Why does it feel so difficult? That’s what I ask myself as sweat runs down my forehead. My T-shirt is stuck to my body, I am gasping for air. I tell myself these hardships won’t stop me. I am on a mission: to learn how to dance the
Samba…
It’s February 2019, and I had arrived in Brazil a few days prior, having picked the Carnival season for my vacation. I’m from Rhineland in Germany, and I love Carnival. Countless times during the celebrations in Cologne, I’ve partied in pubs dressed as a bear, a banana, or a cow. I have boozed, kissed, and danced my way down Zülpicher Strasse with people from France, Spain, and Colombia.
So I thought it would be great to experience Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Carnival. In Brazil the celebration has Catholic roots as an annual feast before the 40-day fasting period of Lent. It has since transformed into one of the world’s biggest festivals, with costumed dancing groups called blocos parading on the streets.
I especially wanted to join the grand finale parade at the Sambódromo stadium and do the samba with thousands of dancers, cheered on by tens of thousands of spectators. For me, that would be the crowning glory. And making that happen sounded very simple: register with one of the samba schools that is allowed into the Sambódromo, buy the proper outfit, and rehearse.
There was just one problem.
The only dance lessons I’d ever taken dated back to a crash course before a school dance ten years ago. I was not a natural talent. And samba— involving quick, lively moves accompanied by music of the same name—is highly complex. It was brought to Brazil long ago by African slaves; in Angola, the word semba meant the implied touching of the bellybuttons of two dancers, which was an invitation to dance.
Rio has more than 100 samba schools, but the nationally televised parade includes just 13. I wanted to be with one of them. So when I arrive five days before Carnival, I call one of the most renowned, Unidos da Tijuca.
“My name is Sebastian,” I say.
“I’m from Germany and I’d like to learn samba so I can be in the Sambódromo parade.”
Silence. Is the man on the other end of the line too polite to laugh? Too shocked to shout?
“Let’s see what we can do,” he growls. “It depends on your skills.”
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From Ipanema in the south of the city, the taxi heads along Copacabana toward Rio’s centre. To my right, the sea is turquoise; bare-chested guys on the beach keep a football in the air seemingly without effort. To my left we pass the glass facades of fancy hotels, and then the favelas, or slums, rickety wooden structures that blend into the hills like colourful mosaics.
Soon the taxi driver points to a lonely looking concrete monstrosity with two grandstands facing each other like an unfinished stadium: the Sambódromo. It’s hard to imagine that the year’s biggest party will take place there in a few days.
We stop in an industrial area not
90 far from the city centre. On a wall is a sign: “Cidade do Samba”—city of Samba. I walk onto a huge square bordered by tall warehouses, which are the headquarters of the major samba schools. In front of Unidos da Tijuca, where I’ll take lessons for 60 euros an hour, is a man in a yellow muscle shirt and flip-flops, leaning against the wall and holding a protein shake: Fabio, my dance master. As he leads me inside, Fabio, who is responsible for 750 of the 3,500 Tijuca dancers, tells me in a whisper that this is a kind of holy place, “like a church.”
This is where the floats are built. I see a tree-sized figure of Jesus enthroned on a carriage, surrounded by his disciples. Next to it is the
replica of a slave boat as big as a school bus. Plastic figures of women and men look down from the railings, their hands in chains, their faces contorted in pain.
“No photos,” says Fabio. Competing schools a few dance halls away must not find out what Tijuca has planned.
In his office on the third floor, Fabio explains that celebrating Carnival is about more than fun. There is a start line and a finish line for the parade in the Sambódromo. Each school has 85 minutes to complete the distance between the lines. Any faster or slower means you lose points. Judges give scores for the drummers, costumes, floats, and dance steps.
I see trophies in the offices here, but Tijuca hasn’t won in a long time. “The pressure is on,” says Fabio, sounding like a football coach. “We have to deliver!” Am I his trump card? Hardly.
Fabio has spent the past few months in countless auditions picking his stars, the men and women who will dance in the limelight. He has been training with them several times a week. Most dancers, however, perform a simple choreography.
A few steps, repeated over and over. If all goes well, I will be part of this rank and file.
We move to a makeshift dance studio where I am to learn the basics. Fabio demonstrates: a step onto the right heel, then onto the left, the right, the left. The seemingly endless repetition is an introductory lesson and warm-up. “One, two, one, two,” Fabio calls, then adds a little jump, arms swinging. Not a lot of moves, yet every part of the body is in motion.
When we’re through, Fabio highfives me, “You’re athletic, that’s good.” It’s only later, when I am in the taxi, euphoric and soaked with sweat, that I wonder about his praise. Athletic? Me?
That evening I go to Rio’s Botafogo, a neighbourhood of galleries and nightclubs. I sit in a wicker chair on the sidewalk and people-watch while sipping on a caipirinha (a local cocktail made with lime juice and cachaça, a cane-sugar-based spirit). The passing crowd looks ready for Carnival: there’s a man wearing a raffia skirt and fishnet shirt, smiling blissfully; a group of women, their nipples covered with black tape; an elderly man sporting a giant afro wig.
