Parade of the samba school, Império Serrano, at the sambadrome, for the 2007 carnival, Rio de Janeiro.
The beautiful performance of the “ala das baianas”.
Rio de Janeiro has always been an invitation to fascination. This mixture of exuberant natural
beauty, with its beaches and mountains, with its immersive and sensual music has become a
trademark.
Rio society is a socially deeply divided society. This is due to its violent colonial past and that
even with the Abolition of Slavery in 1888, there was no attempt to integrate the African
populations that settled in the port area of RJ.
Carnival is the moment in which Rio society meets through samba school parades. Saamba
schools play an important role in Rio’s popular neighborhoods as a meeting center and
disseminator of Samba.
Until the sixties, samba schools had their own artisanal manufacturing process, with the entire
production of the parade, including choosing the samba plot, creating floats and costumes.
From the seventies onwards, samba school parades began to become a brand for the city of
Rio de Janeiro, as well as for Brazil. The turning point towards this commercialization was
with the opening of the Sambódromo, in 1984.
Funk Carioca continues to be a performance element for Cariocas
With samba schools, especially the richer ones, focused on television parades, suburban
populations began to appreciate Funk, a style of music coming from the United States in the
seventies with Brazilian artists who lived there. Carioca funk was developed, with lyrics in
Portuguese portraying the reality of the favelas.
With the funk dances, the young suburban population once again had their entertainment.
These dances are held in a much simpler way, compared to the samba school parades, which
require a series of steps for the parade, especially to the rich samba schools that parade at the
Sambadrome.
These are the starting points of “Performance and Identity, from Samba to Funk Carioca”. I
analyze how the Performances “Desfiles das Escolas de Samba” and “Baile Funk” are
formative in a socially and racially divided society.
The original text was written between 2008 and 2009. It was my dissertation thesis defended
at the University of Vienna, in the Department of Media Sciences.
The main theme remains, as the reality has not changed. However, I wrote two extra chapters
contextualized for the year 2023. Especially within the context of the digitalization process,
intensified with the Covid19 Pandemic and woke agendas.
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Adriana Ribeiro-Mayer 