About this Artist

Founded in 1997 by Co-Artistic Directors Linda Yudin and Luiz Badaró, Viver Brasil is a legacy-bearing Los Angeles institution with deep and ongoing ties to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. 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. In 2022, Vera Passos was appointed as Co-Artistic Director.

Viver Brasil performed at the Santa Lucia Festival in Monterey, Nuevo Leon Mexico in 2022 and in 2023 will celebrate its 10th anniversary performing at Disney California Adventure Park’s annual winter spectacle Viva Navidad Street Fiesta Parade. Over the past two decades the company has performed throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The company’s original works, include Yabas/Queen toured to New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado with National Dance Project Touring support; Feet on the Ground featuring Alaafia, which toured throughout the U.S. and Canada with National Dance Project Production support; Peace Transcends, which culminated the inaugural Aratani World Series in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Ford on the Road Series; and fourteen seasons at the Ford Theatre. Viver Brasil premiered Vera Passos’ Bloco Afro Spectacle, Motumbaxé at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring 38 artists performing with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The company created a site-specific work, Revealed for the Music Center’s Moves After Dark Series, receiving critical acclaim from the LA Times. Viver Brasil celebrated its 20th anniversary with the premiere of Agô Ayó: Spirits Rising in 2017 at the sold-out Ford Theatre with new work by Brazilian choreographers Marina Magalhães, Cor Da Pele/ Color of Skin) and Vera Passos’ Pra Onde O Samba Me Leva/Where the Samba Takes Me. During COVID-19, Viver Brasil created dance films, Tempo by Vera Passos, Liminal by Bianca Medina, and Aroboboi by Ajah Muhammad.

Programming is offered in person and online including free weekly Afro-Brazilian dance and music for the community at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center; in-school and after-school arts education residencies for K-12 & university students; the experiential Celebrating Samba show; Samba in the Streets, which has toured three times to the birthplace of the civil rights movement, building community partnerships in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, Lowndes County, Alabama. The company also offers an annual travel/cultural immersion program, Dancing at the Source in Salvador, Bahia.

Viver Brasil gratefully acknowledges the National Endowment for the Arts, the CA Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the city of LA’s Department of Cultural Affairs, LA Arts Recovery Grant, CA Community Foundation and the generosity of its individual donors.