A journey through dance and music with Brazilian nonprofit EducArte

What comes to mind when you think of Brazil? The colorful parades during Carnival, the yellow and green jerseys of the national soccer team or maybe the bossa nova classic “The Girl from Ipanema?”

For the co-founder of the nonprofit organization EducArte, Kate Spanos’ initial exposure to Brazilian culture happened in — of all places — Ireland. A dancer and scholar, Spanos was studying Irish traditional dance and performance as a graduate student at the University of Limerick in 2008 when she took up capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art form that historically incorporates music, dance and rhythm to disguise its more combative elements. 

“There are a lot of Brazilians in Ireland. I found some similarities in the energy you feel when you are doing Brazilian dance and Irish dance,” recounts Spanos, who grew up in D.C.’s northern Virginia suburb of Arlington. She would go on to earn a PhD in theatre, dance and performance studies from the University of Maryland, where she currently works as assistant director of communications for the university’s Honors College and teaches courses on “dance as resistance.” In 2018 Spanos completed a Fulbright Postdoctoral scholarship on frevo, a folkloric dance form that originated in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, Pernambuco. 

It was through capoeira that Spanos met Pablo Regis de Oliveira, a Brazilian-Peruvian American musician and arts administrator who specializes in the Brazilian musical genres of samba, cavaquinho and choro. After completing an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, Regis moved to D.C. and began working in government communications. Eventually he transitioned into arts administration. He works in Bethesda at Strathmore, as the multidisciplinary arts center’s manager of education and community engagement, and also serves as EducArte’s executive director. 

“I was born in Los Angeles, but I moved to Brazil when I was 11, so I grew up between both cultures,” says Regis. “My dad was also the cultural attaché [for the Brazilian Consulate] in Los Angeles [during] a particularly effervescent time for culture. So a lot of bands and artists like Gilberto Gil went through my dad.”

With each drawing on their own Brazilian connections, Spanos and Regis began to brainstorm ways they could utilize their respective backgrounds in dance and music to amplify Brazilian culture within the Greater Washington, D.C., area. In 2015 the two founded Samba Jig Productions, a music promotion business that paid homage to their respective passions, Brazilian samba and Irish jig.

“We started building an organization that would have the trust of other performing arts venues around town,” says Regis. This allowed them to bring Brazilian artists to the area who “normally would not get a foot in the door.”

Between 2019 and 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the two began to reevaluate the mission of their organization and felt the nonprofit model would better suit their evolving objectives. They chose the name EducArte because it both resonated in multiple languages and reflected their expanding scope of goals — to not only bring Brazilian artists to D.C. but also foster community through cultural exchange and educational programming. 

For Regis, who grew up situated between multiple worlds, languages and cultures, producing concerts was also tied to larger questions about the inclusion of the Brazilian community as a whole in more dominant discourses, both in the United States and in Latin America. 

“We [the Brazilian community] are a forgotten subset of an already underserved or forgotten community,” explains Regis. “It’s important to have [cultural monikers] to help ground us, to help us be aware of where we come from and what our identity is.” 

Spanos agrees, adding, “Instead of just producing concerts, we were also thinking about building a community, opportunities for community engagement and education programs, and that’s where the name EducArte comes from.” 

EducArte has since brought to Greater Washington more than two dozen musical and cultural performances, ranging from coproducing a concert by Brazilian pop singer Marisa Monte (who played at Strathmore in 2022) to producing appearances with guitarists João Bosco and Yamandu Costa (who participated in EducArte’s first Brazilian Guitar Masters Festival this past May).

This summer at the Black Cat, EducArte hosted the award-winning Brazilian trio Gilsons and Brazilian forró band Forróçacana. The Black Cat’s director of operations Lindsay Smyers and talent buyer David Combs say those EducArte events had a strong community spirit. It reminded them of the Black Cat’s storied history as a hub for D.C.’s punk rock scene. 

“[There’s] a community aspect to the events and a breakdown of barriers between artists and audience,” says Combs.

Smyers adds that one of the highlights of working with Regis and Spanos has been that they “have heart for the events, and it makes a huge difference [to have this] community building, attention they’re drawing out, and connection with the band.” 

In June, EducArte hosted Forróçacana at the Black Cat to commemorate the harvest festival of Festa Junina, also known as a festa de São João. The musical group that formed in 1997 stood out among their contemporaries for their inclusion of different genres and instruments, like the fiddle, zither tambourine and cavaquinho. The group has been nominated for two Latin Grammy awards for Best Brazilian Roots/Regional Album and Best Success of São João, and they have won one Brazilian Music award for Best Regional Group in 2006.

For the event, EducArte partnered with local Brazilian artists to decorate the edgy interior of the venue in colorful streamers traditional to the Northeastern Brazilian holiday. They also partnered with other DMV-based Brazilian organizations like Prime Brazil Food, Mulheres Brasileiras de Virginia, Personal Care Foundation and Grupo Mulheres do Brasil Núcleo Washington DC to further galvanize the local Brazilian community. 

“We made a celebration of something that is ultra-Brazilian,” says Regis. “Most people know about Carnival, but not everyone knows about the second largest tradition and public festival in Brazil: Festa Junina.”

Beyond these large events, EducArte also offers hands-on arts experiences on a monthly and weekly basis, from drum percussion classes with Rio De Janeiro native and musician André Coelho at Levine Music to “Samba no Pé” dance classes with Afro-Brazilian dance instructor Ilhuema Zezeh. 

For Spanos, who also teaches dance classes, this work has been an opportunity to reconnect with and share Frevo, the dance form she studied in Recife. The high-energy, vibrant street dance is performed primarily in the cities of Recife and Olinda during Carnival, although one can find groups dancing year-round in anticipation of the annual festival.

Frevo consists of dancers wearing vibrant costumes, twirling colorful umbrellas and jumping up and down to an energetic beat. The joy emanating from the dance enchanted Spanos during her Fulbright Postdoctoral scholarship and reminded her of Irish dances. These observations would later feature in the 2023 book “Dancing in the World: Revealing Cultural Confluences,” which she co-authored with Sinclair Ogaga Emoghene, a dancer and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Theatre and Dance.

“At least in the American imagination, we don’t know a lot about Pernambuco or Recife,” reflects Spanos. “As an organization, it’s really important to show not only the things that everybody knows like capoeira and samba but Frevo as well. I think it’s something — especially when we were offering the classes regularly — [that] distinguished us from other organizations because there’s not a lot of Frevo being taught.”

Regis adds that hosting events is not just about exposing people to different genres of music or dance — these are celebratory acts of cultural preservation. “In Brazil, we are so diverse in our income levels, social levels, race, color, religion and regionalities, but [music] is a unifying thing. It’s particularly heartwarming and inspiring.” 

EducArte recently established a partnership with the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America in Northeast D.C., home to one of the nation’s largest collections of Luso-Brazilian documents. Spanos and Regis envision creating a multidisciplinary performing arts center to not only showcase Brazilian culture but also incorporate other Latin American art forms. 

“There is tremendous joy in experiencing these arts,” says Regis. “But there is also a responsibility. We want to bring it in a way that’s respectful to the traditions and the artists.” 

Through performances, classes and collaborations, EducArte opens doors to the diverse world of Brazilian arts, celebrating a culture as multifaceted and vibrant as the people who call Brazil home. To find out more, visit EducArteinc.org.

* This story has been updated to correct the names of Samba Jig Productions and of Regis’ employer and to make note that EducArte both co-produces and produces musical events.

– Story by Tricia De Souza

– Copy edited by Michelle Benitez