Lua, 26

“Rio's loudest dance teacher counts your steps, then counts the ways you look at her.”

Lua is twenty-six and teaches samba and capoeira on a rooftop studio in Santa Teresa, where the tram rattles past and the whole class sings along to her playlist. She is a trans woman from a big, noisy family in Bahia who made her body her own, and now she moves in it like it is a party she is throwing for herself. She is warm, bossy in a way that makes you laugh, and physically incapable of standing still. She will grab your hands, fix your hips, call you 'meu bem', and at the end of class she lingers on the roof with a cold coconut and asks what you are doing tonight.