The biggest rehearsal ever

Flew from Salvador back to Rio today... only got a couple hours sleep last night, and when I lay down on my bed for just a second at about 5pm, I closed my eyes, opened them again and it was 8pm. Damn! I'd slept through most of the Mangueira rehearsal at the Sambodromo! I thought, oh well, it's nice to mellow out now and then and feel like I don't need to rush around. I decided not to even try to go to the Sambodromo; decided just to poke around at home unpacking. So I started unpacking, feeling nice and mellow, and then sort of accidentally wandered out of the house and into a taxi and suddenly there I was, accidentally, walking up to the second recuo - and the Mangueira bateria was still there!!! They were supposed to have ended a whole half hour before, but they were only halfway through the parade.

AND... I could get right up and see everything!! Mangueira was criticized at their last Sambodromo rehearsal for acting like primadonnas and being over-zealous about keeping the public at arm's-length. Apparently there were nasty security guards posted everywhere and reams of fencing that kept the public unnecessarily far back. Mangueira is the most famous escola in Rio, and the oldest escola, and they do get kind of snotty; they've been my least favorite escola all year because of this. (They're also rather uninventive in their samba. They rarely do any paradinhas, for example, have no fancy breaks, and never go into a funk, afoxe, or any other groove. And their quadra is too crowded to dance. And too expensive. And they won't let women watch the bateria. And...)

But they redeemed themselves tonight! They were letting everybody get right up close and were really friendly and inviting. The whole crowd could get right up to the back row of the bateria in the recuos! They'd put the fence just two feet away from the back line of drummers! (The beer vendors & escola drummers both loved this because the vendors can finally get close enough to sell the bateria some beer, and I saw quite a few players demonstrate their considerable skill at slugging back beers while never missing a beat.) And they'd opened up the frisas (sidewalk areas) on both sides of the parade route. They even had the giant south gate wide open, so people could all come in and watch the bateria at the end of the parade route. (actually, I am not sure how many of these decisions are done by the escola, the Sambodromo staff or who exactly.)

And the energy was GREAT. People were just bubbling with excitement and happiness. There was a sense of giddy joy in the air. Even when the bateria was still a half a mile away, so that you could just faintly hear a very distant "boom! boom!", people started singing along and dancing, starting their own excited parties right there with their friends, not waiting for the parade to arrive.





... and this was just a rehearsal!
(both those shots are from O Dia's Carnaval website, http://odia.terra.com.br/especial/rio/carnaval2006/index.asp)

You know... I basically came straight from Olodum rehearsal (in Salvador, late last night) to Mangueira rehearsal (in Rio today), and the energy here in Rio really is different than in Salvador. In Salvador, sure, everyone loves Olodum, and people were dancing, but there wasn't that sense of "this is MY group!" that you get here in Rio. The blocos in Salvador are not as distinctly connected to a certain geographic neighborhood, a certain community, the way the escolas are here in Rio. People in Rio seem just overjoyed to see their home team perform, almost ecstatic. All the performers are their friends and family from their home town. Where else but Rio would you hear people giddily screaming out the names of their favorite choreographer, and their favorite float designer, and their favorite music director, as if they were rock stars? There were dozens of women yelling "Carlinhos! Car-LINHOS!!!!" - Carlinhos de Jesus, who choreographs the modern dance troupe at the front of Mangueira's parades - and running up to get pictures with him.

Here's O Dia's picture of him during the rehearsal:


and my snapshot right afterwards:


And also, it seems like, in Salvador, Carnaval is for the young, but in Rio, it is for all ages. Olodum's crowd - and the entire Salvador vibe, actually - is like a nightclub crowd, almost entirely in their 20's and early 30's. (Ile Aiye was similar.) But in Rio tonight, while I was edging my way along one 50-meter stretch of the Mangueira crowd, I edged past a clump of at least 20 elderly gray-haired women who were all singing the Mangueira song at the top of their lungs, and all dancing; then past a set of young 20-somethings dancing like crazy; then I stopped to take a picture of the children's ala; then had to step aside to let some wheelchairs go by, the guys in the wheelchairs all dressed up with Mangueira t-shirts and Mangueira caps, waving pink-and-green Mangueira flags. Everybody was there. Again - it's the community, the whole community.

The crowd was in such a giddy mood that in the long wait between Mangueira and Beija-Flor, they started cheering and applauding at any little excuse. Beija-Flor's fleet of buses came down the runway: huge cheers for the bus drivers. A fire truck backed out of the recuo: more cheering. Then a HUGE roar went up from the crowd, for a tiny old woman who had crept out past the security guards and was doing a slow, fragile samba in the middle of the runway all by herself. She samba'd carefully for about 20 seconds, the crowd whooping and clapping the whole time, and then she took a little bow to an enormous cheering ovation, and then she crept back behind the security line again.

When Beija-Flor's parade finally arrived.. wow. Their theme this year is "Africa", and several of their alas are doing forms of African dance interspersed with samba. I have never seen African dance done to Rio samba music before, and the combination was electrifying. It fits beautifully. (West African music & dance are, of course, the origin of samba.) Even the dancers who were doing straight samba seemed to be dancing slightly differently, putting some of the earthier, more grounded African moves into it. Like I said, WOW. I only wish I'd been close enough to get good videos! (I was in the bateria recuo, illegally, never mind how I got there.) Lots of the dance alas had even arranged special outfits just for this rehearsal. The men's dance alas had put themselves in African beaded necklaces, and one group was whirling around in a really cool outfit of wild stripes of white that I finally realized were just white jeans and white t-shirts that had been cut into long, long strips. They'd bought those clothes and cut them up just for this one rehearsal tonight. Half the girl passistas had gone topless, painted with white zebra stripes that somehow sort of disguised the toplessness (every nipple was discretely covered with a white zebra stripe) - somehow this made it even more attractive that it would have been if they'd just been plain nude. Another set of girl passistas had put themselves in leopard-print bikinis, and they looked, if possible, even hotter than the topless girls. It was all such a different look, compared to the usual glitter-queen high-heeled passista look, that it really changed something about the way they were dancing.

Zebra stripes, leopard tops, bead necklaces, topless dancers - it could have been cheesy, but it wasn't. This is the first escola rehearsal that actually made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Seemed like there were real African lions stalking down the Sambodromo runway. There is something about Beija-Flor. They blew me away last year too. They are just intense.

PS While I was writing this post, O Dia newspaper posted a review to the website. The Sambodromo rehearsals tonight drew a crowd of 60,000 - a all-time record for a rehearsal. Also, mangueira's main singer took ill while the bateria was in the second recuo, and was carried off in an ambulance. (I didn't see this happening) But he is ok. He has diabetes, apparently.