Rio Carnaval results

Have finally clawed my way to an internet access point and am actually typing on a normal keyboard for the first time this trip. Good lord, it´s Thursday already...Ash Wednesday was yesterday, the Rei Momo has handed the key of the city back to the mayor, and Carnaval is actually finally over. And last night I slept for nearly 14 hours and woke up at two in the afternoon, since I´ve been up pretty much nonstop since Friday. I hadn´t gone to bed before dawn for the last five days running, and usually would snatch only 4 hours sleep or so, 8am to noon, and then run out to catch the 2pm blocos. Saturday night I never get any sleep at all, since I always have to run from the Grupo de Acesso parades (which end at 7am) straight to the Banga parade (which starts at 9am, clear across the city).

On Ash Wednesday is the Apuracao, the reading-of-the-scores of the escolas de samba. Even after seeing five Carnavals here, it´s extraordinary to me how intensely interested the entire city is in the results of the judging. (Note to new readers: the massive parades of the escolas-de-samba in Rio are judged. It is a competition.) People follow the apuracao as intently as if it were the World Cup or the Super Bowl. What´s really funny is that it´s just a guy reading numbers... for about an hour and a half. But somehow it´s simply fascinating, as this or that escola starts to pull ahead in its total score.

The actual event takes place in the Sambodromo itself, right under the famous arched statue at the end of the parade route. Each escola has a little team of key people - the president, the carnavalesco [parade designer], the mestre-sala and porta-bandeira [the flag couple], the puxador [lead singer], mestre of the bateria [director the drummers] and so on - all seated at a table under the arches. Plus a battery of die-hard fans waving flags from the bleachers.

On a higher table sit the LIESA officials who will read the scores. One by one they go through each of the ten judging categories, which are (let´s see if I can remember all ten...)

- Evolucao - roughly, parade flow)
- Harmonia - singing. Singing quality, enthusiasm, and whether all paraders know the words. When that judge looks at you, you´d better be singing, or at least faking really well! Or, in the immortal words of an Imperio Serrano director who ran screaming past me during my first parade as we approached the judges´ booth: "SING, DAMMIT! SING, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! SING, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! AND LOOK LIKE YOU´RE HAPPY!"
- Enredo - the theme of the parade. Each escola has a new enredo each year. (Enredos this year included Charles Darwin, hair, fear, a famous musician, a famous author of children´s books, the sea, etc.)
- Samba-enredo - the song. Each escola has a new song each year, written to match that year´s theme, and that one song is sung over and over in an endless loop during the parade. By the end of the hour-and-twenty-minute parade you either LOVE the song or you hate it with a passion. It´s always interesting, and mysteriously unpredictable, to see which songs grow on you and which don´t. (The escola with the best song this year, everyone seems to agree, was my own beloved Imperio Serrano. They won an Estandarte de Ouro for it).
- Comissao de frente - "comission of the front", this is the dance group that opens the whole parade. Typically it´s a very inventive, clever, choreographed show with amazing acrobats and dancers, illustrating some aspect of the enredo. (The comissao de frente that really got the crowd´s attention this year was Unidos da Tijuca - it was half dance and half magic show, involving the dancers´ bodies falling apart. The dancer´s heads seemed to fall off of their shoulders, and later the tops of their bodies somehow separated from the bottom halves.)
- Mestre-sala & porta-bandeira - the porta-bandeira is the woman who carries the escola flag, typically wearing a gown that is approximately the size of a pickup truck and covered with some ten million gems, and she whirls the flag around in an incredibly majestic sort of stately dance, while the mestre-sala [her consort] flies around her like a little satellite zooming around the sun. Each samba escola has its own unique flag; and each escola flag is so beloved, and is presented to the judges with such intense pride and respect by the porta-bandeira and mestre-sala, that it makes (say) right-wing Republicans´ reverence of the American flag seem kind of casual and ho-hum in comparison. Anyway, the mestre-sala and porta-bandeira have probably the heaviest burden of anybody in the parade, since those two people are responsible for a tenth of the escola´s total score, all by themselves. (The TV kept showing the porta-bandeira of Mangueira, who, during the reading of porta-bandeira scores, had her head down on the table for the entire time, her face hidden from view. She was gripping the mestre-sala´s hand so hard that both their hands were shaking. Thank god, they got 10´s, or I think she might have died on the spot)
- Bateria - the samba drummers. Usually there are between 250-400 drummers, all under the command of the mestre of the bateria and his crew of directors. This is, of course, the category that most fascinates us musicians.)(
- Alegorias & Aderecos - Floats and their decorations.
- Fantasias - Costumes.
- Conjunto - Overall effect (roughly).

