Festival de Parintins

What actually happens

Parintins sits on an island in the Amazon river, several hundred miles from Manaus, in a part of Brazil almost no American ever sees. For most of the year it is a quiet river town. For three nights at the end of June it hosts a spectacle that people who have seen both put alongside Carnival in Rio.

Two groups compete: Garantido, in red, and Caprichoso, in blue. Each performs one long show per night in a round arena built for exactly this, retelling the Boi-Bumbá legend, a folk story about an ox that dies and is brought back to life, and building out from there into Amazonian myth, river life and indigenous history.

The staging is hard to convey. Floats several stories high that open, breathe and move. Hundreds of dancers and drummers. A figure who works the crowd from a tower. Fire, smoke, river spirits, an entire forest arriving on wheels. It is judged, category by category, and the judging is taken with complete seriousness.

The silence

Here is the detail that tells you what kind of place this is. The arena is split down the middle, red on one side and blue on the other. When one group performs, the other group’s entire half sits in silence. No booing, no cheering, nothing. Tens of thousands of people go quiet on purpose, then get their turn.

The division runs through the whole town. Families are one color or the other, often for generations. You choose a side, you wear it, and you stay on your half. Nobody minds a visitor picking a color at random. They mind a visitor treating the choice as a joke.

Respect the material

Boi-Bumbá is folk culture, and a lot of what gets staged draws on indigenous Amazonian tradition, cosmology and ritual. Some of that is performed by people it belongs to, and some of it is theater built about them. It is worth watching with that in mind rather than filing the whole thing as costume.

It is also unmistakably an Amazonian event rather than a national one, and part of what makes it extraordinary is that it is not staged for outsiders. Very few foreigners are in that arena.

Should you go

Straight answer: not on a first trip to Brazil, unless the Amazon is already the point of your trip.

The reason is arithmetic. Getting to Parintins means getting to Manaus first, then getting downriver, then getting back. The riverboat takes the better part of a day each way and is slower coming back upstream. Beds in town are scarce enough that a great many visitors sleep on the boat they arrived on. Add the three nights and you have spent close to a week, in heat and humidity, a long way from Rio, Iguaçu or any beach.

For a couple with two weeks and a first-time list that includes Rio, Iguaçu and somewhere on the coast, that trade does not work. Say no to it cleanly and come back for it.

Where it does work: on a second or third Brazil trip; on a trip built around the Amazon, where you are already in Manaus and already committed to the river; or for anyone who travels specifically for live performance and would fly a long way for something they cannot see anywhere else. For those people this is one of the best things in the country.

If you do go

Go through an operator. This is not the place to improvise. Transport, arena tickets and a place to sleep are all constrained at once, and the packages sold out of Manaus exist because putting those three together independently is hard from abroad.

Expect late nights. The shows start well after dark and run into the early hours, three nights running.

Expect real heat and humidity, sudden rain, and a town operating far beyond its normal size. Pack light, bring ear protection if loud sound bothers you, and bring cash.

And pick your color before you land.