After three quick weeks of rehearsal, carnaval finally arrived in all its Bacchanalian glory! Although I’ve attended carnaval three previous years in a row as “security” with my capoeira group to protect the samba dancers and musicians from the crowd, this was the first time that I’ve been an integral part of the show. Seven of us female capoeiristas practiced the maculele choreography along with our samba school counterparts.
This year’s theme was Peter Pan; so our characters were Tiger Lily’s tribe of Indians or as I like to think of it, warrior women. My capoeira group normally dances maculele with wooden sticks and grass skirts. All we really had to do was enhance the bling factor, learn the new choreography and be flexible with such a large-scale production.
Several of my fellow capoeiristas got together twice to work on their costumes. My too-busy schedule did not permit me to participate in either occasion, but I was so fortunate to get a lot of help via donated costume parts and ended up with an attractive Indian outfit. Most of us met up at a capoeirista’s apartment that’s in walking distance of the venue. I had help braiding my dreadlocks and putting feathers in the braids. We got partially dressed, walked over and spent the rest of the time getting ready. The longer we waited, the more makeup and bling we ended up adding to our look. In the end, one capoeirista did my eye makeup simply because we had time to do it.
I loved watching the samba women transform into pirates, mermaids and Rio-style samba dancers. We all went to the colorful lights outside of the venue and took pictures. Instead of doing one big group picture, they assembled us in different mini groups. Afterwards, we gathered along the service ramp, which I thought was a curious backdrop to take a group picture, but turned out that we were to “inconspicuously” enter, mix ourselves into the crowd and once we heard the band start playing toward the entrance, we were to start dancing flash mob style and gather in parade formation at our correct places. Only thing, we capoeristas weren’t exactly sure where our correct place was! We discovered on the fly that we were behind the other dancers, but in front of the drummers.
As usual, our part didn’t go as planned. We were supposed to follow a group of male capoeiristas who were doing acrobatics to entertain the crowd, but both times, they went on when the music had cued us to go on. We politely allowed them to do their thing, but then had to guess when to start our choreography. The first time around, I felt bad about what had happened, but apparently we looked good.
We returned to our second floor dressing room and partook in a samba school tradition of a celebratory drink right after our first performance. We snacked a little and I gave one capoeirista the leftover cornbread that I’d baked earlier that day. Then we returned downstairs with the intention of forging for more food. Instead, we joined the roda. I recorded some wonderful digital of our capoeiristas playing, but I must admit, my favorite was when several higher cordas ambushed a lower corda. It was all in good fun of course!
During the second performance, all the preshow gitters were gone and I danced full of energy on the sidelines. That time around, we maculele capoeiristas went out for a cameo run to support our leader, Tiger Lily. Again, that wasn’t something that we’d rehearsed before, but it went over rather well, considering I briefly ran amok.
After the second show came to a close, all capoeiristas, including those in the samba show, took a group picture and then I took off. I’d done what I’d come to do and felt absolutely fine about leaving “early” around one in the morning. It’s a good thing that I’d left at that time since I spent about 30 minutes getting all those feathers and elastic bands out of my dreads. Then I took another 30 minutes or so to scrub off all that sprayed on glitter. I know an hour to clean up is a much smaller amount of time than it took me to get all dressed up, but it’s seemed like forever when all I really wanted to do was shower, eat and fall into a blissful sleep…which I did eventually and still made it to my 10 o’clock yoga class.
Life is fabulous.