So they go through each category one at a time. Ten categories. Five judges for each category (one in each of the five judges´ booths that are at different locations along the parade route. Nine escolas (this year. It´s usually 12). That´s a lot of scores to read! The top score is 10; and in Grupo Especial, the top league of samba escolas, the scores are supposed to be between 8 and 10. Typical Especial scores are clustered in the 9.8, 9.9, 10 range.

What that all adds up to is an hour and a half of the announcer saying things like "Evolucao. First judge. For the escola Mangueira....[dramatic pause]... NINE POINT NINE. For Unidos da Tijuca .... [dramatic pause]... TEN!"

But what´s always fascinating to me is how riveted the whole city is by this reading-of-the-scores. EVERY bar, and I mean EVERY bar in the entire city, is carrying the live TV feed of the reading-of-the-scores. EVERY escola has a big-screen TV set up in its rehearsal hall, with legions of fans waiting with bated breath for every number. If you take a taxi ride during the apuracao, the taxi radio will invariably be tuned into the radio broadcast, with the taxi driver muttering comments under his breath. And with every TEN (or, DEZ, in Portuguese) there´s a huge cheer from the fans from that escola, and moans of despair from fans of the other escolas.

Today I read an interview with the score announcer. He said, quite seriously, "You can´t just read the scores. You have to interpret them," as if the reading of the score is an Oscar-worthy performance. He said he gives great thought to how long a pause he uses before saying each number. The newspapers all commented on his especially dramatic five-second pause before Beija-Flor´s final score of the day. (which was a ten, when he finally got around to reading it)

And everybody´s got an opinion, about EVERY score. Me, I was invited to an Apuracao Party at the house of some Brazilian friends. It was a crowd of maybe 15 or 20 people, all of whom had watched all the escola parades all weekend. Everybody´d brought their little kids, and even newborn babies, and there was an endless flow of beer and a huge spread of sandwiches and cashews and little chocolate treats (and that rarest and finest of Brazilian delicacies, imported Pringles potato chips). And with every score, people were FULL of opinions. The afternoon unfolded like this:

Announcer: "Comissao de frente. Escola Beija-Flor.... TEN!"
Woman next to me: "WHAT? Are you KIDDING me? A TEN? OK, I could not make head or tail of that dance. There was the little boy and that giant box, and then these people in blue all spring out of the box and then run back into the box and suddenly the box falls apart and the people in blue are all holding up this woman dressed in white, right? WHAT WAS IT SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT?"
Man: "It was perfectly clear! The box was a radio! The people in blue were music! Didn´t you see the musical notes on their costumes? And the woman in white represented voice, the power of the singing voice, and the little boy was a young Roberto Carlos, which was the theme, right? So the whole dance was about how Roberto Carlos was inspired as a young boy by the music and singing that he heard on the radio. IT WAS OBVIOUS."
Woman: "All I can say is, IT DIDN´T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME. I couldn´t see those little notes on the blue costumes. It should make more sense if it gets a score of ten."

