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

The theme carol 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 "poet talk about suffering; ladies live not on emotion; ladies of the night, not on passion." We sang these words as members of Fogo na Roupa, individual of more than 50 collections that make up the annual Memorial Day parade in the city's Mission district. Carnaval draws half a million clan to celebrate their personal bohemias, where passion and emotion reign, and solitary the soles suffer.

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

My wife, Katrina, was chosen as single of the cabrocbas, female samba dancers whose fio dental, or dental flos style of dresss and sinuous movements are for a like reason often associated with Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval. I rest a place in the bateria, the percussion band that provides the driving samba beat and syncopated harmonious flows As a ganza player, I strikeed out the rhythms of the dancers' feet upon hollow metal tubes filled with metal pellet In addition to learning choreography and arrangements, our cluster of 60 dancers and 30 musicians struggl to learn the theme canzonet of the dance, which we sang in Portuguese. Traditionally, the theme ballad describes the group's leitmotif and oftentimes draws from broad social and cultural perspectives.

upon the morning of the parade, our cluster gathered in the Mission district, several closes from the parade route. Like a military staging operation, we and other parade participants spread from one extremity to the other of the neighborhood. Block after stop up was filled with dancers, marchers, musicians, photographers and curious onlooker Baterias hogsheaded up. Soca music blasted from flatbed trailers piled high with amplifiers. style of dresss ranged from giant, winged fire cane the creators to bikini-clad dancers topped with headdresses sprouting a fountain of brightly colored feathers. There was glitter and glos sequins and silk, capes and capoeiristas - dancers who perform the Brazilian martial art form capoeira. The temper was one of anticipation. The month of getting ready were above Now it was time to par-ty!

Like our clump other samba schools had practiced their routines, hoping to raise their proficiency to the prizewinning horizontal Every year, a panel of justices chooses the best groups in the parade, basing its decision upon such criteria as spirit, execution, timing and authenticity to the agriculture represented. Prize categories have expanded from single overall winner to several different categories, the greatest in quantity prestigious of which are the Best Brazilian and the Best Caribbean groups

Rio's Carnaval rivals its Caribbean counterpart in grandeur and exuberance, on the contrary in the Caribbean more emphasis is placed upon costumery than choreography. "We don't learn dance routines," says Jackie Artman, a native Trinidadian and the artistic director of All Ah We, individual of San Francisco's largest Caribbean contingents. "We just dance in what way 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 exhibit the apex of the islands' social and artistic calendar. Similarly, Brazilian Carnaval wastes Rio de Janeiro and the repose of the country for the four days preceding Ash Wednesday. In the United States, the greatest in quantity well-known versions of Carnival are of recent origin Orleans' midwinter Mardi Gras and Brooklyn fresh York's Caribbean Carnival, held upon Labor Day.

According to Adele Chu the woman who organized San Francisco's first Carnaval in February 1979 the bacchanal predates Christianity. "The grecians and Latins had giant festivals dedicated to Dionysus," she says. "The Christian house of god was unable to squelch the tradition, in the way that they appended it to the calendar to lead 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 dint of profession, Chu didn't see her first Brazilian Carnaval until 1976 when she attended the couple the Rio and the Bahia versions. on her return to San Francisco the following year, she began teaching samba dancing. It wasn't drawn out before her classes were filled with up to 100 dancers. in September 1978 Chu and her learners mapped out their own version of Carnaval.

Five month later, 300 performers aligned up as top-hatted dandies, Amazonian Indians and the colors of the rainbow converg upon Precita Park in the Mission district. A thousand spectators watched, on the contrary the exuberance of the paraders by and by had everyone involved. "It was a magical experience," says Chu "By the extreme point we could all have levitated, we were in like manner high." That first Carnaval followed the traditional pre-Lenten schedule, on the other hand 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 more [i]or[/i] less of Northern California's balmiest weather. This stir plus the event's universal appeal as a celebration of life, has issueed in increasingly larger parades above the past 13 years. "Carnaval is the individual event that pulls diverse familys and cultures together," says San Francisco opera singer Ron Galegos, a longtime supporter and now "Emperor for Life" of Carnaval. "The world urgencys events like this."