A School That Moves to the Rhythms of Brazil

David de Hilster broke the first promise he made to his new wife.

And, he knew, “sorry” wouldn’t be enough.

Not long after he’d vowed to his bride, Doris, that he’d never leave the mesmerizing daily rhythms of his newly adopted home of Rio de Janeiro, he had a change of heart.

Though the computer scientist and Ohio native had never known such happiness or ever felt so self-assured, he decided it was time to return home. With nothing but professional dead-ends in Brazil, he had to see if the “new” him that bloomed in South America could be transplanted to North American soil--and thrive.

“I took her away from her country,” de Hilster says. “It was the country that had brought her and me so much happiness. And now she was very sad.”

Well, not simply sad, but feeling a deeper more complex emotion, saudades, an oxymoron that many a displaced Brazilian says has no English equivalent. A painter’s palette or composer’s chords often have better expressed this sense of two conflicting emotions at once--a joyful sorrow felt when one is here missing there.

Doris, however, recalls it all in far less elliptical terms: “I was very angry. Then we get here, and he says that he wants to start a samba school. Then I didn’t talk to him for a month!”

Now, six years later, David de Hilster’s please-forgive-me gesture to his wife has evolved into a joyous and popular nonprofit celebration--the SambaLa Samba School.

More than a school, SambaLa, like its Brazilian model, serves as a cultural hearth. While helping Brazilian expatriates reconnect with home, SambaLa offers outsiders a chance to expand their view--passing on Brazilian culture and philosophy, particularly the importance of extended community and nurturing one’s own emotional life.

Since 1994, SambaLa has grown from a couple of dancers to a performance group that ranges from eight to 70, including dancers, musicians and performing bateria (the thundering percussion corps).

Based in Long Beach and operating through a network of local clubs, restaurants and rehearsal studios, SambaLa this year became the first “gringo” samba school to march in Rio’s most prestigious Carnaval parade at the famous Sambadrome. But not before it became the first samba school in the world on the Internet, where the de Hilsters spread the gospel of samba, selling barely there bikinis, feathered headdresses and peek-a-boo gowns, instruments, and dance and drum instruction videos to Brazilian music enthusiasts as close by as Downey and as far away as Denmark.

They keep word of the school’s activities aloft with an e-mail list of more than 250 subscribers. By navigating to their Web page, https://sambala.org, which receives about 300 hits a day, samba enthusiasts the world over can place special orders for custom-designed costumes from Doris’ collection or find the perfect piece of percussion for their bateria. All proceeds from sales benefit the samba school fund to replenish instruments, costumes and other equipment.

Each Saturday, SambaLa offers an afternoon of back-to-back workshops that segue seamlessly. Dance and drum classes are taught by martial arts expert and drum craftsman Alvaro Aguiar, cavaco (a small, stringed Portuguese instrument) playing and singing is taught by David, while both de Hilsters teach conversational Portuguese.

Once a month, SambaLa throws Club Samba, a big festa decorated with costumed dancers and full bateria at Tony’s Famous French Dip Restaurant. Their biggest local event each year is the Long Beach Brazilian Street Carnival in September, where SambaLa (an organizer and co-sponsor) provides the festival’s transformative magic--parades, costumes and food--as well as the heartbeat of any Carnival--the bateria.

And so, what was conceived as a part-time endeavor has proved to be just what Doris feared--yet another full-time job. David, with a partner, runs a computer programming text analysis company, and Doris, who also designs a casual clothing line, have both had to figure out how to balance all this.

“This . . . ,” admits David, gesturing around their digs--alive with steady bleating home-office phones, David’s wall-sized abstracts invoking Brazil. “This is what happens when your hobby goes too far!”

But for David, there are no two ways about it: “It was Brazil that brought me such joy and such peace. Not only did I want to give Doris something back but I wanted to give back to Brazil what I had received.”

In that spirit, the de Hilsters have not only provided Brazilians beset with saudades (pronounced sow-dahd-ji) with a place, but they have created a mood and sense of community that approximates home. And for “gringos” like David who have found themselves overtaken by the spell that is Brazil, it is a place to crawl into like the space of a rhythm or a song.

Setting Up for Rehearsal

Saturday, long after high noon and it’s sweltering. The only thing missing from this tropical motif with potted rubber plants, Pepto-Bismol pink walls and chipped blue floors is the humidity. And that will be self-generated in moments, promises David de Hilster and Aguiar as they trudge into one of the rehearsal rooms at Long Beach’s Lil’ Rock Rehearsal Studios. They lift plastic boxes full of percussion--tamborim, agogu, tam-tams, repique-de-mao. A separate trip brings the caixa, repinique, the surdos--the tall bass the size of garbage cans.

Aguiar, a native of Sao Paulo and its samba schools, whose sambaista talents were discovered here on a local dance floor, stands in front of a row of a dozen men and women of varying levels, ages, interests and backgrounds. There is Connie Di Diego and her two friends from work, Sonia Cuellar and Ginger Dodier who are here because Di Diego, a longtime fan of Brazilian carnival shows, was poking around on the Internet just looking for something “fun.”

At the other end of the samba line is Steffan Panos, a graduate student at Cal State Long Beach studying jazz piano, who also found SambaLa on line. His first dip into Brazilian music was Antonio Carlos Jobim’s dressed-up interpretations of samba--bosa nova--and he’s been immersed in it since. Panos is here for the full day of workshops--from dance to singing to bateria practice.

“There’s something about the spiritual aspects of the music, number one, and the communal, participatory aspects of the workshop . . . “ that keeps Panos coming back.

Aguiar, dressed all in white except for the bright green of his dancing shoes, assesses the assembly as David de Hilster slips a CD into the changer, picks up a tamborine to accompany the day’s samba enredo--samba theme. The drums build, then cascade over the thrash metal guitars spilling out of the adjacent practice rooms. “Listen. Watch the music,” Aguiar presses them to focus. To imagine. He demonstrates--his feet a mere green blur beneath him. “Boom-boom-boom-boom. Always remember--it’s a conversation.”

When it started, David recalls, “it was about half Brazilian, half gringos--a mix of Asians, Latins, African Americans. All of us coming together. They were Brazilians or they were people married to Brazilians or people who simply liked to be involved in cultural things. We get parents who come, whose kids are of Brazilian descent, who tell us, ‘It’s really nice to bring my kid to learn the dances, the music . . . the customs.”

That has been the working magic of SambaLa.

“Anyone is welcome. If they want to dance--they dance. If they want to drum, they drum,” says de Hilster, “We don’t care how good you are. If you get out there is what matters.”

A Sense of Community in L.A.

But one of the most powerful aspects of SambaLa, says Sergio Mielniczenko of the cultural affairs arm of the Brazilian consulate in charge of media/radio, is that it helps define and create community in Los Angeles--a place, that by its sheer breadth and mix, seems to resist that notion at every turn.

“It’s very hard in Los Angeles to create a sense of community, and in organizing an escola de samba--a samba school--David and Doris have tried to transpose and re-create the feeling of what happens in Brazil. It’s the bringing together of not just music but of friendship.”

In Brazil, the escola de samba not only organizes singers and drummers and dancers to practice and perform, but, says Mielniczenko, “they provided community work that helps move the neighborhoods toward social betterment.”

It was following that model, one that could underscore the importance of community involvement and would help build bridges--interaction--across cultures, that most interested de Hilster, especially in a racially and culturally diverse city like Long Beach.

Other samba schools, have come and gone or exist in a more insular form. “Or they model themselves much like a band,” says Mielniczenko, citing the long-popular party that takes place at Cafe Danse, in West L.A. It features MILA--a samba school that hosts a traditional batucada (jam session) each Friday night that attracts expat Brazilians from throughout the county.

De Hilster, however, was more interested in creating something that becomes a fixed focal point, a tool that creates a conversation among diverse communities.

“What you have is both Brazilians and others learning. You’re creating this hybrid--which is absolutely new and exciting--non-Brazilians playing the traditional instruments. In Brazil, most people are born into the escola de samba. They have had generations before them singing and dancing so it was ingrained in their spirit and soul,” says Mielniczenko, “ . . . but what is absolutely magical and marvelous here is that people have to slowly get into the spirit of the music. And turn it into something new.”

The spirit of samba can be traced to Bahia, a state on the Brazilian east coast.

“Originally the word samba meant party,” says Daniella Thompson, a writer and music researcher specializing in Brazilian music. “The rhythm itself was called batuque. People would form a circle and do a call-and-response singing and clap hands. One person would jump in the center, dance, and then would be replaced.”

In the late 19th century, when slavery was abolished, many of the Bahian blacks moved away from the agrarian areas to the cities in search of work.

