Tourists have begun flowing in to Brazil to see preparations for the Feb. 3-4 Carnival parade, but the real work has been in full swing for six months, transforming Rio's humble shantytowns into riots of color and song.
In Mangueira shantytown, a grim collection of hovels tumbling along the steep slopes behind Rio's mountaintop Christ the Redeemer statue, drug dealers toting automatic weapons have melted behind beer vendors, T-shirt hawkers and makeshift barbecue stands set up to greet visitors who wouldn't dare set foot in the slum any other time of year.
They come to watch rehearsals by Mangueira, one of Rio de Janeiro's most traditional samba groups, known as schools. Each year, the group spends more than $1 million to mount a single 80-minute-long carnival parade featuring 4,500 drummers and dancers in the Sambadrome stadium. And as the parade date approaches, the group's colors of pink and green cover the shantytown's narrow alleys and brick dwellings. Elaborate glitter-encrusted costumes hang in the windows, and glitter-covered children run around banging on tambourines.
"It's one big factory," said Max Lopes, Mangueira's carnival designer. "The community plays a big part because of all their love for the school. Everyone's part of the team."
Carnival is a big business in Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns, home to the city's 12 top-tier schools and dozens of others that parade in samba's second and third divisions. Each year, the schools employ thousands of seamstresses, painters, designers and musicians plus small armies of muscle-bound men to push around the floats.
"It totally transforms the community; everybody is working, rehearsing until carnival time. It gives work to unemployed people like me," said Luiz Henrique Barbosa, who spends 10 hours a day six days a week making pompoms for the costumes. "After carnival, everything is just dead for six months."
More-skilled artisans actually find work after carnival building sets and doing costumes for Brazil's popular telenovelas. Less-skilled workers have to fend for themselves.
"For me, it's total 18- to 20-hour days. It's so intense, I need to take the rest of the year off," said Aurea Carvalho, 33, who has worked constructing carnival costumes known as "fantasias" for 12 years.
Carvalho employs 11 seamstresses, and a night shift was being added to have 100 costumes ready in time for the parade.
Carvalho's costumes will sell for $400 each and provide the buyer with the right to dance in the samba parade, which is a hard-fought competition. A single costume flaw can doom a school's chances of victory as each group tries to wow judges and become carnival champion.
Winning brings little more than bragging rights, and yet in the poor communities, residents throw themselves into carnival preparations as if nothing else matters.
The carnival industry is becoming more professional every year. More complicated tasks such as lighting and special effects are farmed out to private companies.
And while many samba schools have been funded by criminals who run Rio's popular illegal numbers games, Brazilian corporations increasingly bankroll the schools. Costumes and rehearsal tickets pay the rest.
Tourists can see floats being built at the City of Samba, a $50 million center opened in 2006, with workshops for all the top-tier schools.
But most of the costumes are still produced in shantytown communities, where the "wing presidents" are responsible for their construction and sales.
"We do it out of love. But you need more than just love, because we can't risk looking amateur," said wing president Amarildo Wanzerler. "The carnival designer launches the idea, and we have to run after it."
This year's design required Wanzerler to come up with 4,500 pompoms, 3,000 plastic jewels, 3,000 feet of plastic gold chain, 2,000 feet each of green and white cloth, 1,000 feet of gold lame, 30 half-gallon cans of shoemaker's glue and 220 pounds of glue sticks.
And topping his shopping list was 55 pounds of feathers.
"It keeps getting more expensive because it's all done by hand; you can't knock off costumes like these with a machine," he said.
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/jan/27/carnival-industry-transforms-brazil/
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