The Wall Street Journal-20080202-Carnaval Arrives Early This Year- Too Soon for Brazil- A Move Is Afoot to Delink It From the Lunar Calendar And Fix a Date in March
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RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil's annual Carnaval celebration starts today, turning the decaying center of this former capital city into a cacophony of drums and samba. It's a time when ordinary rules don't apply. Poor and rich dance together. Even marriage vows are said to be widely suspended.
None of that bothers Hiram Araujo, a 78-year-old gynecological surgeon who is the closest thing Rio has to an official historian of its big party. But there's one thing about Carnaval he doesn't like: the scheduling of the holiday.
The festival here gets under way 50 days before Easter Sunday, a movable date based on the lunar calendar, this year March 23. That's the earliest Easter has been since 1913. For Mr. Araujo, who is cultural director for Rio's powerful Independent League of Samba Schools, that means a premature end to the summer tourist season and an "economic disaster" for the city.
"You'll see," he says, "After this, everyone will be gone."
Mr. Araujo is leading a radical campaign to have Carnaval begin on the first Sunday in March every year. The idea has the backing of Brazil's hotel association, and most travel agencies here seem to like it, too. The thinking is that an early Carnaval means vacationers will not have had enough time to regain their financial footing after Christmas and New Year's.
Mr. Araujo wants a national "Brazilian Carnaval" law. Under its provisions, cities could start their festivities according to "tourist, economic or climate-related considerations."
The two-year-old fixed-date movement is up against more than 1,000 years of tradition. In Europe sometime during the Dark Ages, the feast day became linked to the Catholic calendar. In places that maintain the Catholic traditions, including New Orleans where Carnaval is known as Mardi Gras, the celebration immediately precedes Ash Wednesday.
The moving date causes confusion in the U.S., too. "Most of my emails are all about when is Mardi Gras and why is it on that date," says Bobbi Mannino, who works at Compucast Interactive, a New Orleans company that operates a Web site for Mardi Gras tourists. But she says she never heard anyone in the Big Easy talk about doing it differently.
The Catholic Church has doubts about any changes. Fixing Carnaval's date in March would mean that, in many years, the festival's drag queens and tipsy revelers could hit Rio's streets in the middle of Lent, the period of fasting and prayer leading up to Easter Sunday. Canon Aroldo da Silva Ribeiro, the head priest at Rio's modernist Cathedral, predicts removing the festival from the ecclesiastical cycle of holy and profane would make it just another party.
"It wouldn't be Carnaval anymore," he says. "It wouldn't have the same glamour."
In some other countries, the date of the festival known as Carnival (with an i) in English isn't so controversial. In Japan, crowds of around 400,000 turn out in August to watch 11 major samba schools parade, a tradition imported from Brazil in 1981. Finland's carnival takes place in June. "Otherwise, it would be Carnival for Eskimos," says Harri Engstrand, head of international affairs for Finland's samba school association.
The drive in Brazil for a fixed date is the result of Carnaval's transformation in recent decades from an unruly street party into a big-time commercial spectacle. The proceedings were first televised in a small way in 1960. Later, work was completed on the 70,000-seat Sambadrome, spurring a drive for ever larger and more elaborate floats to wow viewers.
The rising costs of putting on the show invited still more commercialism. Nowadays, universities here even offer degrees in Carnaval management. In 2005, Rio unveiled the $50 million Samba City, a new home for the top 12 samba schools -- social organizations that build the floats and then parade with as many as 6,000 dancers and drummers in a competition to be chosen champion.
The estimated 700,000 visitors expected this year will spend $510 million in the city, according to Rio's tourism office. And government economists are looking for other ways to boost its profitability.
Mr. Araujo began studying Carnaval's history during Brazil's dictatorship, in 1964. He says that after writing an article praising Fidel Castro, he was threatened with imprisonment and forced to "find a new hobby" outside politics. Now his mastery of Carnaval's history is helping him to make the case for a fixed date. Rattling off how musical styles, rules and practices have changed since 1783, he says that "Carnaval today is a science. It's not a party anymore."
His ideas are getting a boost from this year's unusually early start date. "I first heard about the idea from him," says Carlos Ernesto Lopes, a coordinator of Carnaval in Cabo Frio, a resort of 170,000 people that has about a million visitors during Brazil's summer -- December to March. For many Brazilians, Carnaval, like Labor Day in the U.S., signals the end of vacation time. Since there are still seven weeks of summer left before March 21, Mr. Lopes predicts a "huge loss" for the town this year.
A poll by the Rio chapter of Brazil's association of travel agents found 81% of them believed they will lose money because of the early Carnaval this year. But Carlos Alberto Amorim Ferreira, national head of the group, says his mind isn't made up. "People forget it's a religious holiday, because they celebrate like it was a pagan one," he says.
Now Mr. Araujo thinks a bold political stroke may be needed. In late January, he presented his idea for a new national Carnaval law to Marcelo Bezerra Crivella, a senator from Rio de Janeiro, and also a bishop in one of Brazil's most powerful evangelical Protestant churches. Although Carnaval is a "devil's party" to many evangelicals, they also share a fierce rivalry with Catholics. "It would help to be allied with them," says Mr. Araujo.
Brazil's Catholic Church, making its first pronouncement on the matter, isn't strictly opposed to a new date for the samba processions, says Dom Dimas Lara Barbosa, secretary general of Brazil's National Conference of Catholic Bishops. But, he says, a new date must come earlier, not later, to avoid occurring during Lent. He suggests January.
