My knees throbbed for three days after my cousin’s Brazilian beach wedding. The oceanfront extravaganza was just the kick-off to a two-week foray this winter beginning in the country’s remote northeast and ending in marvelous Rio de Janeiro, but it was enough to remind me what makes Brazil such an amazing vacation destination. Yes, the beaches, tropical fruits, honey smiles, and double kisses are all wonderful, but the dancing takes the cake.

I’d traveled with nearly two-dozen family members to Porto de Galinhas, a resort town in the northeast state of Pernambuco. The town’s name, which means “port of the hens” in Portuguese, is a holdover from the illegal slave trade. After Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, slave traders would use the fetid smell and sounds of poultry to hide illicit human charges stashed below. Now, the ubiquitous ceramic hens are one of few reminders of this sordid past, and Porto, with perfect waves and crystalline reefs, is seriously dedicated to the Brazilian national pastimes of tanning, surfing, and dancing.

My cousin met his Brazilian wife in Los Angeles and they live in Vancouver, but she asked to be married in this town, a beach getaway less than two hours from her native Olinda, where she spent vacations growing up and was a local boogie-boarding champion. Her mother arranged the rest. She rented a spacious and modern oceanfront house filled with Pernambucan folk art, provided a steady flow of local delicacies, and built a canopied platform over the deck-top pool for the wedding.

After the ceremony, my family and their new in-laws found that while they couldn’t speak one another’s languages, they could dance together. The Brazilian men held their partners tight, with couples floating across the platform’s narrow width, two stepping in tandem. Alongside, my North American relatives, many equipped with meringue lessons taken in Rhode Island before the wedding, found their own movements to the happy rhythm.

But where, they kept asking, was the samba and bossa nova?

The state of Pernambuco, scorched by the equator and a three-hour flight north of Rio de Janeiro, is a lesser-known Brazilian music capital. As such, its most popular dances – the fervent frevo, the booming maracatu, the upbeat forro – aren’t as familiar to American ears as the samba and bossa nova.

At the wedding, the band warmed up playing some popular forro tunes. A cousin to other accordion styles such as merengue and zydeco, forro probably comes from the African word forrobodo, meaning a big party where everyone is dancing and playing music, according to the New York-based musician Rob Curto. The more popular story, that Brazilians love to tell foreigners, is that an American Army base in the northeast wanted to have a party “for all.” The Brazilians guests mispronounced the name, and “for all” became forro.

Whatever its true origins, with its heavily syncopated 2/4 rhythm consisting of the accordion, zabumba bass drum, and triangle, the music is fun; when a band plays it’s a bit like a country ho-down with an injection of hip swaying.

I first danced to forro six years ago as an exchange student in Rio. With friends I had ventured to the Northeastern Fair on the outskirts of the city late on a Friday night. There, each week, under the cover of darkness, hundreds of Brazilians gather for dancing and food. Part of the country’s great internal migration – the flight from the northeast’s drought and poverty to the South’s urban centers – they dance intimately to forro well into the morning, next to stalls selling northeastern delicacies from dried meat to tapioca.

At my cousin’s party, forro was just the beginning. The music quickly turned to frevo, a frenetic rhythm mostly reserved for Carnival whose name fittingly comes from the verb ferver, which means “to boil” in Portuguese.

The party was lead by the bride’s aunt, now a doctor in Sao Paulo, who paraded with a frevo group in every Carnival of her youth. Each year, she danced up the hills of Olinda, Recife’s sister city, with climbs at least as steep as San Francisco’s. At the wedding, age appeared to have taken no toll, as she squatted and jumped with an unabated fervor, throwing her legs in every direction and tirelessly leading us on the dance floor.

The Americans who had retired to the tables on the edge of the deck to watch the waves and sip caipirinhas, Brazil’s famed lime and sugar-cane alcohol cocktail, said they felt like they were watching a contest where people danced until they collapsed.

A few days later, after we had recovered from the wedding festivities, the party shed any initial inhibitions at Casa do Frevo, a performance space in Old Recife. We walked in thinking we would just listen to the live music and watch the show, but quickly plump middle-aged women with sequined masks and gold gowns lured us onto the lofted dance floor, grabbing our hands and leading us in simple circle dances. As the night wore on the rhythm increased until nymph-like teenagers in short, satiny skirts and knickers took over, jumping, flipping, and twirling in a fury.

The Brazilian in-laws explained that behind the masks were many of the men and women who started Casa do Frevo, academics and professionals who wanted to preserve the folk music’s authentic form. Each night we were there they would don the costumes and practice for Carnival. Even my difficult-to-please uncle called it the most fun dancing he’d ever had – kicking his feet up and glowing, he said he felt like he’d joined the circus.

Still, when a maracatu percussion band emerged late that night, with young men pounding bass drums at deafening decibels, my family, even after a week in Brazil, was soon out the door.

The next day, most of the contingent of Americans headed home, and my sister and I caught a flight to Rio, where we shifted musical gears to the smoother sounds of samba.

Where To Dance

You don’t need a wedding to dance to the music of northeastern Brazil. Olinda, the sister city of the capital, Recife, and a UNESCO World Heritage site, has a Carnival that is considered one of the best and least commercialized in Brazil. Puppets and dancers line the streets and an endless parade of musicians performing maracatu, frevo, and forro drives their moving feet. For those looking for public concerts with smaller crowds, the festival of Sao Joao, which comes the last week of June, is like a smaller version of Carnival.

But music is to be found almost every night in clubs, cafes, and on public corners all over Pernambuco, such as Casa da Rabeca do Brasil and Forro do Arlindo in Olinda, and Sala de Reboco and Casa do Frevo in Recife. There is also the Maracatu contest, which takes place Sundays at 3 p.m. outside of the Mercado Eufrasio Barbosa, on Avenida Sigismundo Goncalves.

If you want to learn to dance before you go, Vanessa Menezes, originally from Sao Paulo, gives classes every Wednesday from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. in Forro, Zouk (a variation on Lambada), and Samba at Champions Studio (257 West 39th St., 14th Floor, 212-307-7707, www.championsdance.com). After her class head downtown to the Village and try out your new moves at Guernica (25 Ave B, 212-674-0984), where Rob Curto leads Forro for All every Wednesday night from 11p.m.to early in the morning. Be prepared to dance.