Rio's Carnival kicks into gear at Sambadrome

Rio De Janeiro, Feb 19: Thousands of Brazilian dancers, singers and musicians kicked the annual Carnival bash into high gear with a spectacle of floats, costumes and Latin beats at Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome.

The revelry began early for many neighborhoods on Friday when Carnival's samba-dancing King Momo -- the Lord of Misrule -- and his shimmying Queen and Princess were handed a giant key to the city in a sun-lit park.

At the Sambadrome, the 13 top samba schools were grabbing the spotlight for about an hour each over two nights, featuring about 5,000 performers each. The last school in the parade usually comes out just at sunrise.

''This is a huge thrill for me,'' said Manoelli Marques yesterday, a 17-year-old student who had not slept for three days before her debut in the parade. ''Last year, my grandfather passed away so I wanted to honor him.'' The first school to take center stage, Estacio de Sa, reprised a song it used 20 years ago that tells of the zapotle fruit used to make chewing gum. One float carried the Statue of Liberty made of nearly 800,000 pieces of candy-coated gum.

Another had a group of women wearing collars of golden feathers that concealed hardly anything.

The Sambadrome, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and built in 1984, was crowded and steamy. Some of the revelers dancing and playing drums had to be hospitalized with heat exhaustion.

For those on parade, Carnival is a way to show pride in their community and culture to the rest of the world. Some foreigners also get in on the act.

''It's very hard to describe the feeling just before going on the parade,'' said Fabio Bianchi, a 32-year-old Italian who moved to Brazil three years ago to pursue his love of samba.

Rio samba schools spent a record 58.5 million reais (28 million dollars) to design and build floats and costumes for this year's event, according to estimates in O Globo newspaper.

The ''recreative gatherings,'' as they are formally called, get some 2.6 million reais from ticket sales and television broadcasting rights, with the rest coming in sponsorships from beer companies, hotel chains and airlines.

Reuters