Maryam and Esmée met in middle school. They influenced each other, shaped each other, and supported each other as they explored their burgeoning sexual lives. In their twenties, a trip to the blocos of Rio's Carnival became a turning point: for the first time, they experienced the freedom of the body and how the rhythm of the music made it exult. During the legendary parade at the Sambadrome, Maryam danced on a huge float—and fell into a hole. She was trapped in the bloco. In that hole, the Carnival turned the world upside down. Maryam confronted everything she hadn't been able to see, her own mysterious, subterranean world.

“In Inner Beauty , I recounted how I lost my body. With Blocked in the Bloco , I want to tell the story of how I found it again.” The project began with a first trip to Brazil in 2013, where Marion Corrales joined her friend at the Rio Carnival. Her friend had been living in the Vidigal favela for six years, working on a photographic project about favela children. During a second trip, to Bahia in 2018, she discovered Candomblé, its Orishas, a Vodou carnival born of resistance. In 2025, Marion returned to Rio and met the choreographer and dancer Smaïl Kanouté, who was working on a project about the Black Indians of New Orleans. This sparked the desire to make visible, through musical theater, the dissociation between body and mind, within a space of song and communion.