On the streets of my home city, Melbourne, a sudden hailstorm sent me running for cover into a nearby café. Huddled in a damp crowd waiting for a break in the weather, my eyes drifted to a television on the wall playing footage from Rio de Janeiro’s famous 'Carnaval'. Across the screen swanned spectacular drum queens and passistas, their muscular bodies gleaming with sweat, adorned with jewels and plumage. The scene was tropical and vivid. The dancers’ exuberant smiles provided instant relief from the miserable scene outside. Melbourne’s winter was fast approaching; I convinced myself that these images must be a ‘sign’ to plan a getaway! In the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, I found myself seated amongst the spectators at the far end of the Sambadrome stadium, at its final stretch where performers spill out onto the street. What would usually be considered the worst spot in the stadium (thanks to my last minute ticket purchase) turned out to offer the best view of a place where two realities collide. Under floodlights and television cameras, and sectioned off from grandstands that hold 90,000 spectators, a rehearsed and polished Carnaval paraded for the world along the half-mile long passarela. In the dark street behind the luminous Sambadrome stage, from my ‘bad seats’ I could see workers in orange suits soaring into the air with cranes to rescue feathered dancers from the tops of the extravagant floats, as though deposing carnival queens from their thrones. On the street below, exhausted paraders milled around stripping off their regalia and throwing them onto growing mountains of discarded costumes. Raggedly dressed foragers rummaged through the piles to retrieve resaleable feathers and fabrics, while city garbage collectors piled costume debris into trucks. A few steps in any direction from this gleaming Sambadrome sprawled dark and sometimes dangerous streets, where half-costumed crowds tread cautiously through pools of dirt and urine and debris. With the blasting music of the official Carnaval in one ear, and in the other the distant roar from the streets outside, I could not help marvelling at the richness and metaphoric significance of this boundary between this gleaming televised performance and the backstage scene that audiences of the globally televised Carnaval might never see. Watching the televised spectacle from afar, who could guess that the dazzling passista girl dancing across the screen goes home at night to a tiny dilapidated room with a dirt floor in a favela (shantytown) where drug wars regularly rage outside her door? Like a modern-day Cinderella, when the night is over she disappears again into anonymity; into the invisibility, marginality and insignificance of her quotidian life. Who could guess that some of the Brazilian community members dancing on elaborate floats are actually fee-paying foreigners, living out personal fantasies? These subtleties disappear and become irrelevant as images spin around the globe. After the show, many of the Sambadrome’s stars crowd into buses home to favelas, while visiting tourists hail taxis to whisk them in the opposite direction to the air-conditioned safety of their hotels at Ipanema or Copacabana beach. Those two worlds rarely meet again, reinforcing stereotypes even in the minds of many who travel to Brazil. Images of Carnaval have long told a seductive story of Brazil as an alluring destination that faraway dreamers might easily imagine visiting to escape the confines of their own everyday existence. However, “Brazil” as performed on a global stage is wearing a carnival mask. Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous description of carnival as “the world standing on its head” applies – Brazil’s Carnaval ritual is a social and cultural upheaval where the everyday is subverted. Paradoxically, images from this ritual dominate global representations of life in Brazil. Since Carnaval is the one time of year when Brazil is guaranteed a news slot globally, the ironic effect is that images of the annual tradition where “normal” life is abandoned are interpreted as what Brazilian life – and all Brazilians – must be like: flamboyant, free-spirited, unwaveringly joyful and scantily clad. As Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta observed, “It was not Brazil that invented Carnaval; on the contrary, it was Carnaval that invented Brazil” (1984:245). Behind the national stereotype is a rich and complex reality that is worth exploring.