The Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro is a world famous festival held before Lent every year and considered the biggest carnival in the world with two million people per day on the streets. The first festivals of Rio date back to 1723.[1]
GRES Imperatriz Leopoldinense at the carnival, in 1999
Mangueira samba school parades in the Sambadrome in the 1998 Carnival.
A Samba school parades in the Sambadrome in the 2004 Carnival.
The typical Rio carnival parade is filled with revelers, floats and adornments from numerous samba schools which are located in Rio (more than 200 approximately, divided into 5 leagues/ divisions). A samba school is composed of a collaboration of local neighbours that want to attend carnival together, with some kind of regional, geographical common background.
One of the many main purposes of the Rio carnival parade is for samba schools to compete with their sisters samba-schools; this competition is the climax of the whole carnival festival in this city, related to the samba-schools environment.[2] Each school chooses a theme to try to portray with their entry.[3] The samba schools work to build the best floats, costumes, lyrics, aesthetics, to represent their themes (in Carnival terminology called "enredo"), and to include the best music they can from their drumming band called the bateria.[4] There are many parts to each school's entry including the six to eight floats and up to 4,000 ( four thousand ) revelers per Samba-school of the so-called Special group.[5]
There is a special order that every school has to follow with their parade entries. Each school begins with the "comissão de frente" ( literally "Commission of the Front" in English), that is the "wing" or group of people from the school that appear first. Made up of ten to fifteen people, the "comissão de frente" introduces the school and sets the mood and style of their presentation. These people have choreographed dances in fancy costumes that usually tell a short story. Following the "comissão de frente" is the first float of the samba school, called "abre-alas" ( "Opening Wing" in English ).
Some of the important roles include the porta-bandeira and mestre-sala. The porta-bandeira is a very important lady who is in charge of the samba school flag, including making sure to not allow the flag to roll. She is accompanied by the mestre-sala, who is supposed to draw everyone’s attention to "his queen", the porta-bandeira. Floatees, who are also important, are the people who populate the floats, also known as destaques. The floatees have the most luxurious and expensive costumes that can be extremely heavy. Along with all the floatees is one main floatee that is located at the top of each float. The main destaque dances and sings for the entire time that the float is on the runway.
One other aspect that is mandatory is the presence of the ala das baianas. This is a wing of the samba school entry that includes at least 100 females only and honours the 'aunts' of the dance. Also important are the glamorous passistas, solo female samba performers dancing between the wings and often stars in their own right (they need considerable stamina for their dancing displays).