The fun and danger of a Brazilian Carnival

I worked in Papa Porto, Alexandria for 2 days. The place is a holiday compound for rich Arabs to escape to - apartments, shopping, swimming pools, restaurants, entertainment such as bands, dance shows, circus, cinema etc. For the Eid 2013 (the Egyptian holiday to finish the holy month of Ramadan, pig party and celebrations across Egypt) Papa Porto Compound was attracting Egyptians with a fierce Brazilian Carnival.


Dancers were hired from Cairo to be the crazy Brazilian party people and dancers on moving trucks and as a grand finale Latin show on the big stage. I was wearing a custom tailored green figure-hugging stretch body suit with lots of feathers and glitter. There were many different colorful shiny outrageous costumes, with boa's, masks, huge feather bird wings, hats and many more...

Carnival dancer

Kaidi with the Mascot and a great friend Ana

Here is the job description. We climbed on a huge car decorated to be a real Brazilian party

Carnival truck

truck. We were dangerously over-crowded: 12 dancers and 2 fire-jugglers. Imagine dancing and entertaining the crowds on a busy platform, while fire guys are blowing fire and throwing fire balls into the air, wind blowing the hot oil all over dancers. We were all sweaty, oily and smelly:) But it only made the feeling more fun and real! Im sure the weather is no colder in Brazil and dancers are oiled by shiny body oil too!

The whole procession was accompanied by live samba musicians with African drums. The feeling was amazing, people happy and welcoming, everyone taking photos and filming this quite a unique party in Egypt. After a while we run into some trouble.

The compound is a mix of families, couples, old and young, Europeans with shorts and tops and of Egyptians with head scarfs and summer dresses and last but not least conservative arab women with abaya's and men with white galabeia's. There were a lot of children running around and the driver had to make sudden stops and manouvers to avoid hitting the children. We couldn't dance on  the platform any more, it had become a survival and a balance struggle to stay on our feet and not to fall off. And the fire guys kept juggling, so we had to focus on the balance (on HIGH heels) and take care from the live fire around us. Suddenly some crazy parents started lifting their children on the truck to photograph them with the artists with attractive costumes. Now there was even less room and we had to take care that the children got safely on and off, because the truck was constantly moving. And then there were of course the horny young Arab guys in galabeia's, who were drooling over the sight of sexy carnival dancers and were not even shy to toutch their private parts for greater pleasure.

Finally the procession finished as we reached our last destination, the grand stage. We started climbing off the truck to go to the stage. We had to fight our way through the crowds who were in high party mood and all of them wanted to dance with us. We had no security and we had to fight them of. Finally there, we made our Latin show, comprising salsa duet, Latin-ballet duet, romantic girls samba and Latin-hip-hop. I was one of the romantic girls, improvising on samba music. All my previous dance experience payed off: basic steps and tricky moves from my "Sõleke" show-dance times, international Latin workshops, salsa classes in Egypt and tons and tons of YouTube Brazilian carnival videos;) With me were 4 more girls with feather masks, I was dancing in the middle because of the foreigner face and the choreographer asked me not to put my mask on my face, because I would hide my best feature:)))

Despite the organizers ignoring all the safety rules of fire, public spaces, over-corwdedness and attacking audience, it was the most fun and crazy dance job I have ever done!
Enjoy this video of the colorful costumes, Kaidi dancing and all the fun: