Amazing Carnival Photos

From around the world, from the Boston Globe

Madrugada: the dawn parade

Today, my last day of Carnaval, was a mixture between the wonderful first night and the terrible second night.

(thanks to interstar for the picture)

It started brilliantly when I arrived at noon. The streets of pretty old Olinda were full of young people all dressed up and out for a day of Mucking Around. Almost everyone was in costume. The costumes, and the people in them, were so creative and playful with each other. Blocos wandered around making everyone dance and sing and laugh and the vibe was fantastic.

pic 1 from irishpolyglot
pic 2 from f. a. photography
pic 3 from alex

It ended on a bit of a downer. By 3pm, the party had mainly concentrated in just a few streets, too crowded to move in. Throughout the town, the streets had become messy, the crowds smelly, the faces ugly, the remaining rhythms blurry. The event had not peaked; it had gradually got drunk and melted.

It makes me think about Barbara Ehrenreich's writing on the removal of the ecstatic peak from European festivities. (Brazilian culture is heavily influenced by the Portuguese colonisers [Brazil has roughly three cultural roots; the Portuguese colonisers, the African slaves they brought over, and the indigenous Indians who were here to start with]). 

She writes:

"Inevitably, something was lost in the transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized festivities - something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of workshop the moment of maximum "madness" and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity... Medieval Christianity, in contrast, offered "communion" in the form of a morsel of bread and sip of wine soberly consumed at the altar - and usually saw only devilry in the festivities that followed.

"...this relative secularisation may help account for the uglier side of European carnival tradition. Without a built-in religious climax to the celebrations - the achievement, for example, of a trance-like state of union with the divinity - they readily spilled over into brawling and insensate drunkenness." p93

I get stuck, though, when trying to imagine what a peak would look like. What if we were to have a London Carnival; how would we usher it towards a collective peak, and away from "brawling and insensate drunkenness"?

So many people, so little fun

Last night was the bit I was dreading.

We left late. The night before had been an early one. This was a late one. Everyone talks about downtown at night. That's the place to be, they say.

Three busses went past, too full of partygoers to stop, before we found one we could squeeze onto, more intimate than the Northern Line in rush hour.

Downtown was mainly crowds. And beer. Thousands upon thousands of people were packed into the old city. A concert was going on, Glastonbury-like with a big stage and big speakers and big screens dotted around, and voluminous, endless crowds.

Trying to move, we found ourselves in one of those crushes where you start thinking, this has the potential to turn into one of those headlines, '17  killed in Recife Carnival crush.' You start playing the scenarios in your head; what would you do, try and scramble out? I looked around. That would probably involve standing on that short woman's head. Then she might die. What else would you do? I tried to imagine a co-operative, non violent approach to surviving a crush and figured it was probably not to be there in the first place.

Observing the crowd, two things:

1) Everybody loves a chrous

Hands in the air, everyone singing, doing the dance, on the chorus. Everyone, everyone loves a chorus.

2) Apart from the chorus, and apart from the people actively involved in being in the concert audience,

there was no joy on the faces.


I'd seen it as we walked over the bridge towards the old city. Throngs were walking away with heavyset, joyless faces. Entering the city we saw these faces everywhere, along with the smell of sweat and beer. "So many people!" someone said. And so little fun, I thought.

So why on earth does everybody do it?

I could think of three underlying reasons: mating, bonding, and liminality, the pull of each all greater, apparently, than the cost of handling horrible fun-less crowds, and tomorrow's hang over.

Mating: single people are here on the pull.

Bonding: Couples, friendship groups, the entire city, the local culture, is bonding, having unusual experiences together. It's like the annual running of the boundaries in the Andes, or Mayday in Padstow .

Liminality: "Liminal" spaces are the spaces in between, where normal rules don't apply. We can shed the restricting bonds of social norms and be free.

We need these spaces. And it feels like booze has kind of taken over from other forms and practices as the active ingredient that creates the liminal experience.

I think that's a shame.

Carnaval 4: and then...

I followed the tribal processions to the performances, and watched the dance in which about 200 dancers divided into men and women, boys and girls, and I thought, what an experience, to be a boy dancing in the line of boys between the lines of men doing their electric men dances, seeing all that power and strength and rhythm, picking your favourite guy, thinking, I’m going to be like him when I grow up. Ditto the girls, and how the women might feel, we are Women, and the men, we are Men, and imagining the kind of unity they might all feel doing that.
(pic from christiano)

Hunger dragged me away, via a few conversations, till the sky had grown dark and the crowds had grown big and all I seemed to be able to find was drunken noise.

I decided to go, turned the corner and stumbled across some incredibly beautiful singing. I went closer and found a singing bloco doing their warm up party in their backstreet, complete with kick-ass rhythm section.

Still singing, they began to walk and I was swept along with them. Their token English speaker befriended me and told me they were a group of tax administrators and other professionals who shared an office and had a sing together every day after lunch. The woman playing the accordion was their composer and conductor, he said. Others later told me that my my translator had been King of Carnaval 4 years in a row in his day.

