The Sensuous <i> Lambada</i> : Blame It on Rio : Trend: The dance originated in Brazil but is just now arriving here from Europe. It is a close-contact affair not for the faint of heart.

Get ready for the lambada. What? You haven’t heard of it? You will.

Described by many observers as “Dirty Dancing” with a Latin beat, lambada brings couple dancing back with a vengeance. Performed in body-to-body close contact, it is not an activity for the faint of heart.

The sensual Brazilian dance that swept across Europe last summer is now hitting the United States. Lambada dances have already sprung up in New York, and separate dance programs are planned for tonight at the Second Coming in downtown Los Angeles and at Samba e Saudade, a Culver City dance club. CBS is preparing to release a lambada single next week by the group that launched the craze in Europe, and the record company plans an album next month. And some other Southern California clubs are gearing up for steamy lambada nights in coming weeks.

“Imagine asking someone to dance,” said KCRW-FM’s music director, Tom Schnabel, a reliable weather vane for musical trends, “and then putting yourself pelvis-to-pelvis with this stranger and starting to move. I think I’d pass out on the dance floor!”

Patricia Dowling, whose Warner Dance Center West in Canoga Park was the first area dance studio to offer lambada lessons, described it in even more succinct terms: “It’s done with a lot of fun, and no one really takes it very seriously, but it can literally be like having sex with your clothes on.”

A lambada starts out innocently enough, with the couple in traditional partner dance position. The thighs and pelvis, however, are virtually glued together. As the music, which can range from medium to fast, continues, it energizes the dance into rotating hip movements--call it a grind. The momentum builds, and the dancers move into improvised dips and swirls. But the body contact, with its rhythmically erotic circling of the hips, is continuous, an essential characteristic of the dance.

The lambada exploded on the European music scene earlier this year, initially via a French orange drink commercial, which led to the release in Europe of the single “Lambada” by the Brazilian group Kaoma. The record, scheduled for release in this country next week, has already sold more than 4 million copies in Europe, and has topped Billboard’s Pan-European charts for months.

But the lambada is not a new dance. Its history traces back five decades. A blend of meringue, salsa and samba, the lambada emerged from the African-influenced music of Brazil’s northeastern states to become enormously popular in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s.

Like the tango in Argentina, the lambada sizzled with eroticism. Unlike the tango, its sensuality was direct and to-the-point.

When Getulio Vargas, then-dictator of Brazil, saw the dance, he was horrified by its “immorality” and ordered it banned from his “disciplined democracy.”

But the lambada lived on in the sertao , the northern countryside, adding a Caribbean influence here and there until it emerged once again in the mid-’60s.

Linda Yudin, a UCLA dance ethnologist and one of the directors of a dance group called Soul of Brazil, compares it to social dances from Cape Verdes and Senegal.

“Its name,” she explained, “traces to porrada , a slang word, which means a hit or a slap. And, in terms of the dance, it makes sense, since the whole focus is for the dancing pair to jam their thighs and their sexual organs against each other.”

Dance Center West’s Dowling remembers seeing the dance when she was living in Brazil in the mid-’60s. “It was very much the same dance as now,” she recalled. “The only real difference is in the way the dancers dress. It was fairly conservative in the ‘60s, while today, the girls like to wear short little ruffled skirts, and the men are often shirtless, with a headband, and maybe a wrist band. Another difference is the fact that today’s lambada is usually done barefoot. But it was just as erotic in the ‘60s as it is now.”

Kleber Jorge, perhaps the Southland’s best expatriate Brazilian musician, recalls playing lambada music for dances more than a decade ago. Like Yudin, he described it as a kind of musical stew, well-seasoned with Caribbean and African influences.

The original lambada , he explained, “had a real Brazilian feeling. But now, it sounds more like meringue, with much more of a Caribbean feeling. And I think that’s what happened to it when it went to Europe. They mixed in other things to make it commercial.

“But it’s not a very interesting music to perform. It’s like the polka. If you ask a musician to play a polka, he might enjoy it once or twice, but not for a whole night. The lambada is real dance music, like disco, not music for musicians to use for creative playing.”

Still, Jorge, recognizing the prevailing winds, is adding several lambada pieces to his group’s repertoire. In the works are upcoming performances of authentic lambada with Yudin’s Soul of Brazil dance company.

The full impact of lambada , however, will begin to be felt in the next month. CBS’s release of the Kaoma single will be followed by an album in December, as well as a two-disc compilation of Brazilian lambada groups early next year. Kaoma, along with a large dance group, is scheduled to appear at the Palace in Hollywood in the first week in December.

More immediately, a dance tonight, at The Second Coming in downtown Los Angeles, will feature Afro-Brazil, a company of musicians and dancers, in a full-fledged lambada program that will include demonstrations and instruction.

Samba e Saudade, the pet Brazilian music project of promoter Maria Lucien, will showcase a lambada dance contest tonight during its weekly program in Culver City. “This will be the third week that we’ve done the contest,” she explained, “and it’s the most successful thing we’ve ever done. I love the lambada . It’s so sweet, so exciting, and it’s already happened in Europe. So now it’s time for it to happen here.

“And you can dance the lambada without getting too close. It doesn’t have to be completely erotic. Of course, it’s more fun if it is!”

Other clubs, among them Nucleus Nuance and Music Machine, are planning lambada events and the Red Onion, in Woodland Hills, will present Felix Chavez, of the Warner Dance Center West, in a teaching session Sunday night.

But does the lambada , so to speak, have legs? Will it be more than another 15-minute novelty?

Roberto Lestinge, a Brazilian television commentator and the host of a KCRW’s Brazilian music show, has mixed feelings.

“The dance may be old,” he said, “but quality-wise and artist-wise it’s quite new. In many ways it’s still in the folk realm of music--very innocent, very naive. But everybody sees its commercial potential and there are a lot of battles raging right now over the rights to it--especially so since everyone realizes how important the American market could be.

“I’m rooting for the lambada ,” Lestinge continued. “But I’d also like to see Brazilian artists like Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso, who are incredible talents, become more successful too. And, who knows, if lambada is successful it may finally be the big hit that will help all the Brazilian performers.”

One thing’s for sure. The lambada has to be experienced to be understood. It is not a music for passive listening.

As KCRW’s Schnabel put it: “ Lambada feels good. It has nice beat, and it’s a pleasurable music. Maybe the best part of it is that it’s beyond intellectual. It just makes you feel like moving.”