By Anthony Howell.

A SANDY SCUM AT the high-watermark of the beach:  in it, I notice a prophylactic and the robbed head of a rose, then a sucked straw and a sodden pair of undies.

The first pale English have appeared, already wasted, a few days before things get started.  They are likely to return to the UK in a week’s time with tattoos they may regret and unwanted buns in their ovens.  Already, the dolphin pavement swims before their eyes. A woman squats to relieve herself in a doorway of Rua Barata Ribeiro. The beach is packed, since it hasn’t started to drizzle yet, as it will throughout the ensuing week.  A parasol swings past, hung with bikinis.  Here comes a man stacked with sun-hats.  Cerveza, agua, coca-cola…beach vendors recite the mantra of their wares. The orange bins stink of rotting fish.  Those with elephantiasis or with crooked or maimed bodies are making pathetic overtures to the tourists.

I have decided to adopt a jaundiced view for carnival, and all this is grist to my mill; however, for my first experience of this world-renowned event, I am taken to see a bloco called the Rio Maracatu.  This is in Lapa, the night-club district just south of the centre, where white arches support the tram that goes up to the bohemian suburb of Santa Teresa on the hill above.  Typical Bahian cookery is being served from tents by comfortably sized white-turbaned black ladies: delicious deep-fried corn-cakes with prawns and an exotic sauce.

MARACATU IS A RITUAL dance that originated in Pernambuco, a province farther north.  It has elements of candomblé, and in my naïve way I think it feels like voodoo.  It features a magnificent band of drummers, beating out the ‘Maracatu of the reversed beat’ – which has a strong driving emphasis to it.

At the front of the procession there’s a flock of wildly dancing girls in sweeping skirts, and this is really great dancing, distinctly African in feeling.  The girls wave their hands in elaborate sequences, more or less in unison, spinning into delirious vertigo with great group screams and shouts, answered by roars from the crowd.  Between these ‘ladies in waiting’ and the band, the king and queen dance in a formally regal manner, swinging from side to side in tight unison.  Both are in blue piped with gold; the queen in a lavish dress with a hugely hooped skirt, and the costumes of both King and Queen are distinctly eighteenth century – imitating the crinolines of the Royal Court of Portugal  –  with baroque embellishments.  They dance beneath a heavy golden umbrella, held by a chamberlain who dances with them.  The principle lady in waiting dances before them, in a red, tiered flamenco-style dress, holding the Calunga, a doll also in a red, tiered dress, who is there as a representative of the deities.  Although diminutive, the Calunga dances as mightily as anyone else.

In plantation times, there were coronations for the African people’s kings and Queens – the ‘kings of the Congo’ – who were recognised as leaders among the slaves, and Maracatu celebrates such investitures.  A big crowd has gathered and presses forward.  The Queen has the strong face of a hawk and moves a short sword-like wand with abrupt gestures, as if conducting the drums behind her.  The drumming is hugely powerful.  She revolves swiftly, and her crinoline moves fantastically with her.  The sun is setting through the white arches as she and her consort (she seems far more important than him) move onto the pavement and progress through the arches onto the main square of Lapa.  It is enormously exciting – exhilarating – and somehow it feels authentic, though this is not actually a Pernambuco group or a Rio tradition, but a group of Carioca Maracatu enthusiasts.  For all that, this is the high-point for me of the entire five-day carnival.

A FEW STREETS AWAY, on a temporary stage in front of a nightclub called Retiro, where I saw a good Fela Kuti tribute band a few weeks back, a black bull is dancing with a hillbilly with ribbons in his straw hat, while other hillbillies play drums and accordions.  The singing has sustained, rather melancholy solos.

Already there are mountains of cans accumulating in circular plastic tubs.  All through the year, but particularly at carnival time, Rio produces a massive amount of rubbish, but it also has a huge team of refuse collectors and scavengers.  Anything that can possibly be recycled gets recycled.  Every single bin in the city is gone through carefully several times between collections, and however badly strewn the beach, it is picked clean by dawn.

RIP.

