Brazil is rubbing its eyes and opening the curtains after the biggest party on earth. For the last five days, millions of locals and foreigners have taken part in the country’s Carnival celebrations, which fall every year before Lent. Typically a Catholic festival, Carnival is traditionally intended as a Shrovetide period of indulgence, before the dreaded 40-days of pre-Easter fasting.
Carnival is such a focal point of the Brazilian calendar that often locals say nothing gets done in the New Year until the party is over. But, in actual fact, a huge amount of work goes into producing Carnival, and that’s what we are going to take a look at.
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Euan Marshall is a journalist and translator who has lived in São Paulo, Brazil since 2011. Specializing in Brazilian soccer, politics and the connection between the two, his work has been published in The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Independent and Jacobin Magazine, among others. In 2014, he authored a comprehensive history of Brazilian soccer entitled “A to Zico: An Alphabet of Brazilian Football.”
Patricia Masche is the MICE (Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibition) Executive at the Rio de Janeiro Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Rio Convention & Visitors Bureau- Rio CVB – is a private non-profit foundation organized to promote tourism in general and also congresses and events to the City of Rio de Janeiro.
Maria Martha Bruno edited this podcast. She is a journalist with 14 years of experience in politics, arts, and breaking news. She has collaborated with Al Jazeera and CNN, among others, worked as a producer in Rio de Janeiro for NBC, and as an international correspondent in Buenos Aires.
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