Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2001 - 43

things when it was built in 1984?
FP: A governor of Rio wanted the city to be decorated for
Carnaval in the late 1950s early 1960s. He wanted this
decoration for six kilometers of street and three squares
working with seven hundred people to create a mood
for the carnival. To make the mood-like in theatre-a
principle of theatre-the main purpose of the set designer is not to be a painter but to create the mood for
the dramatic action. In old times, the carnival had overhead decoration with lights that made the carnival on
the street happier. When they moved to the
Sambôdromo, a great Brazilian intellectual who was a
man-so he made some mistakes-forbade the decoration of the Sambôdromo because a product of Oscar
Neimeyer, the architect who designed the Sambôdromo,
should be untouchable. So the feast lost its mood, became vulgar-much more actor and spectator than integration. It was a great loss. Although the show is very
beautiful, the audience is very far away. They don't participate in the parade. This is the main difference between the Sambôdromo and the others.
TR: Has the parade always had the enredo, the
theme, or has that been developed into what it
is now?
FP: The schools came out from the ranchos. In the 1930s or
1940s, there was something called a rancho and the
ranchos were as important as the schools are now.
There was also something called Grande Sociedade,
The Great Society, from the nineteenth century which
made the floats for the special parade. So the schools
got this part, the floats, from the Great Societies.
The samba schools came from these different
groups. The societies and the ranchos had a theme.
First, the schools had a theme for the floats, but the
sambas were not necessarily on that theme and they had
not only one, but three or four samba songs for the
same parade. So, the floats had a theme but the samba
had a different one.
During the Second World War, there was a war
effort, a war consciousness in the country, that was not
only about the U.S. air base in Natal or sending Brazilian
soldiers to Italy, but about building an awareness about
the need to fight that war. One school brought a parade
with tanks and cannons as floats. That was during the
first dictatorship in Brazil of Vargas. Then the dictatorship obliged the schools to chose national themes, Brazilian themes-before, the schools could chose anything-Nero, the Roman emperor, or the hell of Dante,
and anything else-to build the consciousness, the nationalism, for the war.
TR: You wouldn't have been able to have a theme
that would have been ironic?
FP: Only the Great Society schools had floats criticizing the
government and the government just let them do that
because it was carnival.
And then, they started to make a samba especially
for the theme. During the twenty years the schools
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TD & T

São Domingo do Araxá, much like Bath in England, was a popular resort in
the late eighteenth century where people went to "take the waters." A large number
of fossils were found in the clay around the springs and the history of Minas Gerais,
as in all of Brazil, is full of the struggles between cultures. The subject of the European colonization of the country which brought slaves and pushed the native
peoples out of their homes is a standard part of many of the samba themes.

The Parade
Almost everything in Rio, except perhaps a few McDonald's, closes for three days or
more to celebrate Carnaval and recuperate afterward. The Special Group parades
are staged on a Sunday and Monday with half the schools parading each night. The
first parade starts about seven o'clock in the evening and the last one finishes about
half past six the next morning. Each school must enter and exit the parade route in
no more than eighty minutes. One school does not enter until the previous school
has completely finished so the sambas can be heard clearly. The schools are judged
on nine areas: their Bateria (drum section), the Samba Enredo (theme samba),
the Harmonia (the singing and dancing), the Evolução (how the parade unfolds
and is it evenly spaced), the Enredo (theme), the Alegories and Abereços (floats
and hand props), the Fantasias (costumes), the Comissão de Frente (vanguard
section) and the Mestre-Sala and Porta-bandeira (ballroom master and flag bearer).
The parade is divided into segments which include a float relating to a part of
the samba and one or more sections of dancers costumed to accompany the float.
Each school opens its parade with their Comissão de Frente. Rosa Magalhães, in
her book The Making of Carnaval, describes the Comissão de Frente as usually
male and traditionally in top hats and tail coats. The purpose of this group is to represent the school and introduce the theme with special choreography and costume.
Top hats and tail coats were not in order this year. Mangueira, one of the most

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