This is the most important thing I’ve done in my life, and I’m immensely excited about it.”Īnd samba’s spreading in Austin. “We use Carnaval as a focal point and samba as the vehicle to build community. It’s free, it’s open to everyone and it’s a community-building enterprise,” said Patterson. Patterson talks a lot about community, too, one that includes not just performers but behind-the-scenes volunteer talent as well, including designers, artists and more. It’s all about parading and partying as a community.) (Samba schools, said Quinn, are not so much schools as they are like New Orleans Mardi Gras Krewes, which perform at parades, dances or other events. The volume is not unlike that of a building imploding with you inside. This year the theme is the film “Black Orpheus.” Groups within the school practice separately and, when the show starts coming together, the entire mass of humanity practices one night a week in the auditorium of the Austin State Hospital. Patterson and the 160 or so performers under his field marshal-like command build their year around the Austin event, constructing a show from scratch and honing it for months. ![]() It is consistently touted as the largest Carnaval outside Brazil, with more than 6,000 people reliably attending each year, and these days promoter Michael Quinn is fighting a perception that the event has become, in his words, “a wife swap for the AARP set.”Īustin Samba, which is said to be the largest Rio-style escola de samba in the U.S., is part of that perception correction. It has since become a pre-Lenten debauch, if that’s your thing, that has become an Austin institution. Saturday night at the Palmer Events Center, the manifestation of Patterson’s vision, Austin Samba School - formally Acadêmicos da Ópera -is celebrating its 10th year performing at Carnaval Brasileiro, which itself dates to about 1975 as a party for homesick Brazilians.
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