Samba schools putting on magnificent Carnival shows

The samba schools of Rio de Janeiro, each one with some 4,000 dancers and musicians outfitted in colorful and fantastic costumes and featuring magnificent floats and highly choreographed dance routines, on the weekend are putting on fabulous and exuberant openair parade exhibitions to the delight of the public.

Rio’s Sambodrome, the stadium built by late architect Oscar Niemeyer to showcase the splendid parades, has been the scene so far this year of two nights of presentations by some of the samba schools.

So far, though, only the 16 socalled Series A samba schools second division groups that are aspiring to break into the “big time” top division of the city’s elite schools have staged their parades.

The parades of the 12 Special Group schools, the first division associations, are traditionally held on Sunday and Monday nights of Carnival and are the focus of all Brazilians and millions of viewers around the world who watch the competition on television.

Each school performs for between 65 and 82 minutes on a central theme featuring 33 groups of colorfully attired dancers and up to seven gigantic floats that pass through the Sambodrome.

The Viradouro school, the first to perform on Sunday, for instance, will stage a parade featuring the influence of blacks in Brazilian culture, and Mangueira, Brazil’s most popular samba school and the next one to perform, will pay homage to Brazilian women.

Meanwhile, one person died and at least 10 were wounded when two rival gangs of drug traffickers engaged in a shootout Sunday morning at a samba troupe’s parade in the city of Paraty, in Rio de Janeiro state, authorities said.

The gunfire erupted as hundreds of people were dancing on the Plaza de Matriz in downtown Paraty, which was named a Unesco World Heritage Site for its picturesque colonial homes and cobblestoned streets.

Among the wounded, most of whom were young Paraty residents, were three tourists from the city of Sao Paulo.

Paraty police chief Bruno Gilaberte said that the shooting broke out when two members of one drug gang tried to murder the head of a rival gang, wounding him seriously. He later died at the hospital, having been hit by 11 bullets.

The members of the victim’s gang in turn opened fire on the killers and a stampede resulted as people tried to get away from the scene, but Gilaberte said that nobody had been arrested, although the two hitmen have been identified and are being sought by police.