“There they established a Bahian community where they got together to dance and play instruments,” Thompson says. “They belonged to the lower classes, and oftentimes the police hounded them.” Blacks, says Thompson, were discriminated against, and samba, with its suggestive moves and rhythms, “was seen as an obscene kind of dance.”

The samba schools, she explains, were a way to lend respectability to samba and the people who created it. The first recorded samba, “Pelo Telefone,” emerged in 1917, but it wasn’t until the late ‘20s and early ‘30s that samba became a part of Rio’s grand Carnaval tradition.

Once samba schools made it to the United States, the focus and larger mission began to blur, explains anthropologist Bernadete Beserra, who specializes in transplanted Brazilians’ efforts to re-create home. They become meeting groups rather than cultural posts--more an attempt to expand networks to meet not just Brazilians but non-Brazilians. Or simply to find a husband or wife.

“So here, outside of its traditional space . . . the meaning changes,” Beserra says. “It becomes an international project that is driven by the market.”

From the start, de Hilster, guided by respect for the culture, argues that he has been fighting to try to bolster his school into being more than simply a place to meet-and-greet or a money-making scheme. At root, there was something much more--like an elixir, an antidote--to share.

Appealing to His Emotional Side

“Brazil,” he had observed on his early trips there, “just seemed to be living in an opposite world than in the U.S. More plugged into the people side, the emotional side. Maybe because it was a Third World country, you have to learn to live with and rely on people, and the emphasis is on relationships. I was very introverted when I went there. But in Brazil I grew up emotionally.”

There’s certainly nothing shy or introverted now about de Hilster, a man who has found himself in the spotlight, singing or teaching or on the floor at the Sambadrome leading the bateria singing in Portuguese.

“Our goal was to be the premiere samba school in the U.S.,” says de Hilster, who fully embodies the vision of the shaggy-haired beach-boy/mystic--in flowing shirt and roomy trousers and sandaled feet.

“We came up with a charter in March of ‘94, launched it on the final game of the World Cup at the Foothill Club with 400 to 500 people. I just knew that it would drop down eventually. But it’s kept up . . . this little church of Samba.”

Its flock continues to grow--from growing SambaLa workshops and festas to now extended membership within the International Federation of Sambaistas--Unidos do Mundo--the first international samba school. That accomplished, de Hilster’s eye is now set on creating a “Little Brazil” in Long Beach--and its centerpiece--SambaLa’s own practice, gathering and performance space.

Doris admits with a sigh that nowadays she’s begun to come around.

Outfitting sambaistas from Canada to Japan, her SambaLa Collection continues to grow. That work--designing, sewing and decorating headdresses and costumes in a rainbow of hues--keeps her busy nearly year-round: 80% of that business is generated by the Internet.

“This is a very difficult thing to do. You are always working at it. Sometimes I get sooo tired and . . . overwhelmed--because you can’t say no,” says Doris, sitting behind her worktable surrounded by her sequined gowns and a forest of brilliant, arcing feathers.

“But as Carnaval time gets closer and things get crazy, all the dancers come and help. We put a tent outside. My friend comes to cook and help us. On the CD we put on samba. For me, it’s this big emotional thing. Especially on the last day. The day before Carnaval--everyone wants to be ‘beautiful for tomorrow.’

“And everyone is around me asking for things last minute. It makes you mad. But there’s this moment I forget I’m so far away. I feel like I’m at home. . . . It makes me angry, yes . . . ,” she says, her voice steely, but the traces of something else shimmers up in her hazel eyes. “But, it makes me happy too.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Colorful History Spanning 80 Years “Pelo Telefone,” the first recorded samba, ushered in the carioca variant of the Afro-Bahaian form in 1917. Francisco Alves made his recording debut in 1920 with Sinho^’s Carnaval hit “Pe de Anjo,” a recording that made him Brazil’s first great radio star. Samba’s golden age, according to music historian Daniella Thompson, was the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Some of the greatest interpreters of samba include Orlando Silva, Silvio Caldas, Aracy de Almeida, Moreira da Silva, Ataulfo Alves, Cyro Monteiro, Cartola, Candeia, Clementina de Jesus, Nelson Cavaquinho, Jamela~o Ze Keti, Clara Nunes, Roberto Ribeiro Paulinho da Viola, Dona Ivone, Grupo Fundo de Quintal, Zeca Pagodinho, Beth Carvalho and Cristina Buarque.

*

Lynell George can be reached atlynell.george@latimes.com.