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‘Flying Free’ with City Arts & Can Samba at Nottingham Carnival 2016

Date published: 23 Aug 2016

Posted by: Joe Pick

City Arts & Can Samba at Nottingham Carnival

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At Nottingham Carnival Parade on Sunday 21st August, City Arts & Can Samba won BEST TROUPE for the second year in a row. It was a fantastic day. Enjoy this massive gallery of photos of our amazing, colourful ‘Flying Free’ carnival troupe.

Backed by big beats from twenty samba drummers, led by Ceri Howells, and DJ Si Tew, Can Samba’s dancers performed an environmentally-motivated routine highlighting the plight of the bumblebee. The routine was coreographed by SaRena Kay, artistic director of Can Samba. Following them were six ‘Baianas’, who took the route more gently dressed in beautiful new costumes.

For the second year running, people whose mobility might have otherwise excluded them from the procession drove extravagantly decorated ‘mono-floats’, designed and built around shop-mobility scooters generously lent to us by the Broadmarsh Shopmobility Scheme.

At the rear of the troupe two magical mechanical magpies, named Burt & Joyce, joined our giant parrot. As part of our Imagine – arts and older people programme, artists Tony Mason and Jessica Kemp worked with older adults from Radford Care Group, and Abbeyfield’s Milbeck & Sycamore House care homes, to design and decorate the puppets.

Thank you and congratulations to our partners Can Samba and over one hundred participants, volunteers and artists who, over the preceding 5 weeks, worked so hard to make our carnival troupe as accessible, inclusive and brilliant as possible.