The next day Fabio and I dance laterally, diagonally, back and forth. For the first time, we do step sequences. I swing my right foot behind my left, tap my heels, scuttle in the opposite direction, just as Fabio demonstrates. I feel weightless, in the midst of a transformation, playfully shaking off my dark
German soul.
Then we step in front of the mirror to dance, and I think: Oh, Fabio, I’m sorry! Because what I see doesn’t reflect the light-footed Neymar I had
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imagined myself to be only moments ago. Instead, I look like I’m relearning how to walk. Angular, clumsy movements. Every step an effort, a declaration of war on the samba. I’m like a geriatric Bavarian folk dancer gone astray.
But Fabio laughs, claps, and cheers me on. I deeply admire his ability to not only bear with me but apparently have fun doing it. Or am I not as bad as I think? Is there still hope?
The next day is the final training session, the moment of truth. Fabio starts the choreography that he wants me do in the parade. He snaps his fingers, swings his arms, shoots across the room with steps so fast he doesn’t seem to touch the floor. I try to follow suit, running and jumping, snapping and clapping, giving it my all, and I realise: I can’t do it.
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Fabio takes my hand to guide me, but I stand there like a stubborn donkey refusing to budge. I suffer cramps in my calves, my body is done, and I feel helpless. And there is Fabio next to me: graceful, poised, smiling. I don’t think he’s even sweating. So I keep going.
Afterwards, we sit on the sofa. I know the moment is here—the moment when, like a medical diagnosis, I’ll find out that despite heroic efforts, my condition is incurable.
Fabio begins. “Maybe I should have told you this already,” he says, but at Carnival a few years ago, Tijuca’s theme was Germany. There were giant foam beer mugs on the floats, and men in lederhosen and Goethe costumes pranced through the Sambódromo. Fabio had allowed
a number of German tourists to participate. It was a decision he came to regret bitterly: half of them showed up drunk the day of the parade, and the other half had forgotten their dance steps. The result? Tijuca tumbled in the judges’ rankings. Ever since then, he’s been very sceptical of Germans.
I sink into the sofa. How embarrassing! Here I am, some kind of clueless megalomaniac reporter who thought he could just dance his way onto the team. I am about to start apologising when Fabio puts his hand on my shoulder like a second-hand car dealer about to make a proposition too good to turn down. He has an excellent bloco to suggest for me, he says. That’s where I should go and perform everything he has taught me.
And, of course, he says, I should come to the Sambódromo anyway, “as a spectator.” Fabio has dropped me as a dancer in the big parade, but manages to make the alternatives seem just as good. The man is a hero.
The meeting point for my bloco is a kiosk in the city centre, just behind the gilded facade and turquoise domes of Rio’s opera house. I stroll through a deserted downtown, past office buildings and shuttered stores. No one is working. Every few metres, music blares from a dark alley, and there is a beer booth with a few revellers.
At the meeting point, I soon feel like part of a conspiratorial community: there are people with glitter on bare skin, people wearing neon colours and feathers. Women are in swimsuits and fishnet tights, and men wear skimpy shorts and nothing else. I put on a pair of golden swimming trunks and slip on a Hawaiian shirt. Pop music blares from the kiosk’s speakers. We toast each other and Carnival.
Then, trumpets sound. The crowd starts to move. A band is waiting for us on the street, more trumpets, trombones, drums, and rattles. We run and dance behind the musicians, and the farther we parade, the wilder it gets. It’s like a partying dance caravan in the middle of the city.
We block main streets, run past squat colonial buildings and glass office buildings, and even head right through a small shopping mall. It’s pure anarchy. I’ve lost track of where I am—and of my Hawaiian shirt— but that doesn’t matter; I’m only following the drumbeats.
Then it starts pouring, and we hop arm-in-arm through the puddles, cheering towards the sky and thanking the rain god. The band plays ABBA and the Beatles, and I dance samba the way Fabio taught me.
At some point, a woman pulls me into the middle of the band. Perhaps she has seen my stumbling efforts, perhaps she has sensed the
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sweat I have sacrificed over the past few days. We dance together, her feet flying, her hips swaying, me improvising—and eventually our bellybuttons kiss.
The next evening, I’m sitting in the Sambódromo waiting for Fabio’s team. I have never seen a party like this. Old and young squeeze into the stands, cheering each float. The rich are crowded into boxes lined with artificial turf, the poor are squatting up high on the concrete benches swilling canned beer. Everyone is screaming and clapping nonstop.
The performances look like a psychedelic dream filled with princesses and warriors, glitter and pomp. Men in scuba-diving gear dangle from a float, arms moving as if they are swimming. Women in gorgeous gilded costumes pass,
94 waving flags to the rhythm of the music. A turtle with a fluorescent shell pushes past, as big as a cruise ship.
Tijuca is the last school to dance; it’s almost four o’clock the next morning. At this point I am quite drunk. Red flares give the start signal. I watch Fabio as he runs along the floats, shouts instructions, cheers, corrects. In the end, Tijuca makes seventh place. Once again there’s no trophy for them, but at least they are not relegated.
On my flight home, it occurs to me that maybe it’s a good thing I was just an observer of the Sambódromo grand finale. Maybe samba and Carnival are about dancing until you can’t anymore. And that if you can’t dance…don’t.
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