Big Business Is Pulsing Through Carnaval in Rio

The people who turned this city’s Carnaval parade into a multimillion-dollar enterprise of feather headpieces, fanciful floats and gyrating dancers in expensive costumes have even bigger plans afoot.

Hiram Araujo, the event’s cultural advisor, envisions a “spectacle” with the glitz and commercial appeal of a major Broadway hit or an NBA basketball game.

“Carnaval isn’t yet what it could be,” Araujo said. “We are still learning how to administer the product.”

With each year, Carnaval in Rio grows more exclusive and business-driven, more distant from its roots in the favelas, or slums, that are home to the samba schools that put together the annual parade.

In the favelas, Carnaval was molded into a cultural rite synonymous with “Brazilianness” and the spontaneous expression of joy. The poor people of the favelas marched into the center of Rio in extravagant but homemade costumes, singing improvised songs in a bacchanal celebration that any onlooker was welcome to join.

Samba Schools Attract Big-Money Backers

Today the neighborhoods’ sambistas, or dancers, are still a part of the celebration, but now they are at the center of a vast and complex industry that employs untold numbers of seamstresses, marketing specialists and even a fair number of plastic surgeons.

This year, for the first time, 10 of the 14 schools that will compete for prizes in the two-day parade beginning today will have corporate sponsors.

“Now we are a business, we have partnerships,” said Zelia Lima Coutinho, a 74-year-old member of the old guard in the Mangueira favela, home of one of the oldest and most beloved of the samba schools. “I miss those times, and have saudade for them,” she added, using a word that means, all at once, nostalgia, feeling and friendship.

The first big-money backers of the modern parade were the men who run the illegal street lottery called jogo do bicho. In the beginning, they were in it for nothing more than a bit of neighborhood prestige, hoping to back the winner in the competition for best samba school. But then Carnaval started to make money.

Today the parade is a cash machine producing wealth for Rio’s tourist industry. This week, an estimated 370,000 visitors to Rio will spend about $130 million, according to the local tourist board. Many will pay steeply inflated prices for hotel rooms, meals and child care.

Putting on the show is a year-round “factory without smokestacks,” said Ricardo Pavao, one of the Carnaval designers who oversee small armies of singers, construction workers and the sculptors who help decorate the floats.

Ticket receipts from the 60,000-seat “Sambadrome,” where the parade is held, have financed more costly competition among samba schools. There are more dancers, with more elaborate costumes. The floats are more audacious--last year, one entry paid a stuntman to levitate above its dancers with a NASA-built rocket pack.

The Globo television network paid $4 million to the League of Independent Samba Schools, the parade organizer, for the exclusive rights to broadcast the event to an estimated 20 million Brazilian viewers. Such a big audience is irresistible to advertisers--even though corporate symbols are prohibited in the parade. “We Brazilians always find a way around these problems,” Araujo said.

A company can, for example, dictate the story, or enredo, that a given samba school tells with its floats, costumes and songs. This year, the Salgueiro school will dedicate its floats to the history of Brazilian aviation, with the founder of the Brazilian airline TAM portrayed as a mannequin the size of a whale. TAM is sponsoring Salgueiro to the tune of $500,000.

TAM’s biggest rival, Varig, is sponsoring the Beija Flor school. “We’re going to put billboards across Rio to give visibility to our partnership,” Isabel Werneck, promotions director for Varig, told the daily O Globo.

Tickets to the parade cost between $9 and $260. The most exclusive box, with six seats, goes for more than $1,500. Organizers erected wooden barriers on the streets around the Sambadrome to keep out gate-crashers.

“No one from a favela can afford to see the Carnaval parade,” said Fabio Gondim Palazzo, a naval engineer and samba devotee who organizes one of the small, independent parades that grow each year, thanks in part to disaffection with the official parade. “The price of just one ticket is what people in a favela make in a month.”

