Feathers, sequins and samba are finally back in Rio de Janeiro! After two long years, the parades of the most famous carnival in the world will take place, Friday and Saturday evening, to reconnect with the party following the mourning of the pandemic.
The mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, symbolically handed over a huge key to the “wonderful city” on Wednesday to “King Momo”, a jovial character in an electric blue suit, amid a shower of confetti. “I proudly announce that the greatest show on Earth is back! The carnival is here!” Said the mayor, wearing a Panama hat, during the ritual ceremony.
The sambadrome will vibrate once more, two whole nights, to the rhythm of percussion, with thousands of dancers in shimmering costumes and sumptuous floats as high as multi-storey buildings.
The party was canceled in 2021, when the Covid-19 was still killing several hundred people a day in Brazil. This year, the parades have been postponed for two months due to the increase in contamination due to the Omicron variant.
“Very Special Carnival”
“It’s an emotion that’s been repressed for too long. We’ll have to drink a lot of water to compensate for all the tears that will flow when we go on parade,” Talita Batista, a dancer from Portela, one of the most traditional samba schools, told AFP. .
“It will be a very special carnival, I have the feeling of being a survivor”, adds Bianca Monteiro, Queen of the Portela Battery, who will parade in front of a group of 300 percussionists. This outstanding dancer, who lost friends and family members during the pandemic, wants to “pay tribute to the victims of Covid”, which killed more than 660,000 people in Brazil.
But now, more than 75% of Brazilians have a complete vaccination schedule and the death and contamination curves have dropped sharply. Some 75,000 spectators will therefore be able to gather in the stands of the sambodrome, provided they present a vaccination certificate.
Anti-racism movement
“I missed it, I love carnival. It’s a party that represents our identity, that of the city and of an entire country,” said the mayor of Rio recently. Mr. Paes enjoys appearing in front of the cameras playing the tambourine and dancing the samba.
At the sambadrome, surrounded by bleachers surrounding a 700-meter-long track, 12 schools will parade one following the other – six on Friday evening and six more the next day – to try to win the coveted title of carnival champion.
To seduce the jurors and the public, each school will parade for more than an hour some 3,000 more or less naked dancers and half a dozen monumental floats. This year, eight of the 12 schools have chosen a theme linked to the fight once morest racism and to the African roots of the samba universe.
“Political dimension”
“Samba schools are a manifestation of Afro-Brazilian culture,” explains historian Luiz Antonio Simas, author of numerous books on carnival. These themes had already been addressed in many parades in the past, but they have taken on a whole new relevance since the coming to power in 2019 of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
Customary of racist or homophobic excesses, it is supported by neo-Pentecostal churches which tend to demonize Afro-Brazilian rites and carnival in general. “Under the current government, a visceral carnival, with a strong black identity, takes on a whole political dimension,” insists Mr. Simas.
The return of carnival festivities is also a relief for the tourism sector, which expects 85% hotel occupancy this weekend. Rio city hall has not authorized the street carnival, whose largest processions, “the blocos”, can bring together hundreds of thousands of revelers, but some smaller groups should still parade.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp