1 Billion Hearts presents
Trained dancer Vandana Hart travels the world to learn its dances from the people who keep them alive.
Season 2 launches 1 Million Women Dance. Join the movement
The mission
Move 1 billion hearts for peace through music and dance.
Season 1
The revolutionary spirit of Afrobeat is still alive in Lagos. Vandana follows the street dancers and meets Femi Kuti, son of Fela.
Vietnam’s economy is booming and the way people dance is changing with it, from the moonwalk to professional pole dance.
In a city of extremes, dance is what people share. Vandana goes to a wedding, a refugee camp and a nightclub where belly dancers take the floor.
After it aired, the hip-hop class for Syrian refugee children kept running for three more years.
On one island, sacred movement sits right next to hip-hop collaborations and ecstatic dance parties.
Paris dances ballet and burlesque, walks vogue balls and throws down in hip-hop battles.
Creator and host
Vandana is a trained dancer. In every place she finds the people who carry a dance and asks them to teach her.
The daughter of refugees, she has been to more than 100 countries. As a senior UN official she co-founded the Safe Cities Global Initiative to end violence against women and girls, and grew it from 5 countries to 50.
Season 2 · 8 episodes · Shot and in post
Eight episodes across Brazil, South Africa, Ghana, Morocco, Mexico, Cuba and the United States, about the people who use dance to survive, heal, resist and lead. The Amazon episode launches 1 Million Women Dance.
“Dance is a universal spirit.”
Chief Putanny Yawanawá
1Afro-Brazilian women from the favelas use passinho, funk and samba to express themselves fully and lift up the people around them, all the way into Carnival. With MC Rebecca, Carlinhos de Jesus and Sabrina Ginga.
Impact A favela dance project for women and kids.
Filmed inside Nelson Mandela’s house with his grandson Ndaba, who tells how Mandela had the people dance before his speeches. Children living with HIV/AIDS share the poetry and dance they made in a UNICEF project.
Impact Dance for the children of the UNICEF project.
A dancer spent seven years collecting scrap at an e-waste site to save enough to build a dance school. Around him, Ghana’s hip-hop, salsa and Afro dance scenes.
Impact His dance school.
4Breaker Hind Bahri, traditional Gnawa, and a contemporary company dancing in the streets, set against Morocco’s new wave of DJs and dancers.
Impact A women’s empowerment project led by one of the dancers.
5Chief Putanny, the first woman to lead the Yawanawá, dances in ceremony with her family and speaks about women rising to protect the Amazon. The episode ends with her and Vandana inviting a million women to dance. Alicia Keys reshared her speech.
Impact Launches 1 Million Women Dance.
Vandana teaches a workshop inside a women’s prison beside a young activist ballerina who gives ballet classes there. Then the masked Danza del Diablo, the feathered Danza de la Pluma and Día de Muertos.
Impact More dance classes for the women in the prison.
Cuba’s salsa and contemporary dancers, and the Orisha and Afro-Cuban dance underneath it all.
Impact A dance and food program with New Moon Productions.
8A national powwow where 3,000 Indigenous dancers from more than 100 tribes dance together. Acosia, a jingle dress dancer from Pendleton, Oregon, leads the jingle dance, a healing dance, with six other women.
Impact A dance and leadership retreat led by Acosia.
From the Season 2 shoot
Vandana Hart and Chief Putanny invite a million women to dance.
Produce Season 2
We’re raising $50,000 to finish the edit and film a music-video finale for each episode, the dance people learn and pass on.
Producer credit on the season, and your cause attached to one episode’s campaign.
Executive Producer credit on the full season.
The movement Season 2 starts
Every woman has a dream. Now she has a Dance.
A global community of women dancing for the dreams that change our families, our lands and our world. Joining is free, and you are never dancing alone.
