Thousands of performers danced down the boulevards of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday in the Brazilian beach city's famous Carnival parade.
Thousands of performers, glittering in sequins and sweat, danced down Rio de Janeiro's boulevards to sultry samba beats on Sunday in the Brazilian beach city's famous Carnival parade.
Featuring outlandish floats, a roaring drum section, and a slew of performers in fanciful, body-flaunting costumes, 12 samba schools will compete in two nights of epic booty-shaking to win the coveted Compete for the title of Carnival Champion.
Entering the parade grounds “gives me goosebumps every time,” said Deborah Moraes de Sousa, a 53-year-old doctor who grew up in a poor neighborhood in São Goncalo and has been parading for 10 years with the samba school Porto da Pedra. . .
“When you get to the end, you're like, 'Oh, are we done yet? I want more!' Everybody's jumping up and down, everybody's happy.”
Rio has already been celebrating Carnival for several weeks with colorful free-for-all street parties known as “brocos''.
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The parade on Sunday and Monday is the climax. It's a gorgeous festival of color and sound that lasts all night and into the next day.
A packed crowd of 70,000 cheered from the packed stands at the city's private parade venue, the Sambadrome Stadium, with millions more expected to watch live on television.
But there's more to Carnival than all-night parties.
Samba schools are rooted in Rio's poor favela neighborhoods, and each parade tells a story, often dealing with politics, social issues, and history.
This year's parade will include a tribute to the lesser-known heroes of Afro-Brazilian history and a celebration of the Yanomami, an indigenous group affected by the humanitarian crisis caused by illegal gold mining in the Amazon. .
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Salgueiro School, which organized the parade, linked the plight of the world's largest rainforest to the fight against climate change, in which the Amazon's carbon-sucking trees play a key role.
“I'm here to show everyone what's going on in the Amazon,” dancer Kevin Rodrigis, 22, said after being lowered by a crane from the top of the float at the end of the parade.
“The Yanomami people are in crisis, with severe deforestation, people and animals dying, and trees burning.”
an accident happens
Each samba school takes 60 to 70 minutes to walk down the 700-meter boulevard of Marqués de Sapucai, which passes through the concrete Carnival Parade Temple designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.
The jury will examine each one down to the smallest detail, and things like being out of sync, overtime, or lack of flair can result in devastating points deductions.
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Porto da Pedra suffered two float accidents, which are not uncommon in parades, costing them valuable points.
In one of the cases, part of the float broke in front of the jury. In another accident, a woman was injured when a float got caught in a metal safety grate and was dragged.
She was treated for a cut on her leg and released, according to the city health department.
Putting together a show with over 3,000 performers and a gravity-defying swarm of floats is no small feat.
Samba schools spend all year preparing and often face stiff competition to do so.
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'From the bottom of my heart'
Alexandre Reis, 52, an electrician at Beija Flor School, was leading a team rushing to solve a last-minute problem when a light on one side of the float stopped working.
Wraith has been standing by to respond to just such emergencies for the past 23 years.
“It's a very complex job. (The float) is like a moving bandstand, so the lighting requires a lot of technical expertise,” he said.
But, he added, “I'm doing this with all my heart.” “We sweat and bleed because we love school.”
The parade has been particularly political under far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who during his 2019-2022 presidential term was a leader in the fight against authoritarianism, racism, environmental destruction and COVID-19. All of this was fodder for Samba schools, which have faced accusations of a disastrous response.
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Since veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to office in January 2023, the overall tone has become less political.
Invented a century ago by the descendants of African slaves, the samba is one of Brazil's popular culture and Rio's great symbols.
Carnival is now big business for Rio, with Carnival expected to generate 5.3 billion reais (more than $1 billion) in revenue this year.
– Posted by: © Agence France-Presse
