Viradouro's first-ever bateria float

Just posted a movie from Viradouro's Sambodromo rehearsal last weekend. (This was my last Sambodromo rehearsal of the year because, guess what, I'm going to Recife for the weekend!) The most prominent lesson from the movie is, wow, the crowd sure does love even the simplest bateria choreography! I noticed this last year too - Imperio Serrano did the same kind of thing with the bateria dividing and then coming together, and the crowd went absolutely nuts.

Something weird happened that night. I was surprised to find Grande Rio still parading when I reached the Sambodromo. They were supposed to have finished by 9 but they were still going when I got there at nearly 10. I found out later there'd been a horrible 1.5-hour delay, entirely due to a TV news crew that suddenly decided to do a feature piece on the two queens of the baterias of both escolas, Grande Rio and Viradouro, before the parades started. They just sort of started doing it, and both escolas had to wait an hour and a half. Here's where it gets ugly... the president of Grande Rio finally made an announcement to apologize for the delay, but the crowd had gotten so impatient they booed him, and then, this is almost unheard of, the crowd started singing the Viradouro song while Grande Rio was playing! This is a really vicious thing for a crowd to do to a parading escola. Talk about disrespectful. A huge fight also broke out in the grandstands. Some friends of mine were so turned off by the Viradouro fans that they are now rooting against Viradouro.

I wasn't all that impressed with the rehearsal myself. Sure, the bateria was great, but Viradouro, alone of all the escolas that I've seen, just treated the rehearsal like a rehearsal. They didn't bring any floats, glitter, costumes, nothing; even the porta-bandeiras didn't have their gowns on and hardly danced at all (at least, not in my section of the Sambodromo). And the song turned into one of those nasty earworms for me: It turned out to be catchier than I thought, too catchy because it's actually kind of boring and I don't really like it BUT I CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD. They do have a cute opening dance act, though, the dancers horsing around like the Keystone Kops, which I'm sure will be even cuter once the dancers are all dressed as playing cards. (their theme this year is Games.)

Viradouro is the odds-on favorite, as it happens. Their bateria is smoking, and the escola scored big this year in luring the top carnavalesco, Paulo Barros, away from Unidos da Tijuca. The carnavalesco is the guy who designs all the floats and costumes, and has the overall artistic design for the whole parade. Barros had been with Tijuca for about five years and is an audacious artist who always tries something wild. He is the guy responsible for the float a few years back that was entirely made of glittery naked blue people. This year he is putting the Viradouro bateria on a float! Nobody has ever done that before. The idea seems impossible - the floats are not really all that sturdy, and they always seem to be vibrating so much that everybody on the float has to hang on to little handholds. There are two problems: Can the float survive the drummers? And, can the drummers survive the float? But, after a few trial runs in the Cidade do Samba, it appears that it might work. (however, the trial runs have only been a few feet forward and a few feet back...)

A problem is that the float cannot maneuver in and out of the recuos (side areas that the bateria stops in). So, the plan is for the bateria members to walk into the first recuo on their own. Then the float will come meet them, and they will all walk onto the float from the recuo, while drumming. Then, at the second recuo, they will all walk off, still drumming. The ala behind the bateria will then walk onto the float - they will all be carrying fake drums! The fake bateria will continue on the float; the real bateria will go into the second recuo and continue on foot later.

This is such a silly idea that I am going to have to buy a Sambodromo ticket for Monday just to see if it is going to work.