According to the tide

Carnival 2026 has laid bare a collective choice by the samba schools: to honor people. Artists, intellectuals, creators, cultural leaders, and a sambista. From Série Ouro to Grupo Especial, the avenue will be crossed by biographies: Roberto Burle Marx, Conceição Evaristo, Leci Brandão, Ney Matogrosso, Rita Lee, Mestre Ciça, among many others. This is no coincidence, but a reading of the moment.

Beija-Flor's victory in 2025 was decisive in this process. By winning the title with a theme honoring master Laíla, a central figure in the history of samba schools, the blue-and-white school showed that biography, when connected to the audience's emotional memory and to the samba community itself, remains a powerful path. And the message was absorbed.

Historically, Carnival has always worked this way. In the 1960s, Fernando Pamplona and the group from UFRJ's School of Fine Arts changed the aesthetics of the parade, introducing a modern and dramaturgical conception. The impact was immediate and followed by other schools. In the 1970s, Joãozinho Trinta took spectacle to excess: monumental floats, ostentatious luxury, visual grandeur, and, once again, the avenue followed, even with the significant increase in costs.

The same movement can be seen in music. For decades, samba-enredos were long, poetic, full of images and winding melodies. From the 1970s onward, a shorter, more march-like, more direct samba gained strength. The change spread because it worked. The front commissions may be the most didactic example of this collective logic. For a long time, they were composed of members of the old guard, elegantly dressed, with almost no choreography, fulfilling an opening ritual. When costumed, choreographed commissions with theatrical language emerged, all followed. Later, when one school placed a float in the front commission, the domino effect was immediate. The trend was not resisted: it was incorporated.

What 2026 therefore reveals is not just a "fashion of tributes." It is the internal functioning of Carnival. The school that gets it right does not create a deviation, it creates a path. And, almost always, that path is followed. The question that arises is: to what extent does this trend, historically so common on the avenue, also impose limits on invention? When many look to the same north, there is a risk of impoverishing the diversity of solutions.

By turning individual trajectories into themes, the schools reaffirm the parade as a space of memory, identity, and popular recognition. Biography becomes allegory, trajectory becomes samba, the individual becomes symbol. In the 94 years of samba school parades, the avenue has already shown more than once that it evolves not only by following paths, but by opening new ones.

*Journalist with 30 years of Carnival