So who enjoyed their May Bank Holiday last weekend? Technically, Brazil doesn't have bank holidays but since May 1st is International Workers Day, they celebrate it as a national holiday too (any excuse for a day off, really; St. George's Day is a holiday in some places in Brazil and it's not a even a national holiday in England). I do find it somewhat ironic that Workers Day is celebrated by not going to work, it'd be like celebrating Mother's Day by giving mums a rest. But I digress.
The holiday weekend in São Paulo coincided with the Virada Cultural (The Cultural All-Nighter), a free street festival that encompasses all of the arts from music to theatre to film to dance and everything else in between. And the festival's name is no exaggeration, it goes on uninterrupted from 6pm on Saturday to 6pm on Sunday, with the closing act on the main stage of the festival going on til 8pm. It all takes place in São Paulo's city centre, a mostly run-down area of the metropolis and more or less a no-go zone at night normally, but which comes to life and bubbles with vivacity during these 24 hours. It's a shame that so many people subscribe to this image of the centre since there's lots of gems hidden away in the middle of it, some of which I've been to and many of which I've yet to visit. Thankfully the Virada Cultural is helping diminish this widespread dismissal as it brings more people to the cultural and historic hub of São Paulo, the very birthplace of the city.
Despite having stayed there for an (un)healthy length of time, I didn't end up seeing more than a handful of performances, which I put down to 2 main reasons:
1) the festival "site" is about the size of Notting Hill Carnival. Or maybe bigger, I'm terrible at judging distances and areas. The point is that it's enormous and the stages are very spread out so they don't drown each other out, hence a lot of the time was taken up by walking.
2) this year's budget was much smaller compared to last year, so there weren't many street performances in the same way. From what people had told me, last year one could find something on pretty much every corner but I never really got that sense on the weekend. There was even a carnival-style parade running through the streets all night last year, and there were was certainly nothing like that this year.
Whilst the reason partly reflects my laziness for going to search out different things it also illustrates the lack of the element of surprise of this year's festival, that idea of stumbling across something incredible by accident. It was more a case of going to look for it this year, which is where reason 2 comes into play. Consider all this and the fact that there 4 million people in the streets, the notion of sticking around a few stages seems much more appealing really.
Of the shows I did see, pretty much all of them were great: particular highlights were the Tim Maia Racional Tribute Band at 3 in the morning with hundreds of thousands of people singing along, seeing a DJ spin some of my favourite songs by one of the city's landmarks whilst watching the sunrise, and enjoying a late, sunny afternoon show by a 70s samba-rock fusion band called Os Novos Baianos. Superb stuff indeed.
I read a few reviews and comments people made about the Virada around the internet and they mostly came down to 3 things: too much rubbish, drunken behaviour and awful transport. The transport was certainly poorly handled; despite claims that there would be tubes all night, one of the stations opening to the main hub of activity was closed, there was little signposting about this, and in the end tubes all night meant one every half hour. But concerns about the other two issues seemed exaggerated. I'm not saying I advocate littering or drunken antics but if you have 4 million people in the streets eating, drinking, and doing god knows what else, you just have to face the fact that you're going to encounter these things. Why let these inevitable negatives outweigh the positives? This is a free festival that brings together people from a range of backgrounds and that promotes all kinds of cultural activities on such a grand scale, an event whose main objective is anything but profit. In a country where sponsorship is splashed absolutely everywhere, it's encouraging to see that an event of this size can still happen in this way. Otherwise, it'd be another corporate V Festival-style event, with overpriced drinks, entry fees and artist, all sold in a neat little package. You might be able to see the stage better, standing on your nice little green patch of grass without a drunkard in sight and perhaps it's this "idyllic" vision the naysayers are after. But me, I can see the stage from where I am just fine, behind the five hundred people in front of me. Even through my rose-tinted glasses.
