Well, it has been and it has gone. Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Forty days in the desert, sackcloth and ashes etc etc.
And you heard nothing from me during said Carnaval days not only because I was without Internet access, but also because – to paraphrase the old cliché about the 1960s – if you were there, you were too busy doing to remember or record it…
But record I must, so I now lay down my net frock, fascinator and feathered mask and take up my pen (or keyboard at least) to try and make some sense of the past five days of madcap musical activity.
It was when I was with Naomi at the Praça de Coco on Sunday– we were there ‘en famille’ for some low-key afternoon carnival activity in the form of a band of drummers, dancers and pipers playing music from Recife – that we were reflecting (as outsiders, both being English) on the fact that for Brazilians, music and dance are the most prominent form of artistic expression. Naomi mentioned that when she had travelled to Mexico she was struck by just how visual a culture was to be found there – the place being like one giant visual artwork.
Brazil in general – and ‘carnaval’ in particular – of course has its visual motifs. See, for example, the extraordinary animations and constructions of the samba school parades in Rio. Although I’ll say here that when I was in Rio for Carnaval 2011, I didn’t see any of the carnival displays that are beamed to TV sets across the world. That carnival is hidden away in the Sambodromo, a massive stadium where tickets costing a fortune are sold months in advance to visiting tourists, or ringfenced for corporate hospitality. There is a sense of cynicism amongst Cariocas I know about the invisibility of this famous display, the majority of the people of the city excluded from its most famous cultural activity…
Where they and other Brazilians throughout the country have their carnival experience is in the street ‘blocas’. And yes, there is of course a visual element in the costume of the samba bands and accompanying dancers or walkabout characters, and in the fancy dress of every conceivable type on display in these street events – vis, the sequinned hot-pants, Harem pants, blue nylon wigs, angel wings, devil horns, halos, funky shades, Hawaiian leis – but the essential element of the experience is the music and the dance. And true to the origins of carnival, the street bloca is a collective experience in which there are no onlookers, all are participants to a greater or lesser extent, and in which the roles of ‘performers’ and ‘non performers’ merge and cross.
So let me give you some idea of how these work. A carnival bloco is scheduled to start at, say, 6pm. Should you turn up at the designated starting point at 6pm, what you will find is a truck with a sound system playing some recorded music, and a bunch of musicians ambling about, chatting to colleagues, drinking beer, trying on band t-shirts, changing strings on their cavaquinhos or guitars, tightening up the skins of their snares – or whatever. There will be some small children in fairy wings or Superman outfits running round and through their legs, and a spattering of other people lounging around smoking and drinking. A police car will be blocking the road to traffic, and a few policemen will be leaning against it, arms folded, bored expressions on their faces.
At some point a while later – maybe an hour, maybe more – the band will have taken up their cortege formation – cowbells and tamba and bass drums and snares, with the stringed instruments to the rear, a snake-nest tangle of leads trailing from the PA truck and plugged in to the pick-ups on the instruments. There will be a few low-key guitar-and-voice based songs (mostly as a sort of rehearse-in-public soundcheck, I suspect), but then we see the band leader go round and shake everyone’s hand or hug them intensely, so we know something is about to shift.
And suddenly there is a great surge of energy, as following the whistle blow and fingers-in-the-air countdown from the bandleader, the batteria thunders into action, and the ever-growing crowd starts dancing. But we are still, as yet, in our starting spot, no forward movement. Usually there are a fair few tunes played at the starting site, and these attract more and more people in – the first things played are often popular songs that everyone knows the words to, or perhaps songs newly-written for this year, with helpers passing round sheets of paper with the words on.
Once the band are fully in their stride and the unifying first few songs have been sung, the whole cortege starts to move forward along its designated route. Which may well be a mere mile or so, but it’ll take us five or six or more hours to do that route, in a kind of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ pattern of progressing and stopping.
Along with musicians and accompanying crowd – some dancing wildly, some kind of edging along in what we might call the ‘carnival two-step shuffle’ – will be a whole army of drinks sellers, their beers and water and energy drinks (and in some cases, spirits and cocktails too!) housed in a variety of ways, from the simple polystyrene ice-box carried on the shoulder, to the shopping trolley filled with cans, to the rather more sophisticated fridge trolley and umbrella contraptions. Sometimes these get caught in a kind of bottle-neck, and have to edge their way to the side of the crowd.
There’s all sorts of unwritten rules about the blocos. If you are right in front of the band, then it is customary to dance backwards, so you are kind of paving the way for them rather than holding them up, as you might do if you had your back to them. This way, the band (and any ‘official’ dancers or flag bearers the band carries with them) can set the pace of the forward movement rather than the crowd setting it – although it is always a give-and-take situation. This front row of backward-facing dancers often hold hands and get into little patterns of forward and back runs or grapevine-like side steps weaving from left to right, as well as the legendary faster-than-the speed-of-light on the spot footwork the street samba dancer is renowned for!
