Imagine a group of dancers dressed in large white and yellow hooped dresses, holding vases of fresh flowers, moving to the rhythms of samba drummers and intermingling with singers of Brazilian melodies. No, it's not Sao Paulo we're evoking here but the streets of dirty auld Dublin. A torchlit procession of up to 100 samba drummers, 40 dancers and 30 choral singers will wend its way from the Five Lamps on Portland Row to College Green next Saturday evening. An element of the re-scheduled St Patrick's Festival, the Afoxe Joy carnival will be the culmination of weeks of intensive preparatory work by community arts groups based in the north inner city.
The idea to have a carnival originated with Fiona Galvin and Pamela Hill, two artists working in the north inner city area who received £20,000 funding from the St Patrick's Day Festival to run the event.
"Usually the children around here don't get to see much of the St Patrick's Festival parade because of all the crowds. With this carnival, they can be a part of it by joining in the workshops, watching it from their doorsteps or dancing alongside the procession. There isn't the same division between the audience and spectacle in a carnival," says Galvin.
The presence of the Happy City Samba School on Mountjoy Square, an open school for enthusiasts aged 18 and over, gave the project a pool of resources from which to draw.
Watching second year students from the Larkin Community College on Sean MacDermott Street practise samba drumming, one can instantly experience the infectious rhythms and anticipate the great fun element associated with all street carnivals.
"Afro-Brazilian music has great street credibility, and places like Rio are associated with the exotic, the macho, the sexy and good football," laughs Galvin. Other workshops in samba drumming, costume-making, singing and Brazilian dance were held in various after-school clubs and other community arts projects in the north inner city.
In one after-school club we visited, the young girls were busy colouring in their wishes for the wish tree and making shakers with plastic bottles filled with lentils. Their wishes included: a parade and fireworks every week, sweets and chocolates for all the children in the world, peace in the world for all children and, more poignantly, that the robbing of cars would stop.
In the north-east of Brazil, this AfroBrazilian event usually takes place before the full-blown carnival. The movement of dancers dressed in white represents a symbolic washing of the streets/spiritual cleansing process before the main carnival begins. The musicians play ijexa, a rhythm which creates energy, according to the African tribe Yoruba. The combination of the rhythm, singing and dancing is known as Afoxe.
The organisers of the Afoxe Joy festival are also planning to decorate some of the buildings along the route, mount a fire sculpture in Diamond Park and erect a wish tree outside Our Lady of Lourdes church on Buckingham Street.
As part of the final preparations for the carnival, Brazilian artists Dudu Tucci and Murah Soares are coming to Dublin from their Berlin base to give masterclasses in samba percussion and the Brazilian folk dance Maculele on May 17th.
Tucci has given master-classes here before, and he enthuses about how easily Irish people pick up the Brazilian rhythms. "Irish people have a very natural response to the Afro-Brazilian culture because they have their own dance, song, melodies and drumming," he explains.
"A lot of Afro-Brazilian rhythms are the same as Irish folk music - the 6/8 and 12/8 rhythms - so the rhythms are already in your bodies. It's only about a change of clothing. Brazilian people are very explosive. They have music, dance and singing in their everyday lives. So have the Irish. I have never had to convince Irish people to sing and dance."
The Afoxe Joy carnival will start from Sean MacDermott Street (beside Champions Avenue) at 8 p.m. next Saturday. It will travel down to The Five Lamps, turn right onto Amiens Street, and finish on the Matt Talbot bridge. Participants will include musicians from the Leitrim Samba Band, the Tallaght Samba Band, the Youth Samba School, Ballymun and the Happy City Samba Band; and dancers from the Capoeira (Brazilian form of martial arts) school in the Vietnamese Centre on Hardwicke Street, Dublin 1 and choral singers from the local workshops led by Eileen Stephens from Yemanje, the a capella group.