The samba schools in Rio de Janeiro are currently seen as true models of “business” organization, capable of responding to different interests, adapting to new realities and imposing their esthetics upon Carnival in Brazil and around the world. These dynamic responses to various requests from a spectator society are almost always criticized by a decharacterization process that would bring, inevitably, at their destruction, suffocated by pleas and intakes increasingly more distant from an initial project of highly popular character. In the first part of this article, we seek to discuss and question founding concepts of samba schools rooted in the Brazilian imaginary, starting with literary and visual discourse constantly redesigned and restated in texts on the topic and in the very poetics of the samba schools. In the second part of this article we seek to draw up a contemporary process panel of the production at a samba school, updating the former text of our authorship (FERREIRA, 2006), originally published in Engineering of Entertainment: My Vice, My Virtue (KAMEL, 2006).