THE NEXT DAY, THAT drizzle which started the previous evening changes to rain.  I am taken to another bloco by my sixty-five year old landlady Geni.  Wild geese are flying north in formation.  Geni’s friend buys us some Globo crackers to munch. Back in Copacabana, before boarding a bus, I bought myself a red umbrella.  It’s needed.  People are wearing rabbit ears and paper flower garlands which droop and melt in the rain.  I’m reminded of the coronation, which is the largest parade I’ve ever witnessed.  Then we stood waiting for hours, getting wetter and wetter, just as we are now – and while we wait, we’re queuing up for something before the monument to President Getulio Vargas  – dictator of the Estado Novo in the forties – whose bullet-holed pajamas are kept by the Museu da República in the bedroom where he shot himself.  Here in Gloria, he is commemorated by a gigantic, bespectacled bust in bronze and a pair of abstract pillars.  I leave the queue and go over and examine all this to keep my mind off the rain.

Not him.

Ah, we have been queuing up for an Antonio Carlos t-shirt, whoever he is.  Of course, Roberto Carlos is the most famous singer in Brazil, a sort of Carioca Cliff Richard, who has a hugely popular televised show on the beach at Christmas.  But this isn’t him.  This is Antonio, sponsored by Radio Globo – no relation to the cracker.  And after we have queued up for another hour for the free carton of guarana, it only takes another hour before the lead lorry moves off, its tannoy so loud that it completely drowns out the desultory sousaphones of the band that has been waiting in the downpour, trying to keep the drum-skins dry.  Antonio must be the young man bawling a samba into the mike.  Most of the people are familiar with the words, so this bears some resemblance to a pub sing-a-long (‘my old man said follow the van!’),  but we’re all so cold and wet, and no one’s dancing is inspiring me, even the perfectly cute little girl in the muslin Turkish trousers and the pink bikini and the flip-flops decorated with golden butterflies has had her spirits dampened, and so I say my goodbyes.

THINGS IMPROVE THAT EVENING when my son takes me to a party for capoeristas, in a hostel in Botafogo.  Because of the rain, the performance is moved out of the courtyard where the bar is located into the sitting room.  Capoeira deserves its own article, so I’ll simply say for now that the fighters cum dancers try to trip up and back into each other in a circle comprising music makers and prospective performers.  I get the bar to make me a Caipirinha, but just as the mix has been shaken and it’s poured out for me, a huge leak opens in the tiled roof over the bar area, and it floods my drink.  I get another and decide to nest in a sofa, where my friend Yuri has already collapsed. I ask him whether his tattoo is an iguana, and he shrugs and says it’s just some lizard.  With its emphasis on the grotesque, carnival has something in common with the tattoos practically everyone has been inked with, here in Brazil. Carnival is a sort of dreamy nightmare, and people have these embroidered on their skin.

It was Yuri who took me to see the Maracatu.  He is exhausted, but happy, because last night he scored.  For Yuri, scoring is the principle purpose of carnival.  I’m not talking about drugs, which are actually hard to come by here, though you smell enough pot on the beach.  But although Brazilian marijuana is excellent, none of my friends seem to use it.  Drugs are just such a big issue that using them seems uncool.

Yuri confides in me that he’s  worried about getting old.  I tell him that is why, seeing crisis ahead, I started dancing the tango at the age of fifty-three.  The eyes never grow old, I say – my Caipirinha lending me wisdom – and at least I still meet lovely young things who enjoy being in my arms.  At that point, a girl enters as trash, dressed in a garbage bag miniskirt with a crumpled beer-can in her hair.  This rivals the best costumes I have seen yet, but it’s the next day that sees the neatest home-made get-ups.

The Palacio.

FLATTENED DISKS OF PAPER flowers are strewn on the floor of the Metro. I’m not in costume.  I could have worn my orange shirt with the blue parrots, but my son told me when I arrived that it would make me look like a tourist so I left it at his place. I meet Yuri at the hostel at 8 a.m.  He and his three friends are going to the street party in Praca de Tiradentes and the adjoining Praca XV dressed as Arabs.  They are going to carry a panoply made out of a sheet – they are all dressed in sheets – and the most important thing is to be drunk.  This is in line with the best carnivalesque in which everything is topsy-turvy and back-to-front.  An upside-down world should be celebrated in which you are blind drunk at breakfast, you are awake all night, your abbot is a scullion, the scullion is a king, offal is strewn about the church and urine is sprinkled from the censers.  We all pile into a cab.  The Arabs lean out of the window and offer five or six camels for each girl who passes in another cab.  More appropriately, I offer a Lamborghini.

