It’s two A.M. in Rio de Janeiro on Friday, February 28, the night before Carnival begins. At dawn, the streets will flood with bodies in fishnet tights and tiny bikinis, drinking Guaraná, Brazil’s answer to Coca-Cola, and cachaça, the sugarcane liquor in caipirinhas. But for now, the city sleeps.
Most of the city, that is. In a mansion perched high in the lush hills of Santa Teresa, overlooking the Atlantic, a party rages on.
Entrepreneurs Pedro Igor Alcantara and Malu Barreto, wife of the artist Vik Muniz, started Baile da Arara 12 years ago. It has since become the Carnival party, where people come to see and be seen. Last year, the French actor Vincent Cassel and his girlfriend showed up in matching sequined bikinis. This year, black cars sidled up to the door as socialites including Carlos Souza and Brazilian actors Camila Pitanga, Agatha Moreira, Rodrigo Simas, Rômulo Arantes, and Isadora Cruz slipped inside.
The theme was “Surreal by Nature Itself,” an homage to the flamboyant Brazilian comedian Chacrinha and the queer icon Elke Maravilha. A giant illustration of Chacrinha’s mouth opened onto a neon-lit hallway with a silver-glittered moon shimmering at the end of it. Downstairs, a thousand or so people danced beneath a canopy of trees. Women in matching fruit costumes—designed by Alexia Hentsch, who worked on the Rio Olympic Games’ opening ceremony—sipped Tanqueray cocktails. As always at Carnival, costumes left little to the imagination.
Feathered headdresses and sequins filled the dance floor. The singer Thalma de Freitas shimmered in blue tape and matching nipple covers. Felipe Veloso, best known for styling Gisele Bündchen and Kate Moss, wore a gold-fringed, rhinestone-covered dress. The photographer and descendant of Brazil’s imperial family João Orleans e Bragança arrived in a black mask. The Brazilian crime novelist Raphael Montes and the artist Raoul Moreau were also there.
Over the years, Barreto and Alcantara, the hosts, have cultivated an eclectic circle of musicians to play at the party. Last year, Brazilian titan Seu Jorge gave an impromptu performance. This year, the percussionist Pretinho da Serrinha took the stage alongside musicians Ju dos Santos, Assucena, A Cattoo, and Rachel Luz. Muniz’s son Gaspard was on the decks by three A.M.—a time that would be considered late anywhere else in the world, but not here.
Two hours later, the mansion’s gates would swing open, and, in proper Carnival form, the party would spill onto the street, merging with the neighborhood. A group of shirtless musicians in dreadlocks and sunglasses, carrying trumpets, trombones, and drums, led the way, blaring the Carnival anthem, “Cidade Maravilhosa.” The horns were the distress flare—the Baile da Arara was over.
Each year, Barreto and Alcantara open their party to the city. By sunrise, the musicians had hoisted a colorful flag onto a totem pole and started to march on the cobblestoned streets, glowing orange in the early light as toucans circled overhead and the party’s guests followed. They played samba music, the heartbeat of Rio, tracing back to Afro-Brazilian traditions that emerged from enslaved communities. This newly formed bloco, as Brazilians call their itinerant street parties, would soon join another, Ceu na Terra.
On any given day during Carnival, as many as 400 blocos snake through the city. A flag will appear on a street corner, and within minutes, a crowd will gather, made up not just of hardcore party-goers but of children, old ladies, and bored shopkeepers. Street vendors materialize with ice carts filled with beer and caipirinhas, evoking the heat-drenched chaos of Black Orpheus, the 1959 film on Rio by French director Marcel Camus.
Some blocos, such as Céu na Terra, become known across the country. Founded in 2001 by the Núcleo de Cultura Popular Céu na Terra, a collective dedicated to Brazil’s folk traditions, it features dancers in swirling skirts, brass bands playing frevo and maracatu, and towering puppets. (The Brazilian newspaper O Globo named it the “Most Colorful Block of Rio Carnival.”) This week, musicians in another bloco dressed up like Oscar statuettes and sang as crowds waved golden miniatures, in celebration of the Brazilian film I’m Still Here winning the Oscar for Best International Feature.
As Brazil’s infamous wealth disparity has deepened even further over the last decade, blocos have surged in popularity. Attending the Sambódromo Marquês de Sapucaí—the Oscar Niemeyer–designed stadium where samba schools compete with towering floats, a historic Rio Carnival custom—has become prohibitively expensive, pushing much of the community into the streets.
Some wealthy party-goers avoid the blocos, opting instead for branded events like the Ray Ban cocktails at Hotel Fasano. “We aren’t going to the street party,” one influencer said in an Instagram story, filming a bloco as she drove past. But Barreto and Alcantara understand that avoiding the streets misses the entire point of Carnival in Rio.
By eight A.M., the Arara crowd had melted into a sea of thousands. Stiltwalkers loomed over the procession, followed by colorful mascots. Pickpockets moved in the crowd like ghosts.
I knew it was time to leave when a group of teenage boys began circling us and a blockade of cars formed just ahead. A stranger watching nearby gestured toward a taxi with its green light on. “Get in,” he said solemnly.
But around us, the music reigned.
Music is the great equalizer in a city where beachfront apartments in Ipanema overlook the sprawling favela of Rocinha. It’s a collective reckoning, a way of reclaiming the streets.
Out of the taxi window, I saw an older woman stepping onto her balcony, coffee in hand. She put on her sunglasses and pumped a fist into the air.
“Viva o carnaval!” she said.
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