Announcer: "Fantasias. Escola of Salgueiro... TEN."
Woman seated next to me: "Yes, that´s exactly right, they really had lovely costumes this year, don´t you agree?" [Long discussion ensues about this or that costume:] "Personally I really liked the hoop skirts, they were so charming this year, just adorable," "Yes, but why would such-and-such escola be scored lower? They only got a nine point eight, but I really think that they were every bit as good as Salgueiro´s..." "No no no, Salgueiro´s had more attention to detail and were much more creative..." "But didn´t use see so-and-so´s headdresses?" "But without Ilha being judged we just can´t make sense of these scores! Didn´t you all see Ilha´s kangaroo costumes?!" "But Tijuca´s Velociraptors had the same idea -" "But BOTH the kangaroos and the velociraptors were really inspired by Beija-Flor´s elephant and giraffe costumes from four years ago, don´t you remember those?) [Long discussion ensues about Ilha´s kangaroo costumes vs. Tijuca´s velociraptors vs. Beija-Flor´s giraffes]

Announcer: "Floats and decorations. Porta da Pedra... NINE POINT EIGHT. Imperatriz... NINE POINT EIGHT. Mocidade... NINE POINT SIX. Beija-Flor...TEN!"
Crowd around me responds to this with: "VAI MORRER! VAI MORRER! VAI MORRER!" (You´re gonna die!) - This judge´s scores seemed so clearly skewed toward Beija-Flor that the crowd instantly assumed the judge had been bought. The "you´re gonna die" chant was in jest, but in fact, the escola competition is so fierce and bloodthirsty, and the politics of Rio´s crime-ridden escola neighborhoods so dangerous, that people have indeed been assassinated over matters of escola politics.

Announcer: "Bateria. Escola of Mangueira..... NINE."
We´re all waiting for the announcer to add "...point nine" but he doesn´t. Slowly we realize it´s just NINE, as in nine point zero, as in 9. Just nine. Mangueira is one of the very best baterias of all of Rio and they´ve just gotten the worst bateria score we´ve seen in years.
Everybody talking simultaneously: "WHAT? WHAT IS THAT? NINE? REALLY? NO WAY! THAT´S CRAZY!" One of my musician friends, who plays in the Portela bateria himself, says: "Where do they FIND these judges? Do they just grab random people off the street to be judges? They must just drive around and find someone and say, Hey, you, you there by the bus stop! You look like you don´t know anything - would you like to be a bateria judge in the Sambodromo this year? I mean, come on, this is just unbelievable!"

[The rumor on the net later was that the 9 was because Mangueira happened to hit their long 20-second break exactly when they passed the last judge´s box. That is... they were NOT PLAYING AT ALL when they walked past that judge! In which case he really should have given them an 8, the lowest score possible. However, one of my most knowledgable sambista friends has since passed me a little clue from a media interview in which the 5th judge commented that "another surdo" was messing up the clarity of Mangueira´s traditional one-surdo sound. This is utterly baffling to me, because if he´s talking about the 3rd surdo, he´s out of his mind - Mangueira´s always had a third surdo.)

And so it goes.