'I note a certain oddness…'

Praca Tiradentes is heaving.  Joaquim José da Silva Xavier was the dentist who gave his name to this central square – he was publicly hung and quartered here in 1792 for leading a revolt against Portuguese rule  – his parts were then displayed in various Brazilian cities.  This morning, a whole fart of sousaphones occupy the top of the steep steps leading up to the entrance of the Palacio Tiradentes.  The palace is crowned with kings, gods and goddesses supported on elaborate Corinthian columns and flanked by massive maternal and pedagogical muses.  Perched on a toe of one of these, Heidi is snogging Dracula.  Meanwhile a beer tankard is embracing someone in a jock-strap and a full leather head-mask zipped up and locked at the nape.  A thirteen year old and immaculately beautiful Tarzan is standing hand in hand with a Roman soldieress.  I note, however, a certain oddness about fancy dress.  Chefs dress up as nurses, nurses dress up as bankers, bankers dress up as doctors, doctors dress up as patients.  It’s only because of a certain dislocation that one notices any irregularity.  A gentleman passes me with breasts for cheeks which swell when he exhales.

The panoply held intermittently aloft enables me to follow my Arabs through the crush.  Chanting ‘Hallah, Hallah, Hallah,’ they surround a gaggle of black-nosed, be-whiskered girls.  Then one of them drops a vodka-filled plastic bottle shouting ‘Bombi!’ and all four Arabs pounce on the bottle, and on the fortunate or not-so-fortunate girls – depending on their point of view.  Someone goes by waving aloft a placard which says in Portuguese, Respect women at Carnival Time!  I warn the Arabs not to pounce on anyone in a policewoman costume.  They are too drunk to appreciate my point.

Watched over in Praca XV by a horse-back riding general in the sort of flat cap I associate with the American Civil War, witches, furies, superheroes, gorillas and Vikings commingle.  The streets are filled with wonderful stalls selling Globo crackers, tapioca pudding, popcorn, pasties, rolls, calzones, empanadas, kibes, kebabs, battered kebabs and sausages – all of it delicious.  The air is filled with samba, streamers and balloons. My favourite costumes are a trio of toilets, a Frankenstein carrying his master in a cage, a man in a pirate costume with a girl who has come as his parrot, and here is my son!  He has come as a tourist.  He is wearing my parrot shirt, and a straw hat with fifty reales sticking in its band, and another fifty reales sticking out of his pocket.

I have a date at lunch-time, so I wander away, finding that by now carnival is diffused throughout the town.  Some girls stop skipping rope to leap on my bus with a big glass of beer.  They sing what I think are raunchy songs at the top of their voices, wriggling their behinds and swinging from the bars.  A mum in tears leads tots in masks away from a restaurant.  Three gorillas are talking serious girl philosophy on a street corner.  Well, what is she supposed to do?  Perhaps the most bizarre thing is sharing the metro with clowns, giant pixies, princesses and Colonel Gadaffi.  A rear moves in front of me down the street and the golden disks decorating the Turkish shawl it is wrapped in start to clink to a samba-like rhythm.  No one in Rio can sit still for long.  The capoeira girls prefer drumming to flirting.  I went to a barbeque in North Rio, and each of the young men there had a knee which couldn’t stop jiggling up and down.  Doormen play with their keys. I find it all exhausting, and since I have an hour to kill I fall asleep, like any tramp, on a stone bench under a cannon-ball tree.

The great Sunday street party in the centre seems to epitomise the creative communal madness this festival represents. But it’s hard to convey a sense of the scale of it.  I would guess there were over a million people there, almost all in costume.  This is carnival.   Creative and spontaneous!

Art as a sport.

