'Gringos' can samba, too

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP):

WITH THEIR gyrating hips and feet that move so fast they dissolve into a blur, samba instructor Carla Campos' students are barely distinguishable from the swarms of scantily clad dancers in Rio de Janeiro's carnival parades. What's make them different is where they come from: abroad.

While non-Brazilians have long shelled out hundreds of dollars for the right to dress-up in over-the-top costumes and boogie in Rio's samba school parades, which wrapped up Monday in an all-night extravaganza, few in the so-called 'alas dos gringos', or 'foreigners' wings', know how to dance the samba well. They tend to bop along goofily in the parades while waving at the crowds of spectators.

Campos' students, mostly blonde women from northern Europe and the United States who stand out in a land of dark-haired dancers, are a different story. Campos has built a career out of debunking the widespread myth that only those born and bred in Rio, the birthplace of samba, can actually learn the notoriously complicated and lightning-fast dance.

"I swear I have seen foreigners who not only danced as well as your average person here in Rio, but some who are even better than good dancers from here," said Campos, looking the part of a samba instructor in her unitard with white and electric blue stripes. "Sure, it's a hard dance, but it's ridiculous to think there's anything genetic to it. It's about hard work."

At her studio
in Rio's Tony Ipanema neighbourhood, Campos puts her students through
their paces. They file in, swapping their sundresses and sandals for
leotards, flippy little skirts and the towering but sturdy platforms
required for samba.

Class starts with a series of
hip-rolling exercises meant to limber up the pelvic region, where all
samba's fancy footwork has its origins.

By minute 10
of the 50-minute lesson, sweat pours down the dancers' faces - and
that's before the sambaing actually gets going in earnest. Once the feet
start moving, beating an ever-accelerating tac, tac, tac rhythm into
the parquet, the air-conditioned studio becomes a
sauna.

For diehard samba fans

Campos
developed her patented SambaFit workout, which combines samba steps
with aerobics about a decade ago. The idea for the class, which she also
teaches at two high-end Rio gyms, was born during a trip to Finland
where she discovered a whole sub-culture of diehard samba
enthusiasts.

"The Finns were so passionate about it,
they knew more about samba and danced better than many people here,"
Campos said, adding that those from Rio's moneyed elite have long tended
to look down their noses at the samba as the dance of the lower
classes. "I thought, 'We have this dance that people around the world
think is marvellous, so we Brazilians have to learn to respect it,
too'."

Through her Finnish connections, Campos began
giving private lessons to foreigners living in Rio. At first, she had
just a handful of expatriate students, but Brazil's galloping economy
and massive offshore oil discoveries have flooded the city with foreign
workers in recent years.

When Campos opened her studio
last year, a roster of around 40 students, all of them women and nearly
all of them foreigners, followed her. Most have husbands or partners
who were transferred to Brazil and are here on spouse visas that don't
allow them to work.

"A lot of my students have had a
really rough time integrating. They don't speak Portuguese and haven't
made many friends here," said Campos, who gives the lessons in
Portuguese, with a healthy dose of hand gestures and a sprinkling of
simple English words. "Samba is their way of integrating Brazilian
culture, and they throw themselves into learning how to dance it
well."

That dedication is clear at the lessons. Even
the shyest of students stare themselves down fiercely in the mirror, as
if willing themselves to nail the steps. So much effort goes into the
'getting this' that Campos periodically has to remind some to stop
scowling and smile.

Despite the heat and the intensity
of their concentration, every face in the class lights up when they
rehearse the routine and song the group performed at the Sambadrome last
week with the Academicos da Rocinha samba school. Feet get thrown into
high gear. Faces are frozen into beaming smiles, and even those who can
barely muster a "hello" in Portuguese belt out the lyrics to the
school's theme song with gusto.

Student Mandy
Gulbrandsen, a 37-year-old mother of one from Salem, Oregon, radiates
excitement.

"I never ever imagined I'd be dancing in
carnival in a costume that's so small that I should be wondering where
it went," said Gulbrandsen, who moved to Rio about a year and a half ago
with her husband, who works for Merrill Lynch. "I danced ballet and tap
as a kid and that helps, but nothing prepares you for
this."

Gulbrandsen said it took her about 10 lessons
to manage to dance anything even vaguely resembling the samba. Her
British-born classmate Jane Strachey said it's taken her even
longer.

"I've been taking classes for about a year,
and my moves have definitely improved but I have to face the fact that
I'm never going to dance like a Brazilian," said Strachey, who moved
here with her husband two years ago. "When I went to my first carnival, I
thought these girls were so beautiful and I wanted to be able to dance
like them."

"And 12 months later, I am, but 'gringo'
style," she said, employing the Portuguese word Brazilians use to refer
to all
foreigners.

AP Photos