If you stay right in the thick of things you really need to keep dancing and go with the flow – although I did, at one bloco, see a very tall man with a child on his shoulders stand resolutely still right next to the band, people weaving around and past him as if he were some sort of civic statue or sculpture to be negotiated.
If you feel that your energy is flagging, then you can ease your way out to the edges and take a break, walking slowly alongside for a while, or even just watching the parade go by, then working your way back upfront, should you so wish, once your energy returns. These slower and calmer edges are where much of the meeting and greeting goes on. In a place the size of Barão Geraldo, everyone at any event will know a great deal of other people there. What I found most amusing and lovely was the excitement with which people greeted others whom they had seen a mere 24 hours earlier – hugging and kissing each other as if they were long-lost brothers returned from a great sea journey lasting many years…
In Rio, I experienced blocos day and night – a complete carnival immersion, with little chance of escape. Barão Geraldo is a lot different, with one main bloco each carnival day, which lasts a good long spell of up to eight hours, and a number of smaller events (such as the lovely Sunday afternoon in Praça de Coco mentioned earlier). I went to two of the big blocos. Saturday evening’s event was led by the extraordinary and redoubtable Altaneira, who played for an astonishing and truly marvellous eight hours without a break, cleverly shifting rhythms and speeds to accommodate traditional carnival samba song, hardcore percussion-led battatuque, axe style music from Bahia, sinuous African rhythms – and a whole host of other things I couldn’t name but loved.
Monday evening saw the turn of Cupinzeiro, who had a slightly more laid-back and melodic style, and who paced their bloca in a different way. Rather than the relentless build of Saturday’s event, in which Altaneira never stopped playing, but found ways within their eight-hour set to give some musicians a short break, for example by having a number of vocal-and guitar based tunes as an interlude for the percussionists – Cupinzeiro’s event scheduled stops along the way, where the whole band came to rest for a while, and everyone had the opportunity to sample the delights of the downtown ‘portaloos’. Not the grandest of toilet facilities, but a step up perhaps from the alternative option, which is behind the trees in the parks alongside Avenida Santa Isabella. There are stories to tell on that front, but you are not going to hear them from me here…
Both these two blocos start early evening, and there is a family-friendly feel for the first few hours, the children weaving in and out of the crowd of dancers or excitedly poking at the sculptural decorations that were wheeled along the streets at the head of the cortege (the Alterneira event on Saturday had some sort of evolutionary theme, and featured models of space rockets, dinosaurs and a rather fetching monkey writing the works of Shakespeare on a word-processor!). But as the night progresses, it gets a little more adult and earthy, as more and more people join the throng, and more and more drink is drunk. Yet despite the high volume of alcohol being consumed, I didn’t see one moment of bad humour from anyone.
I should also mention here that apart from the street events there are also, of course, special carnival bills at the usual live music venues, such as Casa São Jorge and Bar do Jair, for those who prefer a more sedate carnival experience. For some people it is enough to party in their gardens with friends. Carnival is different things for different people.
For LUME and friends, the big event is the Saida do Cortejo Trueque that ends the Terra Lume season of participatory events. It is held from 5pm on the Friday that kicks off carnival – and although the official carnival start is the big late-night bloca of that evening, the Trueque is viewed by many in the town as the unofficial start of carnival.
Directed by Ricardo Puccetti, and using students from his Street Theatre course – as well as the LUME actor/dancers, friends and associates, groups from other LUME courses, and members of other theatre companies – the Trueque is something rather more than a carnival cortege, although built around that principle, integrating street theatre action into the carnival model.
The Trueque starts in the regular carnival way, with a samba band at the heart of the cortege (Cupinzeiro are the band in question). The cortege is made up of the performing groups, each in their own block, with ‘audience’ walking alongside them as they progress. There are also numerous floating elements: costumed bearers of colourful wind-socks; winged LUME company members who dart and weave around the cortege, helping to move people on or stop them as needed; and a group of blue-cloth waving dancers who fly like birds around and through the groups and, when needed, create a human wall designating the various allocated performance spaces along the route.
The theme of this year’s Trueque was The End of the World (cheerful, no?). As one of the participants in Ricardo’s Street Theatre course, I’m involved in the Trueque anyway, but invited also to contribute some ideas and simple choreography for a ballroom dance scene. We decide on a Rumba Bolero to Besame Mucho, and although originally plan to work with dancers from outside of the LUME groups, in the end Ricardo decides that it makes most sense to use the existing Street Theatre course group. As we are also committed to making another piece, which means participants in his course have two Trueque pieces to be slotted into the afternoon’s parade.