NOT SO THE SAMBADROME, where twenty-four samba schools compete for the accolade of being judged the best school, each having rehearsed their parade intensively for a year and devised their floats, all in strict secrecy.  My son and his girl have super-expensive tickets.  But there’s no ticket for me, and the event is completely sold out, so feeling peeved I watch the first six schools on television,  with a bottle of scotch to help me through the experience.  It takes each school an hour and a quarter to get down the sambadrome’s artificial street and they lose points if they go over time.  This is art as a sport:  it’s highly competitive.  In Paraguay they shoot goalies;  in Rio, they stab samba queens who fail to deliver. Each school sings one samba over and over, and the parade is meant to illustrate the words of the song.  There are eight allegories, represented by the floats.  The theme might be the botanical gardens, the destruction of nature by market forces and the replanting of hills coffee plantations have devastated with the forest of Tijuca, or it might be a homage to a singer who has recently passed away, or a celebration of the Rio film industry.  Whatever the theme, it will very often manage to work its way through history, to allow for a sphinx with waving wings, and an orgy in a Roman bath-house, and end up in a Carioca brothel or a bossa nova bar.  Silver is a favourite colour and the relentless rhythm of the samba enforces a certain jack-boot jerkiness that affects miming – drumming is after all martial.  There is never any change in the dynamic.

The several thousand in each school who comprise the rank and file, often paying tourists, are all in elaborate costume – from crinolines to corn dollies – and unlike the Praca Tiradentes merry-making, no one gets any creative say in what they wear.  Old ladies are led away, having grown faint under the weight of their headgear.  The quality of the dancing suffers because the choreography has such an illustrative agenda, and it often descends into a pastiche of ballet.

Although everybody is meant to look so happy that it’s as if happiness never happened at any other time, everything is strictly supervised.  You get penalised if there’s a gap or if a costume is out of place, and anxiety is an impression I get as I watch people nervously trying to be in the right place at the right moment.  Neptune’s eel-bearded head moves glowering up and down, controlled inside the float by a computer.  A brigade of divers in frog-feet go past, but how do you dance the samba in frog-feet?

It is said that the samba school phenomenon is about belonging, but so was Fascism.  The parade reminds me of the Nuremburg rallies, or the march-pasts of North Korea.  And also, it’s all being critiqued by media personalities, judged by experts, sponsored by, in this case, TIM, the phone service, Pantene, the shampoo, Schin, the beer, Bradesco, the bank, and Prez Unic, the supermarket chain.  Everything conspires to reaffirm our society’s values.  How is this in any way in the back-to-front spirit of carnival?

The last straw.

THE LAST STRAW IS Gisele Bündchen, the supermodel who is the current face and hair for Pantene.  She’s on a float as a modern Venus, against a video backdrop of her own hair, and she can’t samba for toffee and she’s not even naked, as Lady Godiva was on a previous float, only screened by her hair.  It is so flagrantly commercial, pandering to the demands of the sponsors, that the judges seem to disapprove and mark this school quite low.

Nine hours of relentless parading.  I fall asleep drunk and exhausted.  However it’s amazing how a nine thousand eight hundred real ticket can alter one’s perception of an event – there being about three reals to a pound.   This is the value ascribed on the following night to the ticket that wings its way to me for the second six schools, including the favourites to win the competition. Now at least my experience will not be mediated through the virtuality of a screen.

We get to the Sambadrome around ten p.m., wearing the t-shirts that identify us as VIPs.  This in itself is a gas!

The samba parade is not carnival, it is spectacle.  It is not particularly sophisticated spectacle, but it has to be said, it’s spectacular.  A helicopter hovers overhead, filming the proceedings.  Once per parade, a camera on a track runs the entire mile or so of the street.  The crowd watching is vast.  Those from the favelas, in the cheaper seats, get to see everything as it turns the corner by the exit and winds down, exhausted.  We’re in the boxes opposite the judges, with complimentary tickets given us by the editor of Rio Samba magazine, whose boxes are the best on this Oscar Niemeyer-designed piste.  We have a swipe card which allows us to go down and watch at street level, again in a reserved area, and behind us is a hospitality suite which offers limitless Moët and Chandon all night, sushi, a grill, salads, sweets and ices – the entire cornucopia of bliss including near-naked samba queens from previous years to dance with us in the intervals between schools.  Over the course of this marathon I graduate from champagne to red-bull and scotch on the rocks.

