The Internet is full of stories of romances, of lives saved, of businesses started.
Now it can add the story of two samba lovers who are not even Brazilians, who
founded samba schools in two very distant cities and who ended up uniting the until then isolated
samba community from all over the world.
Once upon a time in cyberspace… That would be a perfect beginning for this story. Because it talks about
two sambistas from two samba schools in the opposite sides of the earth. What makes their story unique, isn’t only
the fact that their samba schools aren’t in Brazil, or that they speak different languages, nor the fact that one is in a
semi-desert region of the world while the other is near the Arctic Circle. The uniqueness about these schools is that
they became sister samba schools via the Internet.
The Internet was created around 25 years ago by physicists in Switzerland to allow for easier exchange of
information and data between scientists. In 1993, the same people created a multimedia standard for the Internet
that allowed text, graphics, audio, and even video to be easily created and exchanged around the world. The
World-Wide Web, (or Web as it is commonly called) has exploded from a few hundred sites in 1993, to tens of millions in
less than two years and its growth has been steadily increasing ever since.
A few samba lovers (or sambistas as they are called in Brazil) began seeing the potential of putting samba
information on the Web, began preparing their own sites in cyberspace not knowing how it would change their lives
in only a few short months.
Let’s face it: playing, dancing, and
singing samba is not the most common activity, unless of course you are
in Brazil. What is more common than coffee in Brazil, is more rare than
diamonds abroad. Finding a samba group outside Brazil is more difficult
than it was finding one Web page out of the millions in the Internet
before there were search engines (search engines are web sites
dedicated to helping find anything about anything on the Web). But the
web created cybercommunities with no political, geographic, or cultural
barriers. All of a sudden, the world was one community and that
included of course the sambistas.
The first samba group on the web was a fairly new samba school in Long Beach, California. Other groups
followed. The Edinburgh Samba in the United Kingdom, a Swedish samba group, and also the Finns. Pretty soon , there was a
small group of people on the Web all with the same interest: samba. A
sambistas mailing list was organized and soon, a
World-Wide Samba Home Page was launched. (A “home page” is like the index of a book from which one can easily
connect to other pages of information related to that site, whether it be local or from the other side of the world). Together,
the World-Wide Samba Home Page and the electronic mailing list did what no other technology had done before: brought
the international samba community together for the first time.
Other sambistas from around the world joined in. From Japan, Israel, and even Brazil people started coming
on-line. The World-Wide Samba Home Page was voted as one of the top 5% sites in the entirety of the Web which contains
an estimated 15 million pages.
The beginning — Harri Engstrand, president of Império do Papagaio, a samba school in Helsinki, Finland,
was preparing a Web page for his samba school when SambaLá launched its own home page. Engstrand was a
little disappointed that David de Hilster, the president of SambaLá, had beaten him out. But he would get very soon over
it, mainly due to the satisfaction to suddenly discover so many people around the world who shared his passion for samba.
Both schools were preparing for their annual Carnaval parades. SambaLá would have their first in Long Beach in
June. For Império do Papagaio, also in June, it was their sixth year. Carnaval passed and both David and Harri, like others,
kept tabs on what was happening in other samba groups around the world.
David posted information about SambaLá’s
first anniversary party. Harri saw the announcement on the Web and felt
moved to see a new samba school surviving its first year. Knowing the
joy and pain of starting such an organization outside of Brazil, he did
something that would link even more the schools: he sent SambaLá
carnival posters, a T-shirt, a birthday card and a small audio cassette
containing a samba enredo (a samba school’s annual theme song) in Finnish. Everything sounded Brazilian except for the fact that it was in Finnish.
David decided to take the challenge and learn the song even though he didn’t know a word of Finnish. David, who
has a master’s in Linguistics, lived almost three years in Rio. Although he speaks Portuguese fluently, learning a samba
in Finnish wouldn’t be easy. SambaLá’s president knows that the best way to learn a song in another language is to
practice the melody first, ignoring the words. That’s the way he has been learning new samba songs from Brazil.
Many people knew that David was learning a samba in Finnish and it didn’t surprise them. “David is crazy!” is a
phrase that the computer expert and artist hears a lot. After all, he did start a samba school without knowing what a samba
school really was. The Finns also called him a “crazy” American for trying to sing Finnish without knowing Finnish. Finnish
is supposedly one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. But that made the challenge even more interesting for him.
David decided to wait until the first Sunday of the month to officially “launch” the song. He wanted to videotape
the event for the Finns. He chose the first Sunday in November (the 5th, 1995) for the big event. He suggested to Harri
that the two samba schools become sister samba schools. To his knowledge, they would be the first samba schools outside
of
Brazil to do such a thing. In Brazil, it is very common for the larger samba schools to have affiliates or sister samba
schools in other cities and even states. The larger schools usually help smaller schools by sending costumes and other things.
This relationship would be one of friendship. Sort of samba school “pen pals”.
It seems unimaginable that cyberspace could generate such passion and feelings over such a great distance.
Many people say that cyberspace is a cold and impersonal place a place that strips you of your natural senses and
replaces them with artificial sensors. Yet such an attitude overlooks a revolution that is taking place on the Internet that is
making the impossible possible: the forming of a community that could not exist in the physical world.
And among the first settlements in
cyberspace, one now hears the vibration of samba. And within that cyber
community, two samba schools met, exchanged culture, and have become
lifelong friends. The cyberspace sambistas continue to grow and thrive.
The non-Brazilian sambistas are now starting talk of organizing an
international league of samba schools and an “Encontro 2000” (Encounter
2000) in Rio de Janeiro where all international samba schools would get
together and form one large international samba school! All via the
Internet.
But nothing said it better than the words of the Finnish song that made its way halfway around the world to
California all thanks to this new technology: “Once upon a time… That much you can always
believe if you just want to.”