Learning to dance at forty
Camila talks to three adult beginners from her Rio studio, a lawyer, a bus mechanic and a grandmother, about fear, mirrors, and the week it finally clicked.
Inside a carnival rehearsal, four months out
0:00 / 0:49
Sample the first 60 seconds free. Sign up free or log in to hear the whole episode.
Show notes
Inside a carnival rehearsal, four months out
Four months before carnival, Camila spends a Sunday night at the rehearsal of a Rio samba school and talks to the choreographer responsible for keeping 3,000 people, most of them not dancers, moving together down the avenue.
- The wing system: breaking 3,000 people into groups of 80
- Teaching a step to a neighbourhood, not a company
- Counting against a drum section you cannot always hear
- The 82 minute rule and what happens to a school that runs over
- Why the hardest wing is the one with the oldest members
Recorded on location with the drums in the background. Headphones recommended.
Transcript
Welcome back to Five, Six, Seven, Eight, I am Camila Nogueira, and if you can hear drums behind me it is because I am standing in the rehearsal hall of a samba school in Rio, four months before carnival. Around me are maybe eight hundred people tonight, and by February there will be three thousand of them moving together down the avenue in exactly eighty two minutes, or the school loses points. The woman responsible for that is the choreographer, and she has agreed to talk to me between drills. We talk about splitting three thousand people into wings of eighty, teaching a step to a whole neighbourhood rather than a trained company, counting against a drum section you cannot always hear, and why the wing with the oldest members is the hardest and the best. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
Open as text