The Besame Mucho piece has a ‘salon’ style bolero dance as its centrepiece, choreographed with the thought of it being the last dance as the world ends, the performers changing partners throughout the dance and bidding each other desperate farewells. Before the dance is a movement sequence that uses ‘flockings’ from one formation shape to another – from arrows to lines, lines to circles – and the dance dissolves into a butoh-esque crumbling to dust, and a resurrection into a Pina Bausch-inspired forward-moving formation of tiny syncopated steps, with still upper halves, glassy eyes, and rolling hips.
Immediately before our elegantly clad ballroom dance group in the cortege is Naomi’s team of fan dancers – usually, I am told, they dress in white, but this year, in honour of the End of the World theme, they are all in black as The Widows of the World, their pitch-black lace and net offset by dashes of bloody red. Theirs is an elegant choreography of swoops and flutters and melancholy sweeps of feathery fans, as like a flock of witches turned to birds they create an ever-morphing series of group shapes – walls and spirals and blocks – then suddenly dispersing to fly through and around other groups.
Elsewhere in the parade come scenes, set amongst the trees, of Arcadian delights that turn to passion, death and (inevitably) a sorrowful funeral line – ‘tableaux vivants’ with song, inspired by and created in homage to the paintings of Caravaggio. These short interlinked scenes are enacted by students from the No Labrinto da Paixão |In the Labyrinths of Passion course run by Simi and Lina (Carlos Simioni of LUME and Lina della Rocca of Teatro Ridotto in Italy). They make a very pretty picture, in white muslin and cream silk, offset by dashes of red and black – and they give us rousing and full-throated versions of such Latin classics as Gaudete, as well as some very nimble dancing.
There is also a delightful display of the Wind Dance, enacted with rhythmic zest and gusto by the students on Ana Cristina Colla’s workshop dedicated to this lovely movement work – the Wind Dance being based on the three-four waltz time signature, and very similar to waltz in many ways, with a strong relationship with the ground on the downbeat ‘one, but danced with a strong spring into the air on the second and third beats, giving it an almost lamb-like gambolling feel.
In a completely different tone, there were some delightful interventions along the way from esteemed clown Lily Curcio (Seres de Luz Teatro) – who I discover later is a friend and erstwhile colleague of Angela de Castro, another wonderful Brazilian woman clown, who lives mostly in the England, and is very well known on the UK’s physical theatre, circus and clown scene…
Other contributions I missed, as after the Wind Dance, as with Ricardo’s group I got whisked away ahead of the crowd by the blue-cloth-waving dancers – taken off to have time to prepare for our final scene, which would also be the last theatrical intervention of the Trueque. This piece being a very different interpretation of the End of the World theme to our salon dance scene!
In a style that for me had strong resonances with some aspects of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre and Newspaper Theatre work, the group (under Ricardo’s direction) used information gleaned from news reports and photojournalism on the web and in magazines to devise a response to an appalling incident that had happened in the Sao Paulo region a month or so past. In Pinheirinho, a shanty-town (favela) community had been ordered to leave their makeshift homes, and had resisted. The police had then stormed in, attacking the community and destroying the homes. Seven people lost their lives in the incident and many hundreds were displaced. One of the most disturbing aspects of the incident – and almost as much of a scandal as the horrifying invasion itself – was that it wasn’t initially reported on mainstream news media, it was only through web reports and magazine features did the story start to emerge.
For our street piece, we split into two groups. Roughly half of us represented the Pinheirinho community, carrying our cardboard box homes on our backs, seeking out a space to settle, singing as we travelled the road. The other half of the group were the police invaders – arriving with loud rhythmically stamping to round us up (literally, with a rope) – although not before a stylised battle enacted as a tug-of-war with the rope and a clownish intervention from two of the actors, playing Money-grabbing Landlord and Government Official as two merry buffoons. The piece ends with a nod towards Brechtian techniques with a dissolve into a song celebrating the end of the world – and as the samba band picks up on the chant ‘dance on for the world is ending’, we lead the cortege off to the park which is to be the site for the final flurry of music and dance.
Taking part in the creation and enacting of this piece is a good reminder that ‘street theatre’ has always been a strongly political form: from Commedia del Arte to Punchinello; from Punch & Judy to the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front street actions; from the Bread and Puppet Theater to Boal’s Invisible Theatre – across the globe over many centuries the ‘non-legitimate’ theatre of the streets has been the place to re-tell hidden news stories, lambaste and mock politicians and government officials, and to spread the message that the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ are forever intertwined, and that liberation from oppression – be that oppression on the grounds of gender, sexuality, race or social class – can be fought for with song and dance and humour.
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