2024-02-12 08:26:35
Time.news – Shining with sequins and sweat, overwhelmed by the sensual rhythm of the samba, thousands of artists danced along an avenue in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday in the Brazilian city’s carnival parades. With whimsical floats, thundering drum sections and legions of performers in imaginative costumes, 12 samba schools competed for the coveted title of carnival champions in two epic nights. Rio has been celebrating Carnival for weeks with colorful, open-to-all street parties known as “blocos.” The Sunday and Monday parades are the pinnacle: sumptuous festivals of color and sound that last all night and into the next day.
A crowd of 70,000 applauded from the packed stands of the Sambodromo, the city’s purpose-built parade venue, with millions more watching live on TV. But the carnival is not just about partying all night. Samba schools have their roots in the poor neighborhoods of Rio’s favela, and each parade tells a story, often dealing with politics, social issues and history.
This year’s parades include tributes to little-known heroes of Afro-Brazilian history and a celebration of the indigenous Yanomami people, devastated by a humanitarian crisis blamed on illegal gold mining in the Amazon. The school behind that parade, Salgueiro, linked the plight of the world’s largest rainforest to the fight against climate change, in which the Amazon’s carbon-absorbing trees play a vital role.
Each samba school has 60 to 70 minutes to dazzle its 700-meter Marques de Sapucai, the avenue that runs through the concrete carnival parade temple designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. A panel of judges evaluates them down to the smallest detail, deducting potentially devastating fractions of points for being out of sync, running over time or lacking talent. Porto da Pedra were set to lose valuable points after suffering a couple of float accidents, which is not unusual during parades. In one, a piece of the wagon broke right in front of the jury. In the other, a cart got caught in a metal safety grate, dragging it and injuring a woman. Putting together a show with more than 3,000 performers and a fleet of floats that appear to defy gravity is no easy feat. Samba schools spend the entire year preparing.
The parades were especially political under far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who faced accusations of authoritarianism, racism, environmental destruction and disastrous mismanagement of Covid-19 – all fodder for samba schools during his 2019 presidency – 2022. The overall tone has been less politically charged since veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in January 2023. Invented a century ago by the descendants of African slaves, the samba is one of the great symbols of Brazilian popular culture, and of Rio. Today the carnival is big business for the city: the festival is expected to generate 5.3 billion reais (more than $1 billion) in revenue this year.
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