BACK TO BLACK FESTIVAL IN RIO DE JANEIRO

2011 Back2Black Festival in Rio in August

August 9, 2011 | Filed underEntertainment | Posted by Patricia Maresch

By Patricia Maresch, Senior Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – While Rio is preparing itself for the Rock in Rio Festival in late September and early October, another music festival with big international guests is already on its way: Back2Black. The African roots, music and cultural heritage festival takes place the last weekend of August at the old train station Leopoldina and is a celebration of African rhythms, sounds, colors, styles and social and economic consciousness.

Prince will perform in Rio August 27th, photo by I Do Shows/Flickr Creative Commons License.

Undoubtedly, the festival’s highlight will be the performance of the American musician Prince on Saturday the 27th. “I am so excited that Prince is coming to Brazil, I think I’ve waited my whole life for this moment,” says 32-year-old Prince fan Guilherme. It has been twenty years since Prince has last performed in Brazil, at the 1991 edition of Rock in Rio.

It’s Back2Black Festival’s third edition this year, bringing great names of Black culture to Rio de Janeiro for concerts, debates and exhibitions, on four different stages. Besides Prince, there will also be other international artists performing, such as Chaka Khan, Macy Gray and Aloe Blacc.

One of the four stages will be entirely dedicated to Afro-Brazilian artists with music from Moreno Veloso, Domenico Lancelotti and a special performance from the band Paraphernalia with rapper BNegão. Brazilian superstar Seu Jorge will also be performing at the Back2Black Festival.

Seu Jorge gained world fame for his acoustic versions of old David Bowie songs in the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou directed by American filmmaker Wes Anderson.

Macy Gray is performing August 26th in Rio, photo by Programação Back2Black Festival 2011.

Brazilian culture has strong African roots and the Back2Black Festival wants to show how the African influences affect Brazilian contemporary culture. “Our African roots have been ignored for several decades,” says festival organizer Connie Lopes.

“The Back2Black project was therefore created out of the urge to redo bridges, giving Africa back to Brazil,” she adds. Last year’s edition was a huge success with performing artists Erykah Badu and Carlinhos Brown.

Tickets for the festival went on sale two weeks ago and vary from R$100 for a day pass to R$250 for a ticket to see Prince. “It’s kind of pricey, but it will be totally worth it,” says English teacher Thiago. “It’s kind of a unique experience to see Prince perform at this very special Leopoldina venue.”

According to O Globo’s gossip column Prince has said that none of the festival employees are allowed to drink alcohol when they are working with him. The artist became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001.

Prince has supposedly invited the famous architect Oscar Niemeyer to attend his concert at the Back2Black festival, the same gossip column wrote. The last time Prince – a fan of architecture – was in Rio he had also tried to meet the 103-year-old Niemeyer but the architect was traveling at the time.

For more information about tickets and programming, see the official festival site.

COST OF LIVING IN BRAZIL

Cost of Living Soars in Brazil
August 2, 2011 | Filed underBusiness | Posted by Sarah de Sainte Croix
By Sarah de Sainte Croix, Senior Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s two biggest cities, Rio and São Paulo, have been ranked amongst the top fifteen most expensive cities in the world for expats, according to Mercer’s Worldwide Cost of Living Survey published last month. The report has Luanda, Angola as the world’s most expensive city for expatriates in the second year in a row, and for the Americas, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil top the list.


With soaring real estate costs and strong real against the dollar, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are the most expensive cities in the Americas, image recreation.
The survey ranks São Paulo as the tenth most expensive city in the world (up eleven places since last year), and Rio de Janeiro as the twelfth (rising seventeen places). New York, North America’s most expensive city, lags far behind in just 32nd place, making Brazil the most expensive country in the Americas. London and Paris occupy eighteenth and 27th place, respectively.

The Mercer Report, which is published annually, is designed to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees. It measures the comparative cost of 200 items in each of the 214 cities covered by the survey against prices in New York City. These items include housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment.

Brazil’s astronomical rise through the rankings can be explained in part by the recent housing boom. Property prices in Rio de Janeiro have risen by 16.1 percent since last year, and rental prices have gone up by around 100 percent in some areas of the Zona Sul.

Nathalie Constantin-Métral, the survey’s senior researcher, commented, “The cost of housing – often the biggest expense for expatriates – plays an important part in determining where cities are ranked”.

Because the findings are measured against a base line in New York, another crucial factor is the growing strength of the real against the dollar. Mercers says, “The US dollar has weakened significantly against some currencies, including the Brazilian real. So the Cost of Living indices for U.S. expatriates will continue to increase to reflect the need to use more U.S. dollars to buy the same number of host currency units.”


Brazil's Big Macs are the second most expensive in the world, photo by John Sember/Flickr Creative Commons License.
A third factor is the ever increasing cost of goods and services in Brazil. A recent survey by Veja magazine found the average cost of a forty inch LED TV screen in Brazil to be R$2,000, compared to R$1,700 in France and R$1,100 in the United States.

Similarly, a minute’s cell phone talk time costs on average R$0.60 in Brazil, R$0.44 in France, and in the U.S., just R$0.17. A Brazilian Big Mac is also amongst the most expensive in the world, second only to Switzerland.

In global terms, Brazil’s inflation rate (currently at around six percent) is relatively high, but even with this in mind, prices are still soaring. Businesses blame increasing logistics, utility and rental costs, combined with high staffing costs as a result of Brazil’s employment laws, which are tipped very much in favor of the employee.

High taxes are another determining factor. On the price of a car in Brazil, for example, the consumer will pay around thirty percent of the total value as taxes, compared to sixteen percent in France, and just six percent in the U.S.

British expat Rebecca Smythe commented, “I only buy clothes and things when I go back to England – it’s just too expensive here now. I am struggling to afford my rent even.”