Feathers in the wind: San Francisco's Carnaval - annual Memorial Day celebration; includes visitor information for May 30, 1993 event

American Visions, April-May, 1993 by Shimon-Craig Van Collie

The theme song of the dance my wife and I performed in 1991 at our first Carnaval in San Francisco describes the narrator's dream of a bohemia where "poets talk about suffering; ladies live off emotion; ladies of the night, off passion." We sang these words as members of Fogo na Roupa, one of more than 50 groups that make up the annual Memorial Day parade in the city's Mission district. Carnaval draws half a million people to celebrate their personal bohemias, where passion and emotion reign, and only the soles suffer.

Like the San Francisco Bay area, with its mix of Anglo-American, African-American, Latino and Asian populations, Carnaval reflects the multicultural spectrum of carnivals around the world, especially those in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Fogo na Roupa ("Clothes on Fire" in Portuguese) patterns itself after Brazilian street troupes, and our members' ethnicities cover the globe, representing every continent but Australia and Antarctica.

My wife, Katrina, was chosen as one of the cabrocbas, female samba dancers whose fio dental, or dental floss, costumes and sinuous movements are so often associated with Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval. I found a place in the bateria, the percussion band that provides the driving samba beat and syncopated rhythms. As a ganza player, I pounded out the rhythms of the dancers' feet on hollow metal tubes filled with metal pellets. In addition to learning choreography and arrangements, our group of 60 dancers and 30 musicians struggled to learn the theme song of the dance, which we sang in Portuguese. Traditionally, the theme song describes the group's leitmotif and often draws from broad social and cultural perspectives.

On the morning of the parade, our group gathered in the Mission district, several blocks from the parade route. Like a military staging operation, we and other parade participants spread throughout the neighborhood. Block after block was filled with dancers, marchers, musicians, photographers and curious onlookers. Baterias tuned up. Soca music blasted from flatbed trailers piled high with amplifiers. Costumes ranged from giant, winged fire cane gods to bikini-clad dancers topped with headdresses sprouting a fountain of brightly colored feathers. There was glitter and gloss, sequins and silk, capes and capoeiristas - dancers who perform the Brazilian martial art form capoeira. The mood was one of anticipation. The months of getting ready were over. Now it was time to par-ty!

Like our group, other samba schools had practiced their routines, hoping to raise their proficiency to the prizewinning level. Every year, a panel of judges chooses the best groups in the parade, basing its decision on such criteria as spirit, execution, timing and authenticity to the culture represented. Prize categories have expanded from one overall winner to several different categories, the most prestigious of which are the Best Brazilian and the Best Caribbean groups.

Rio's Carnaval rivals its Caribbean counterpart in grandeur and exuberance, but in the Caribbean more emphasis is placed on costumery than choreography. "We don't learn dance routines," says Jackie Artman, a native Trinidadian and the artistic director of All Ah We, one of San Francisco's largest Caribbean contingents. "We just dance how we feel. it's more spontaneous than the Brazilian Carnaval."

In the Caribbean, what began as European festivals were infused with the African influence to produce the apex of the islands' social and artistic calendar. Similarly, Brazilian Carnaval consumes Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the country for the four days preceding Ash Wednesday. In the United States, the most well-known versions of Carnival are New Orleans' midwinter Mardi Gras and Brooklyn, New York's Caribbean Carnival, held on Labor Day.

According to Adele Chu, the woman who organized San Francisco's first Carnaval in February 1979, the bacchanal predates Christianity. "The Greeks and Latins had giant festivals dedicated to Dionysus," she says. "The Christian church was unable to squelch the tradition, so they appended it to the calendar to precede the period of penance leading up to Easter."

Chu, who was born in Panama, vividly remembers her childhood carnivals in Central America. "They were always a giant party," she recalls. A dancer by profession, Chu didn't see her first Brazilian Carnaval until 1976, when she attended both the Rio and the Bahia versions. Upon her return to San Francisco the following year, she began teaching samba dancing. It wasn't long before her classes were filled with up to 100 dancers. in September 1978, Chu and her students mapped out their own version of Carnaval.

Five months later, 300 performers dressed up as top-hatted dandies, Amazonian Indians and the colors of the rainbow converged on Precita Park in the Mission district. A thousand spectators watched, but the exuberance of the paraders soon had everyone involved. "It was a magical experience," says Chu. "By the end, we could all have levitated, we were so high." That first Carnaval followed the traditional pre-Lenten schedule, but the event's organizers soon realized the impracticality of sponsoring an outdoor parade during the Bay area's rainy season. The date was shifted to Memorial Day weekend, a time that brings some of Northern California's balmiest weather. This move, plus the event's universal appeal as a celebration of life, has resulted in increasingly larger parades over the past 13 years. "Carnaval is the one event that pulls diverse peoples and cultures together," says San Francisco opera singer Ron Galegos, a longtime supporter and now "Emperor for Life" of Carnaval. "The world needs events like this."