Their music was Just Beautiful. I started to hum along and a tax administrator in heavy makeup and a bright red wig put her face in my face and sung the words very loud and clear at me. I hadn’t a clue what they meant but tried my hardest to copy her, I think that was what she wanted. Then the guitarist was taking my hand and looking into my eyes and singing something about the stars and it was all getting a bit much so time to turn the corner and find that bus.

A couple of streets later I was lured off course by the sounds of rhythms wriggling out of clapping hands, and it was such an alive clapping, not a mandatory clapping but an animated clapping, the sounds of a characterful group of clappers who really want to be clapping right now. I turned the corner to see hundreds of clapping hands raised above a procession of clowns, all rednosed and dressed up each in their own funny way, wiggling and tiggling down the street.

(thanks to Doutores de Alegria for the pic)

Behind the clowns were the sounds of a brass-and-drums marching band, some distance behind.

The clowns carried me away with them and they played with me and I played back and we turned the corner and under a street light the marching band - all straight and dressed in black and playing the local Frevo music really well and really loud - caught up with the clowns, who stopped and danced.

A pretty clown woman found a little clown girl dressed in an almost identical pretty maroon strapless satin dress with flouncy skirt, and they danced together. Each had such a sway to her, such an understated, captivating elegance, that a circle formed around them and suddenly there it was, a party under a streetlamp by a pavement café, the marching band and the dancing clowns, delighting everyone and themselves inside their spontaneous eruption of form out of chaos.
(this pic from christiano too)

I stayed with them awhile before my tired feet dragged me home. I don’t know how long they stayed under that street light, or when they left, who else bumped into whom and what happened then, but I do know this: what a fantastic form for a city-scale party. Get some music styles that everyone likes and knows. Invite everyone to make a group, however they want. Make sure there are enough musicians, drums and brass instruments to go around, and somehow have a historical precedent such that everyone has high hopes for Carnaval. Set an entire city free from normal life for five days: give each group their starting positions and times, and simply, simply, press go.

(pic from cristiano. )

Carnaval 3: The Fun Killers

As far as I can see, there are three (or maybe four) things that kill the fun.

1. Big Cameras

There haven’t been many of them. But they make people self-conscious. Self-consciousness kills fun. Good fun seem to involve the loss of self-consciousness.

It’s not so much the little point-and-shoot cameras that revelers fling around. They’re fun, and used in the spirit of fun.

It’s the people with big cameras who don’t participate but just take pictures. They’re taking from the proceedings without giving anything. To take more than you give traverses a fundamental principle of life.

Good fun needs contribution, not documenation. Let it be and let it go.

I haven’t taken any pictures yet. I feel I should. I don’t know what to do about that. I’ll see what I can find on flickr.


2. Stages

So, I went last night to see the Tribal processions. I’m really interested in tribes, because if research suggests that play is a human need at all ages, that there’s some kind of singer and dancer in all of us, but we’ve been smothered by a Protestant Capitalist thing that says work is more important than play – if that is true, then I’m really curious to see what people do when they haven’t been smothered by a protestant capitalist culture.

And given the dominance of a North American economic and cultural model, the main people who potentially haven’t been thus smothered are tribes.

So, I went to see the tribal processions and they were just fantastic, powerful dancing and drumming and costumes. They weren’t contemporary tribes, an old schoolteacher told me; rather, contemporary Indians reviving practices now dead. Their feathered headdresses and skirts were made of gowdy coloured synthetic feathers, but my do these people have rhythm.

Their parade was FUN, but then it culminated at a stage where each group gave a performance of the dance they had been parading. The joy ended there. It drained from me. It drained from their faces. It drained from the whole palpable experience. They did the dances, sure, but the fun was lost.

(pic from cristiano)


3. Electricity

As the night went on more and more blocos joined the party, and some had electricity. Microphones and speakers. That killed the fun. It made some people’s fun drown out that of others. It hurt the ears of anyone too close. And when the speakers played unlive music, it broadcast a kind of deadness, an un-liveness, across the whole feel. It killed the fun.

There were no carnaval vans. They weren’t needed; everyone danced down the street.

Lights were useful though…


4. There was kind of a fourth. Groups of men just trying to make as much noise as possible. Crappy vibe. No fun.

Carnaval 2: Form

As far as I can tell, the form of Carnaval here works like this.

Anyone who wants to forms a ‘bloco’, a parading group. They come up with whatever they want to do, but a bloco usually includes a marching band playing funky local rhythms, some great costumes, a big sign telling everyone what they’re about, and some kind of story that they all share.

In their allotted space and time, organized by the government, the bloco gets together and warms up. This seems to take a couple of hours and involves having a great big party together, with whichever onlookers come and go. The onlookers don’t matter here: it’s all about the team and their energy.

When they’re hot, they start parading around. Yesterday the parading started organized and ended up totally chaotic, with blocos crashing into other blocos, battles for power with the strongest veering through while the weaker disintegrated, joined in with the stronger as it passed, then regrouped their parade afterwards.

In this stage onlookers are important and there’s no barrier and only the very occasional policeman so you get swept along and away with the bloco.