SO WHAT DOES THE samba parade get right?  Well, some of the sambas are really catchy, and some schools get full marks from me for ingenuity.  Each school is proceeded by a special group which performs an abstract of the theme of the samba they are illustrating.  One such number begins with patients being wheeled in on hospital beds which eventually turn into trampolines.  There’s another special group who speed in as icicles on roller-skates, and another group on bicycles.  The winning school has a group which it manages to make entirely disappear – an illusion which goes down well with the judges.

Courage is another quality demonstrated, by the near naked dancing samba flat-out in glittering high-heels forty feet up, each on a tiny platform, with nothing but a waist-high pole to hold onto.

Most of all, the parade does justice to one distinctly carnivalesque attribute, and that is the grotesque.  The spirit of the grotesque has always been that you see something which is both living and dying at the same time – Bakhtin’s example is the Kerch terracottas of laughing, pregnant hags.  Because of this paradoxical confusion, you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  Now this is true for some of the floats of the samba schools.  Summer bursts out of winter, as if death were giving birth.  Midgets turn into buds, and the witch they are accompanying turns into a passion-fruit flower. The Roman baths are full of performers who had been chosen for their obesity.  They are all very nearly naked.  They splash each other with the very real water in the baths, fountains and showers and slap each other quite mercilessly, all this to the driving samba of a band dressed as something that might have been a brown-shirt brigade or the military police, or the metro police, or cave-men or fish or tractors, and then there’s a float representing the evil spirit of disease as some awful monster out of an Egyptian tomb that glowers down over a flag-holding samba-dancing queen with her attendant, who my son tells me used to be by tradition a capoerista, to prevent the flag being stolen by a team from some rival school.

I’M LOSING MY WAY here, and indeed that seems intended, or at least, it’s an inevitability.  As with any popular mass rally there’s an infectious excitement, and a sheer childish delight in the chiaroscuro of dark and light moods and bright or sombre costume.   One school merges into another in the mind.  Neptunes abound.  Faces fall off and disappear into stomachs and then reappear.  Death, disease and pestilence are laughed away in a crazy whirl of wheelchairs and polar bears, Aztecs and Siberian tigers.  It’s surreal.  The really good, usually black, samba dancers are kept relatively free of constricting costumes and come in their own group in each school, dancing like fury.  A golden calf is pursued by ladies in antlers.  Bacchus is followed by a float filled with saints.   Venice precedes Mexico, while Carmen Miranda presides over a float holding aloft a biplane with dancing bathing beauties on its wings, flying down to Rio!

The last group to perform is Beija-Flor, and Beija-Flor usually win:  they are so well supported by gangsters – but which gangsters?  Gangsters such as the fantastically costumed and masked Bate-bolas who torment the backstreets at carnival time beating people with evil-smelling cow-bladder balls and occasionally killing each other?  No, these are gang ceremonials that appeal to thugs.  The villains who often become presidents of the samba schools are the Bicheros – usually dripping with gold – who control the “jogo de bicho”, that is, “the animal game” – or, as they might say in the States, the numbers racket.  Smooth operators, these Essex boys of the Rio underworld prefer car bombs to cow-bladders, but are they are also eager for social acceptance, and becoming the Padrino or godfather of a samba school is one way to start scaling the social ladder.

Beija-Flor are doing a tribute to…yes, you might have guessed, to Roberto Carlos.  Roberto is a product in himself, a sort of Pantene. The first float of this final parade is teeming with humming-birds waving their wings.  So guess what Beija Flor means.  Their last is a wing-flapping parrot.  No, there’s a float after that – it’s Jesus, our Saviour, at an enormous scale – and who is it riding at the prow?  It can’t be, but yes, yes it is!

A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, The Times Literary Supplement, and he is a frequent contributor to The Fortnightly Review. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice.

The first part of this three-part letter from Rio is here. The third part is here.