Rio de Janeiro - A group of gagged people, beheaded dancers and a bloody giant baby closed the first of Rio's world-famous carnival parades early on Monday, injecting considerable controversy and questionable taste into the otherwise joyous event.
The bizarre sights were thought up by the Unidos do Viradouro samba school, and were carefully engineered to contrast with competing schools that had entered more traditional animal effigies and semi-nude dancers.
A shroud-covered float carrying the motionless group wearing cloth across their mouths was Viradouro's protest at a judge's order last week prohibiting what would have been its most shocking display: a platform of skeletal Holocaust victims accompanied by a dancing Hitler.
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Viradouro's creative director, Paulo Barros, had complained that the Rio Jewish group behind the ban misunderstood the intent of his theme, which was to shock, through depictions of death, fear and cold.
Nearby, dancers jigged along holding their severed "heads" in one hand The Holocaust imagery, he said, was meant to serve as a warning against such atrocities ever being repeated.
Instead, he had to hastily modify that float into a protest at what he saw as censorship, and concentrate on the other parts of the school's show.
Those elements included another float upon which huge hands held a mechanized giant baby covered in blood with its umbilical cord attached.
Nearby, dancers jigged along holding their severed "heads" in one hand.
There were also snippy Edward Scissorhands and creatures from the movie "Alien," as well as school members dressed as black spiders and cockroaches and flies, women parading with prosthetic arms tied to crosses above their heads, and gold-painted couples writhing in positions from the Karma Sutra.
Many of the women wore very little, mostly glittering g-strings The lighter part of the spectacle was a mobile ski slope, complete with skiers and snowboarders.
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