Through the Looking Glass: A carnival full of carnage and hate?
This year’s celebration tests the limits on what defines ‘distasteful’
Dancers, painted bodies and naked women are just a few of the spectacles one is guaranteed to experience when attending Rio De Janeiro’s annual Carnival. Similar to Louisiana’s Mardi Gras, the idea behind the street gathering is to create the biggest party possible for all to participate in.
Although Carnival now includes a parade of labor-intensive floats and sequined dancers, the essence of the original festivities, which dates back to 1723, remains the same: the more nudity and provocative dancing, the better.
One of the signature characteristics to come out of Carnival is the shock and awe factor the parade tries to uphold each year. The annual street party is considered risqué, not only because of the sexual dancing and little or no clothing worn by both females and males, but because of the controversial themes and content of the floats.
Yesterday’s festivities have had an immense amount of debate surrounded by one float in particular, which featured the theme of the Holocaust. The event is supposed to be cheery and joyful—not exploit tragic parts of the world’s history.
Originally, the float created by the Viradouro samba organization consisted of realistic-looking “dead” bodies modeled after victims of World War II’s concentration camps. Paulo Barros, the artistic director of Carnival described the float as “extremely respectful” and as a “warning” so that history may not repeat itself.
However, the dancers who were scheduled to prance around another nearby float while wearing uniforms with swastikas on them pushed the envelope even further. One part of the parade was even named after Hitler. If that wasn’t enough, the group hired an actor to dress and act like Hitler for the day while standing on top of the float which had the deadbody models piled high. Barros insisted that the only way this could be offensive was if the float had “people dancing on top of dead bodies.” Apparently, Barros thought he found a loophole by calling the work one of expression instead of what it truly was: undeniable insensitivity.
Fortunately, on Jan. 31, state judge Juliana Kalichszteim ruled that the Viradouro samba group either pay a $110,000 fine for the float and an additional $28,000 for the Hitler impersonator or cancel the float altogether. The judge stated, “Carnival should not be used as an instrument of hatred, any kind of racism, and clear trivialization or barbaric and unjustified acts against minorities,” especially when the parade is televised globally—and by naked dancers at that.
The protesting efforts of the Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (an international Jewish human rights group) have hopefully put a stop to the tactless intentions of the parade for good.
This isn’t the first time that Carnival, a Catholic celebration, has been questioned in its opinion of taste. Members of the Roman Catholic Church had banned certain floats which portrayed Jesus and the Virgin Mary in provocative ways. The samba schools were faced with a similar situation: either clothe the holy figures or take the floats down altogether.
Hiding behind artistic expression and cultural relativism, members of the samba group felt that outsiders to Carnival tradition were too quick to judge their intentions. But when there is a man hired to re-enact a ruthless dictator who killed millions of people on a day that is meant to be a celebration—I wonder how one cannot judge a culture that is re-opening old wounds for another.
Sarah Delia is a junior English and art history major.
