Starting in September, the schools hold weekly practices for thousands of dancers and musicians. One such school is the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro which warmed up for the season with a practice in the street in front of their hall.
Carnaval in Rio is a showcase the work of samba schools. The huge organizations are not educational institutions, but social groups that mount entries for the three days of parades before Easter each year. Each parade entry by a top-ranking school will showcase up to 5,000 dancers in thematic ranks, and enormous floats.
Starting in September, the schools hold weekly practices for thousands of dancers and musicians. One such school is the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro which warmed up for the season with a practice in the street in front of their hall.
The batucada of thirty drummers set the rhythm in motion, and over 300 dancers and spectators cleared an oval among the crowd for the flag bearers to present the colors of the Salgueiro samba school.
The couples, dressed in the red and white colors of the school, twirled their way up the long oval stopping frequently to present the colors to a member of the schools governing body. Around the perimeter of the oval, Baianas — a rank representing the roots of samba in the state of Bahia — shivered and shimmied in a halo around the four chosen pairs.
The Porta Bandeiras, or flag bearers, and the escort Mestre Salas are chosen as the best dancing members of the school, and display the honor with a regal poise while meandering through the oval. Around the edges, the other school members and spectators sing the year’s chosen samba to the loud pulsing rhythm of the music.
All images ©Kevin Moloney 1995-1996
After all four Porta Bandeiras have presented the colors, the ring closes in, and members of the rank and file pair up to demonstrate their skills in the traditional Brazilian dance.
Once-simple parade groups formed by slum-dwellers to celebrate alongside the rich, the schools now have fulltime staffs of accountants, designers, press agents, artistic directors and construction crews. The city’s 51 samba schools spend an average of $500,000 a year in carnaval expenses. Leading schools spend twice that.
More than 50,000 samba school musicians and dancers perform before some 400,000 spectators in Rio’s Sambadrome, a stadiumlike avenue designed for the annual parades. An average of 200,000 people a night take part in formal and informal parades, parties and costume balls throughout the city.
Maria Rita de Araújo Conrado, chief seamstress for one of the schools, oversees the production of 4,000 costumes, some of them worth more than $250. Many poor participants must take a second job to pay for their costume.
“I hate carnaval, but I love the brilliance of the parades,” said Dona Rita.
Carnaval in Rio hasn’t always been so big. For centuries, the celebration consisted of small religious processions of common people.
In the 19th century, the masquerade balls and fancy dress of European society attracted the city’s elite. The first samba school was organized in a Rio slum in 1928. Carnaval began to take its present elaborate form in the 1930s.
Dr. Hiram Araújo, a retired physician and a carnaval historian in Rio, has watched it grow in a city as notable for its crime and poverty as for its carnaval.
“It’s a liberation from the daily life of the poor,” he says, “an elevation of their lives.”
