Brazilian capoeira goes international

SALVADOR, Brazil – The master, wearing dreadlocks, dings out a twangy rhythm on his bow-shaped “berimbau” and lets loose with a plaintive melody recalling slavery days.\nTwo men, glistening with sweat, squat before him, reaching up to touch the African instrument’s resonating gourd. They cross themselves and shake hands before cart-wheeling into the circle formed by the other players, singing and clapping hands.\nThe players exchange rapid-fire flurries of spinning kicks, feints and flips and keep time with the syncopated beat, their feet missing each other’s heads by mere fractions of inches. What looks like a dance one minute, looks like a fight the next.\nThis is capoeira, a 400-year-old martial art disguised as dance, born in the holds of slave ships and on the plantations around Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’s first capital.\nOnce banned as a lethal weapon in the hands of Brazil’s newly freed slaves, today capoeira (pronounced cap-oo-way-rah) is more popular than ever, with schools across Brazil and in more than 150 countries around the globe. There are so many Japanese, Finns and Swedes on pilgrimages to the “cradle of capoeira” these days that they often seem to outnumber Brazilians on Salvador’s streets and capoeira schools.\n“Capoeira is not just a sport – it has a message. You have to come to Brazil to learn what it is all about,” said Ida Reiz, a 23-year-old student from Stockholm.\nThere is even talk of making it an Olympic sport – if only someone could figure out how to keep score.\nBut Capoeira’s explosive popularity abroad is cause for concern as well as pride. Many here fear the international attention will rob capoeira of its uniquely Brazilian identity, in the same way that Japanese samba dancers now tour Europe, and bossa singers have become more popular abroad than they are in Brazil.\n“Capoeira has always been an oral tradition without any documentation of our history. There have been a lot of cases in the past where foreigners came and filmed and documented things so they are now better known abroad than in Brazil. We have to prevent that,” said Rubens Costa Silva, better known as Mestre Bamba.\nHe estimates as many as 3,000 foreigners a year pass through his academy on the second story of a colonial house in Salvador’s historic Pelorinho district, where a virtual rainbow coalition of students can be seen working up a sweat on any given night.\nTo preserve capoeira’s Brazilian essence, the culture ministry has been documenting Capoeira’s mostly oral history, taking depositions from old masters and digging up old books and newspaper clippings, in preparation for an appeal to UNESCO later this year to recognize Brazilian capoeira as part of the “intangible heritage of humanity.” The distinction is meant to preserve cultural traditions needing protection in the face of globalization. Examples include Japan’s Kabuki theater, France’s processional giants and dragons, and Brazil’s samba de roda – a traditional form of the dance practiced mostly in backyards.\nUNESCO requires real government safeguards, such as financial support for research, specialized teaching and protective legal measures. The culture ministry envisions increased funding to schools that teach traditional capoeira and government pensions for the old masters, who have a long history of dying destitute and in obscurity.\n“Capoeira has been seen as a martial art or just as a sport. We want to highlight its cultural aspects – that it is part of the memory and history of Brazil’s black people. We want to recognize this is an important part of our history,” said Marcia Sant’Anna, the Culture Ministry’s director of intangible heritage.\nThe UNESCO effort focuses on preserving capoeira’s rich history, but Sant’Anna said the ministry also wants to respect its evolution as a living art.\nIn recent years, Capoeira has inspired enough fusions to make a purist’s skin crawl. Among the most popular are capoboxe, which includes elements of boxing, and capoerobica, which introduces capoeira movements stripped of music and context into aerobics classes.\nCapoeira probably would never have survived if not for the innovations of Manuel dos Reis Machado, the legendary Mestre Bimba (no relation to Bamba), who opened the first capoeira school in 1932 and codified the movements. By courting the sons of admirals and politicians as students, Bimba was largely responsible for overturning the ban on capoeira that had been imposed two years after Brazil became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to free the slaves in 1888.\nBimba even performed before President Getulio Vargas in 1937, a demonstration that led Vargas to declare capoeira Brazil’s national sport – a fact often forgotten in this nation of rabid soccer fans.\nBut Bimba’s new style called “regional” also incorporated elements from Asian martial arts, such as colored belts to denote rank and many of the flashier kicks, offending traditionalists.\nIn 1942, capoeira’s other great master, Vincente Ferreira Pastinha, or Mestre Pastinha, opened up a rival capoeira school calling his style “Angola,” in a reference to the art’s African origins.\nFor many years, people preferred regional’s flashier movements. Angola’s slower low-to-the-ground style languished in obscurity until the late 1970s when it caught the interest of Brazil’s nascent black consciousness movement and gradually spread abroad with old masters like Joao Grande – a student of Pastinha who now teaches in New York City.\nColette Desilets, a 51-year-old Canadian widely credited with bringing capoeira Angola to Canada, says that in many cases foreigners are more reverent and respecting of capoeira’s roots, more inclined to preserve traditions, than Brazilians are.\n“Even in Brazil capoeira can lose it’s Brazilianness. Here they are adding jiujitsu moves. I only do what my master tells me,” said Desiletes, who was visiting Brazil for a month with 12 of her students.\nAnother innovation certain to change the face of capoeira is the move to have it declared an Olympic sport.\nGersonilto Heleno do Sousa, who is leading the effort as president of the Brazilian Capoeira Confederation, hopes capoeira, which doesn’t require either player to knock his opponent out, could be scored in manner closer to Olympic gymnastics than to boxing. Another challenge: persuading the International Olympic Committee to accept a live band for each competition.\n“We would probably like capoeira to begin as demonstration sport and become competitive only later, after it gains greater recognition,” Sousa said.