As the scores start piling up it becomes clear that:
- Beija-Flor is winning by a landslide. Beija-Flor is a truly formidable escola - they´ve already won three championships in recent years. They´re generally one of my favorite escolas: hard-working, dedicated, traditional. And I love the silky swing of their bateria, with its beautiful frigideira section. But their parade left me cold this year (I´m not really familiar with Roberto Carlos, their theme this year; and definitely not a fan of gigantic weepy-looking Jesus statues - their last float. Ilha´s kickass Charles Darwin parade was much more my style) Anyway, it´s a bit peculiar how big the landslide is, since regardless of what you think of Roberto Carlos or Gigantic Jesus, the Beija-Flor parade had some technical flaws that seem to have been overlooked by the judges. They did have a really good parade - nobody´s disputing that - but they shouldn´t be winning by such a huge margin.
- Unidos da Tijuca´s clever, fantastic parade has received some oddly low scores. Perhaps it´s just not a traditional enough parade for the judges? However, their magic-show comissao de frente did receive five perfect 10´s.
- Salgueiro´s terrific bad luck with float breakdowns will bump them from 3rd to 5th, but has neither cost them the championship nor kept them out of the Parade of Champions. They went horribly over the allowed time - a shocking ten minutes over - leaving the Salgueiro paraders literally in tears at the end of the parade route. But in the end they pulled through ok.
- Everybody´s increasingly frustrated that Portela, Grande Rio and Uniao da Ilha were excluded from judging this year. This was because of the devastating fire at the escola warehouses some three weeks ago, which destroyed all of Grande Rio´s floats and costumes, and half of Portela´s and Ilha´s costumes too. (That´s over two thousand costumes destroyed for both Portela and Ilha, over four thousand for Grande Rio. That´s a lot of costumes to make in three weeks). At the time it seemed like a kind thing to exclude those three escolas from judging, but now it´s suddenly apparent that we are all just dying to see what the judges thought of those elements that were not affected by fire: the wonderful Portela bateria, for example, and the porta-bandeira, the singing, the parade flow, the song, the theme.

What´s more, Ilha did such a phenomenal job reconstructing their entire parade that people are now saying they might have actually won!

And in fact, Ilha did win the prestigious Estandarte de Ouro award for best escola. This is an unofficial award, given annually by the O Globo newspaper, but it´s quite prestigious. Kudos to Ilha for pulling this off; they really showed a lot of guts and creativity in being able to reconstruct more than two thousand costumes, and a giant float of a walking spider, in three weeks, and in the end put on such a great parade. (By the way, they also won best parade theme - for the Charles Darwin theme. Go Darwin go!)

So three escolas have parties tonight: Beija-Flor of course, because they won; Salgueiro, because they were so relieved that they still managed to get into the Parade of Champions (the top 6 escolas) despite their appalling string of float breakdowns; and Ilha, because they won the Estandarte de Ouro despite the horrific fire.

Final results:

Grupo Especial: (top group of samba escolas)
1. Beija-Flor
2. Unidos da Tijuca
3. Mangueira
4. Vila Isabel
5. Salgueiro
6. Imperatriz
7. Mocidade
8. Porta da Pedra
9. Sao Clemente

Excluded from judging due to fire: Grande Rio, Uniao da Ilha, and Portela. Grande Rio, which was worst affected by the fire, had to parade under a torrential downpour that lasted exactly, precisely, the duration of their parade. How ironic.

Due to the fire, no escola will be demoted from Grupo Especial this year, but as usual 1 escola will be promoted from Grupo de Acesso. (The winner was Renascer de Jacarepagua. See below) This means Grupo Especial will have 13 escolas next year (instead of 12); so next year 2 escolas will be sent down.

Mangueira won best bateria in both the newspaper-based awards (Estandarte de Ouro and Tamborim de Ouro).

Grupo de Acesso results:(second group of samba escolas)
1. Renascer de Jacarepagua
2. Viradouro
3. Estacio de Sa
4. Cubango (This is the escola I played with last year. Their parade was great; a lot of people thought they´d win.)
5. Santa Cruz
6. Imperio Serrano (who I have paraded with 3 times.)
7. Imperio da Tijuca
8. Innocentes de Belford Roxo
9 Rocinha
10. Caprichosos (demoted to Grupo B). Caprichosos´floats were unfinished. One of my Cubango friends said "When I walked past the floats just before the parade, the Caprichosos guys were still actually painting their floats! And some floats were still just the iron framework! I thought maybe their theme this year was about iron."
11. Alegria da Zona Sul (demoted to Grupo B). This is the friendly little escola that tourists often run into along Copacabana beach. They´re usually in Grupo B, and back they go to Grupo B again - they´re just a bit too disorganized to stay in the upper leagues.

And that´s the results.
Till next year.
Today, Thursday, just hours after their celebration party, Beija-Flor announced its likely theme for next year. And so it begins again...