In some cases there’s some kind of culmination, like a short stage performance of each group. In other cases people just wander around with their bring-your-own-party blocos and the city descends into wild, chaotic revelleries that go on until the small hours, under the peeling old colourful buildings and the tall trees and the bright stars and the warm indigo sky that takes everything into itself with something of an endless, calm, all-night smile.

Carnaval 1: Frevo

First taste of Brazilan Carnaval last night. It rocks.

Or should I say, Recife Carnaval. The Carnavals are very different in each region. More on that later. Let’s talk Frevo.

The bus dropped me off in the old town, by hundreds of people milling around, chatting, singing, dancing, playing in a couple of scratch bands, in a big open space by the sea.

Carnaval starts today. Yesterday was…. Was everyone not being prepared to wait for Carnaval in order to have a Carnaval.

So they did.

Let’s start where I started, with Frevo.

It was 5pm, and people were gathering before processions started. I wound my way through the leaping children and huddling teenagers and big men with big brass instruments wrapped around their bodies, towards the funkiest sounds I could hear.

It turned out to be coming from a group of purple t-shirted women, with a bandstand area at the top end,  lots and lots of them, dancing to an all

girl band. Girls on drums, girls on brass, girls singing.

And the women were getting down! I stood at the edges and started bobbing away. I couldn’t help it. Some of the women were my mother’s age; most were something in between us, some older than her. And they were funky! They all knew the same moves, which they played with amid their general getting down.

(pic from cristiano)

The young girls were at it too, and running around whilst singing and dancing. The band struck a popular tune and the women started singing along at the tops of their voices, as a lively conga of twelve year olds came skipping past in a line singing the same song as their mothers like it was the latest from the Spice Girls. God I’m old. Beyonce?

There’s so much to say about this one thing.

Let’s start with Tradition.

The music was Frevo. Everyone knew the words and the moves. Everyone felt they owned it; it’s the music of this region, the music of this ‘people’ whatever that means now. No-one seems to reject it, the way my parents and I rejected one another's music for so many years.

I don’t think we’ve got music like this in our culture, in the UK, have we? Songs that everyone knows the words and the dance moves for and can get down to together, regardless of age, class or race?

A tall skinny kid wanting to practice English sidled up to me. “Frevo

started 103 years ago”, he declared.

A-ha! I thought. So, like planting a big tree, it might be possible to seed an encompassing music now and in 103 years time, everyone will get down to it together, feeling that these sounds are our shared home.

A little later, I shared a beer with a professor of social Geography in a big square. “Frevo was dead until ten years ago.” It was a forgotten music, he said, until Chico Science, a young musician from Recife, picked it up and mixed it with contemporary beats and sounds. That created Mangua Beat, and it spread bigtime. “It’s post-modern hybridity. It’s the same as Manu Chao in Europe, Massive Attack in England, The Gotan Project with Argentinean Tango, The Tinariwen Movement in Africa. Mangue beat put Frevo back onto the radio and into people’s lives.”

“That’s rubbish,” said an old school teacher who cornered me for some English practice a bit later. “I love Frevo. We have always listened to Frevo. It’s just that the media, ruled by the southern power centres of Rio and Sau Paulo, only started playing our music ten years ago. Until then it was not on the national radar.”

“Frevo wasn’t dead ten years ago,” 27 year old Giovanni told me today, “but it was dying. Mungabit helped to bring it to life. But it wasn’t just that. The Refice authorities banned the playing of Axe, the music of Bahia (the neighbouring state), during carnaval, to preserve Frevo and the local culture. If you want to play it in the street, that’s fine, but there can be no Axe concerts over Carnaval.”

So in sum it sounds like, as a result of some combination of the above, these people of Pernambuco, Recife’s state, share a music called Frevo that is 103 years old. It’s a happy music that makes you smile and dance, and it’s cool, to me, to the 12 year olds, to the grandmothers, to the teenage boys, to everyone. I like that.

…

So, back to the women in the purple t-shirts. I’m the only tourist. Some of them look at me, and I grin, and they grin back, and we seem to agree together that everything’s cool, and we get down some more.

It’s only when I stop for a breather that I look more closely at their t-shirts.

They read: “Nem com Uma Flora: Pelo Fim Da Violencia Contra as Mulheres.”

It means: "(You don't hit a woman), not even with a flower: For an end to violence against women.”

I shiver.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of women here in these purple t-shirts, dancing and singing away, grinning from ear to ear. I wonder what they, or their sisters or their friends or their mothers, may have experienced.

Lonely Planet says that "Instances of domestic abuse are frighteningly common (one report stated that every 15 seconds a woman is beaten in Brazil)." (p59)

I don't know how that compares with other countries, and I know we’re getting away from talk of fun here but here’s the thing:

Each of the groups in this Carnaval carries a story.

A reason why they sing and dance.

It is variously the story of their own culture, their club, their cause, or a mixture of all.

Every one of them has it.

So the fun is not fun on it’s own; it is fun that carries and weaves stories that help define a person, a group, a people. The fun is a cultural heartbeat, cultural blood flow, cultural aliveness in action.