iya Agba Cici, honors the knowledge of Babalorixa Rychelma Imbiriba, visual artist/designer J. Cunha, and writers Melissa Adun and Guellwaar Adun of Oguns Toques. The company had the pleasure of intense study with the late Sambadeira, Joselita Moreira Cruz da Silva and Afro-Brazilian dance pioneer Mestre King. These partnerships enrich Viver Brasil's knowledge and significantly contribute to its bold and impactful work in Afro-Brazilian dance with live music on and off the stage.
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Viver Brasil has a rich history of producing successful and impactful works. The company has created fifteen original works. Notable productions include Yabas/Queens, which toured throughout New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado with National Dance Project Touring support; Feet on the Ground featuring Alaafia by Rosangela Silvestre, which toured throughout the U.S. and Canada with National Dance Project Production support; Peace Transcends, by Vera Passos which culminated the inaugural Aratani World Dance and Music Series in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Ford on the Road and performed for fifteen successful seasons to sold-out High Ci audiences at the Ford Theatre featuring the choreographies by Luiz Badaró’s signature Navio Negreiro, A Lavadeira, Vem Chega Mais Perto de Mim, Rosangela Silvestre’s ORIXAS, Yabas/Queens, Mo Ife/Love Stories, the Gift on the Water; Shelby Williams Gonzalez’s, Para Xaxa. Viver Brasil premiered Vera Passos’ Bloco Afro Bahian Carnival Spectacle, Motumbaxé, at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring 28 dancers and 10 musicians with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The company also created a site-specific work by Shelby Williams-Gonzalez, Revealed, for the Music Center’s Moves After Dark Series, receiving critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times. For its 20th Anniversary, Agô Ayó:Spirits Rising at the sold-out Ford Amphitheatre, Viver Brasil commissioned Vera Passos to pay homage to the great sambadeira Zelita Moreira da Cruz Silva in Pra Onde O Samba Me Leva/Where the Samba Takes Me as well as Marina Magalhães to create Cor Da Pele (Color of Skin). Viver Brasil continues to perform at the Ford in the LA Soundscapes program.
WHERE VIVER BRASIL PERFORMED
Touring venues include Park Avenue Armory (NYC), Santa Lucia International Festival (Monterey, Mexico), Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts (Miami); The Strathmore Theater (Bethesda, MD); Queens Theatre (Flushing, NY); Nazareth College (Rochester); Mendocino Festival (Mendocino); ) Colorado State University (Ft Collins); Diana Wortham Theatre (Asheville, NC); Zorn Arena (Eau Claire, WI); Herbst Theatre (San Francisco); University of NC (Wilmington); American Theatre (Hampton, VA); The Lensic Performing Arts Center (Santa Fe), Taos Center for the Arts (Taos, NM), National Hispanic Cultural Center (Albuquerque, NM); Egyptian Theatre (Ogden, UT); Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts (Cerritos, CA); Johnson State College (Vermont); Stephens Auditorium (Ames, IA); Arden Theater (St. Albert, Canda); Keyano Theater (Ft. McMurray, Canada); and International Book Fair (Guadalajara, Mexico). Los Angeles stages include the Ford Theatres, the Hollywood Bowl, the Music Center, Aratani Theatre, Grand Park, Grand Performances, California African American Museum/Art and Practice Gallery, the Broad Stages, the World Festival of Sacred Music, Rosenthal Theatre at Inner-City Arts, UCLA Glorya Kaufman Dance Theatre, Fowler Museum, the Broad Stages, and the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center; Arte em Cena/Casa de Cultura SoMovimento (Salvador, Bahia), University of Capetown and Dance Factory (Johannesburg), South Africa; State of Alabama: Tuskegee Institute, Alabama State University, Montgomery; Birmingham: Ramsay Auditorium, Civil Rights Institute, St. Paul Methodist Church Sanctuary.