Rio’s oldest samba group opened Brazil’s carnival parade Sunday with more than 4,000 dancers and a cavalcade of opulent floats on display.
Estacio da Sa led off its performance with a troupe of Aztec-inspired dancers before a shimmering, golden float crowned with a gigantic lion’s head - its jaws in motion and a huge golden paw sweeping from side to side.
At the Sambadrome, the 13 top samba schools were grabbing the spotlight for about an hour each over two nights, featuring about 5,000 performers each. The last school in the parade usually comes out just at sunrise.
The sambha dances are a hard fought competition and a panel of judges made up of folklorists, musicologists and carnival scholars chooses the winners.
The Sambadrome, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and built in 1984, was crowded and steamy. Some of the revellers dancing and playing drums had to be hospitalised with heat exhaustion
The schools are judged in 10 different categories including music, the quality of their dancing and floats, their parade theme, and crowd reaction. A less than perfect score can dash a school’s chances of victory.
The featured dancers, especially the female flag bearers and their male counterparts - practice all year to perfect their steps, which are actually closer to minuet than samba.
Rio samba schools spent a record 58.5 million reais ($28 million) to design and build floats and costumes for this year’s event. The country is also likely to earn a lot from carnival tourism with over 200,000 tourists in the country.
Source: Reuters
