It’s CubaDupa weekend! Hooray!

We’ve been madly making our costumes, dressing our drums, building and painting the stage set and – of course – practicing our drumming and dancing for a couple of months now, and things are coming together nicely.

The donations we raised from our Boosted campaign have enabled us to bring a whole bunch of sambaistas to Wellington from across the country. We’re playing host to 37 drummers from AK Samba in Auckland, 40 drummers and dancers (including a brass section!) from Samba de Sol in Nelson, 30 drummers and dancers from Hamilton & Tauranga and 14 from Bay Batucada in Hawkes Bay. Together with the 55 drummers and 15 dancers from Wellington Batucada, we’re going to be bringing Carnival to Cuba Street in a big way this weekend.

We’ve trained up a whole bunch of new dancers, who will debut for you at the Wellington Batucada gig on Saturday night on the Swan Stage. Somewhere along the way we’ve also moved from Upper Cuba Street to Swan Lane, Glover Park and Te Aro Park, and our costume theme has morphed from Pushme-Pullyou into Amazonian rainforest and now “AmazoniAotearoa”.

With our costuming we have decided that you can basically never have too much bling, and so with that in mind we have cleaned Wellington out of green holographic paper and scoured the $2 shops for sparkles, diamante, glitter and other shiny things. We can neither confirm nor deny the rumour that we have also imported a rather large number of fairy lights from Hong Kong.

Here’s the weekend’s timetable and full carnival programme for the NZ Samba Bloco:

Saturday 28 March

Sambatron/ Tauranga Samba
2.00 – 2.20 pm Upper Cuba Stage Performance
2.20 – 3.00 pm Parade to Te Aro Park
3.00 – 3.45 pm Street Performance, Te Aro Park

Nelson Samba de Sol
5.30 – 5.50 pm Glover Park Stage
5.50 – 6.15 pm Parade to Te Aro Park
6.15 – 7.00 pm Street performance, Te Aro Park

AK Samba
7.30 – 8.00 pm Swan Stage performance and off stage
8.00 – 8.30 pm Parade to Te Aro Park
8.30 – 9.15 pm Street Performance, Te Aro Park

Wellington Batucada
9.30 – 10.00 pm Swan Stage performance and off stage
10.00 – 10.30 pm Parade to Te Aro Park
10.30 – 11.00 pm Street performance, Te Aro Park

Sunday 29 March

Hawkes Bay Batucada
1.30 – 2.00 pm Parade to Te Aro Park
2.00 – 2.30 pm Street Performance, Te Aro Park

Batucada Finale (all batucada groups)
2.30 – 3.00 pm Street Performance, Te Aro Park
3.00 – 3.30 pm Parade to Swan Stage
3.30 – 4.00 pm Swan Stage Performance (joined by Niko Ne Zna)

…and then I guess we can all go watch the cricket 🙂

We are very excited to be performing for you this weekend. Samba makes us happy, brings us together, and makes us want to dance. We trust it will have the same effect on you.

Thanks as always to Chris Parkin at the Museum Art Hotel for being our Boosted match sponsor – you rock, Chris!

Thanks everyone once again for your wonderful support, and we’ll see you at CubaDupa!