There was a time, well within memory of some participants of this year’s parade, when people in Rio could enjoy the main Carnaval parade for free from the sidewalks of the city center. They brought fruit crates and benches from home to stand on. Samba dancers with torches provided the lighting.

“We would dance for four days,” said the Mangueira school’s Coutinho, known to her friends as Tia Zelia. First, they would march for about two hours in the Carnaval parade, then they would take the parade to other favelas. “Now we get 80 minutes in the Sambadrome, and that’s it.”

The samba league’s Araujo sees the changes as a mark of progress. “We march in a Sambadrome, and let’s not forget that dromo means speed in Greek. What you have now is a parade with velocity, a virtual experience where you don’t see the dancer so much.”

Schools Had Humble Beginnings in Slums

Traditionally, samba schools were neighborhood institutions. Mangueira, in northern Rio, was founded in 1928. In the early part of the 20th century, Rio celebrations marking the start of Lent were prim and proper affairs, costume balls attended by the elite. The favelas’ poor residents paraded through the streets to African-influenced rhythms. The fusion of those European and African traditions created the modern Carnaval parade and the music called samba.

For decades, Mangueira’s dresses were sewn by the women who danced in them, many of whom worked by candlelight at home. The costumes were made in variations of the samba school’s colors: pink (symbolic of love, one veteran says) and green (for hope). The people who composed, performed and sang the school’s song lived in the neighborhood.

Nowadays, a growing number of dancers are upper- and middle-class Rio residents, or foreigners who pay a hefty price to buy a costume and join a “wing” of performers. A model or actress looking for television exposure might pay thousands of dollars for the dress and a spot riding atop a float or dancing in front of a samba school’s corps of drummers.

Some Rio plastic surgeons say their business goes up by as much as 70% in the months before Carnaval. Fabiana Andrade, a 24-year-old model, recently said she will have had 13 “fat-removal” sessions by the time she dances today with the Imperio Serrano samba school.

To attract well-off sambistas, some schools hold tryouts in the fashionable southern neighborhoods of Rio. Even an inexpensive costume can cost $200, double the monthly minimum wage here.

“There are people dancing for Mangueira who are from Japan, from France, from Germany,” said Ari “Arizinho” Jorge da Silva, a member of Mangueira’s old guard.

How well do they samba?

Da Silva frowned. “These people come to play samba,” he said. “For us, Mangueira is something we carry in our hearts.”

Anthropologist Maria Laura Viveiros, who wrote a book on the annual event, sees the parade as a cultural institution that has begun to lose its edge.

“Up until the 1980s, the samba schools of Rio were important symbols of Brazilian national identity,” Viveiros said. “Now I don’t think that’s true.”

Among certain Carnaval connoisseurs, Rio’s celebration takes a back seat to the somewhat less commercialized parade in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador.

Viveiros and other Carnavalologists say the parade began to change dramatically--for better or worse--with the 1984 construction of the Sambadrome, officially known as the Passarela do Samba, or Samba Walkway. The concrete stadium, designed by Marxist architect Oscar Niemayer and built along several blocks of a central Rio street, made Carnaval a profitable enterprise.

The underworld’s continued support of samba schools has given it a chance to present a respectable face to Rio society. At the same time, the schools have gained stature as community institutions.

And Viveiros sees something positive in the growing corporate sponsorship of the schools. “It might be possible for the schools to break free of the control of the bicheros,” Viveiros said, referring to the men who control the lottery game.

Despite the changing nature of Carnaval, the samba schools remain a source of pride in the favelas that created them. “I don’t think Carnaval has lost its popular character yet,” Viveiros said. “When it starts to lose its popular character, it will be finished.”

For the members of Mangueira’s old guard, the day they march in Carnaval--this year it will be Monday, beginning at 10 p.m.--is still the highlight of their year.

“When we step into the Sambadrome and we hear those people cheering, we still cry,” said Da Silva, 69. “And then we do the best we can do defend the flag and the honor of the school.”