BackSwaying to the samba in the shadow of the Olympics
Despite the Games hogging all the limelight, the selection process for next year's Carnaval is drawing the die-hard fans in Rio
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On 5 August, while Rio de Janeiro was scripting history as performers marched into the Maracana for the opening ceremony of South America’s first-ever Olympic Games, about 2km up the road, a rather large in-house band and dancers were working up quite a sweat with their music and moves.
This was the Salgueiro samba school, one of the biggest and among the top draws in the famed annual carnival of Rio. It was a similar scene at Rio’s oldest samba school, the Estacio de Sa, in the southern part of the coastal city. Henceforth, it is going to be like this among all the top samba schools in the city on the weekends.
While the Olympics—which end tonight—have absorbed all of the world’s collective attention, there are thousands of people in Rio who have had something more important to attend to than the Games. It is the same story every year.
This is the time of the year that the samba schools—whose bands and dance troupes feature in the annual Carnaval, which attracts tourists from the world over—begin the process of selecting their songs and dance routines for the carnival. In 2016, the beginning of this selection process has coincided with the Olympics.
The samba is an Afro-Brazilian dance popular largely among the poor since the 1890s—it got some sort of global exposure when Fred Astaire danced to it in the film Flying Down to Rio. Samba music has a specific rhythm and the songs use local Brazilian instruments like the chocalho, reco-reco, cabaca and tamborim. The songs pick their themes from the daily lives of the people.
Through the years, samba music has undergone several changes and seen many notable movements, such as the Bossa Nova in the 1950s and the samba funk in the 1960s.
The Carnaval itself has its roots in the 1800s, when people paraded along with the emperor and aristocrats in masks and flamboyant costumes through the streets. By the 1840s, the Copacabana Palace Hotel and the municipal theatre in Rio started organizing the carnival grand balls which eventually turned into the samba parade (which we now associate with the Carnaval) under the influence of the Afro-Brazilian culture.
Since 1984, the Carnaval parade has been starting at the Sambodromo, which was designed by Brazil’s most prolific architect, Oscar Niemeyer. The Carnaval starts on the Saturday before Lent and ends on Fat Tuesday, a day before Lent begins.
The selection process
Rio has several samba schools, but only a dozen, such as Vila Isabel, Unidos da Tijuca, Salgueiro, Beija Flor and Mangueira—one of the oldest, set up in 1928—are included in the top tier. Such schools are invited to perform on Friday and Saturday at the Carnaval. In Rio, loyalty to a samba school and rivalry with others is almost as intense as it is with football clubs in all of Brazil.
“This is an important time not only for Salgueiro but for all the samba schools in Rio. The Carnaval is actually a big and serious contest in which all the schools vie to win the top prize—the title of the best samba school," says Claudio dos Santos, a lawyer, who was moving to the beats while claiming he can’t do the samba, at the Estacio de Sa samba school.
“While samba is something we do for fun, the schools take it seriously when it comes to the Carnaval," says Pedro Simoes, a postgraduate student in economics who drums in a samba troupe—a bateria, in local parlance—as the band started its performance at the Salgueiro samba school.
The selection process starts in August after the theme of the Carnaval is announced, he explains. Once the theme is announced, all the top songwriters and composers get busy and come up with a new song. Then dancers practise to these songs. The schools then start their internal contests to pick the number for the Carnaval the following year. The technical rehearsals for the Carnaval start at the venue, the Sambodromo, in December.
“The song selection is in itself another contest within the school," Simoes says. “The composers get together and write up to 20 samba songs and these are performed every week and finally the winning number is picked. It is an important process because there is a lot of passion, emotion and money involved. Don’t forget the politics. Each composer’s politics to get his own number picked starts much earlier."
More than just fun
The schools, depending on how affluent and popular they are, are huge complexes with viewing galleries complete with refreshment counters selling snacks such as barbecued meat, peanuts, hotdogs with beer and caipirinhas. While members of samba schools have free entry, guests have to pay 30 reais (Rs620) per head to enter on weekends when performances are held.
These performances start gathering steam around midnight and continue till almost sunrise. From babies in strollers to grandparents, pregnant women to teenagers, people of all ages and ethnicities mix together and everyone moves and sings along once the music starts.
While it is a big happy party inside with loud music, the outside resembles the streets of Kolkata, “quite like it is during Durga Puja", remarks Dos Santos’s friend from India, except that there is a lot of alcohol and street food such as barbecued meat sold by hawkers.
“For all the people present here tonight, this is not just about a good night out. It is an important and integral part of their lives. I would say for 90% of these people, at this point in time, samba is more important than the Olympics," says Simoes, as he air-drummed a beat that was playing behind us.
“It is not that they don’t care about the Summer Games, but the timing of the event is such that they have been forced to choose; and if they have to choose between Olympics and samba, they will always choose samba."
That samba is pretty much part of the 2016 Olympics is amply clear: the accreditation centre for the Olympics is at Cidade do Samba (City of Samba), the Sambodromo—where the Carnaval parade begins—is the start and finish point for the marathon, and samba performances were part of the opening ceremony. They also keep popping up at different venues to entertain the audience.
The Olympics may come and the Olympics may go, but samba goes on forever.
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