When class is in session for CapoeiraMandinga Rochester, the
rhythm grabs you from the parking lot. As you enter the Elton
Street building, the steady thump… tha-thump… tha-THUMP suddenly swells, reverberating down the stairwell. The pulse and boom of sound envelopes you and connects with a place deep
in your body. Even before you’ve laid eyes on the twirling limbs of the
participants, it becomes almost impossible to resist the urge to move.
Inside the capoeira
practice room, the sound seems strangely smaller. But immediately you witness
the embroidery of the different artforms that come
together to form capoeira: martial arts, acrobatics,
aerobic exercise, dance, rhythm, music, song, and the Portuguese language.
Sometimes singing, instructor Todd
Russell plays hand drum beats in slowly varying cadences. Following Russell’s
instruction, class members overlay complementary patterns of movement but in
their own time sequence — not unlike musicians working within their own
pocket of rhythm but having to be mindful of the greater whole. In fact, the
group takes on the appearance of an orchestra: Russell conducts and the bodies
are instruments. Music becomes movement and vice versa, fused together by
hypnotic, wave-like repetition.
CapoeiraMandingaRochester
(“Mandinga” refers to a specific branch of the art)
formed in August of 2004. The response was so enthusiastic that Russell, who at
first commuted from Buffalo to
teach, moved to Rochester. Class
members describe the impact capoeira has had on their
lives as profound. Across the board, they speak of almost unconsciously
acquiring increased musical acuity, of feeling like they’re building a sense of
community that goes beyond what they may have experienced in team sports, and
of gravitating towards Brazil and the Afro-Brazilian culture in which capoeira first emerged.
“At its most obvious,” says OlaDlugosz, a graduate student
spending a year in Toronto, “it’s
just a series of kicks. But there’s so much more to it. It requires so much
intuition.”
“I’ve been a martial artist since I was a
kid,” says Martin Fischer, a small business owner and one of the more advanced
students in the class. “I had always studied Eastern styles, which tend to be
very linear. The movements, stances, and katas you
see in a lot of the Eastern arts are based in attacking in a straight line. In capoeira, you’re typically looking to use positioning,
circular movements, and momentum to gain power. Also, I was immediately drawn
to the music. I found it to be very powerful and motivating.”
Capoeiristas,
Fischer explains, refer to the combative aspect of capoeira
as “playing.” They prefer not to describe what they do in terms of fighting or
sparring. “When I heard that,” Fischer says, “I was taken aback. It didn’t make
sense to me.”
While it’s obvious to the naked eye
that physical confrontation is one of capoeira’s many
facets, individual creativity and a kind of physical empathy also come into
play.
“In the Eastern arts, there’s not really a lot
of room for the individual,” Fischer says. “Capoeira
really just lets you branch out and tap into what you’re taking from the art
and — hopefully — what you’re giving back to it. I’ve practiced a ton of
different arts and you really don’t find that anywhere else.”
Both Fischer and Dlugosz
emphasize the importance of reading one’s opponent. When two people square off
in capoeira, they must constantly gauge what the
other person’s about to do, which involves cunning and deception. At times, in
certain formations, the whole object is to avoid contact. Dlugosz
and Fischer also stress that capoeira isn’t
competitive in the traditional sense — the player seeks not only to outwit
their opponent but also to make the other person’s technique (called their
“game”) look as good as possible. Fischer refers to the face-off as a
“conversation.”
“Even before you’re able to do all the
physical things,” Dlugosz says, “you learn to dance
and you learn to sing. You have to have this sway and feel the beat of the
music that’s dictating how you’re playing. You play a lot of the game with your
head, because you anticipate what the person’s going to do, read them and read
their motions, respond to a lot of stimuli all at the same time.”
What
outsiders might refer to as “fighting,” then, takes on the qualities of a
dance — which makes sense when you consider that capoeira
developed during the Portuguese colonization of Brazil,
when Portuguese colonists ruled over West African slaves. By necessity, slaves
incorporated music and dance to disguise the fact that they were devising a way
to defend themselves. They also needed to communicate — in coded, musical
terms — the approach of white slave masters or law enforcement. So, to this
day, capoeira retains a very festive appearance and
an unmistakably Latin musical feel — even when practiced by a mostly
non-Latin group like Rochester’s.
A recent fundraiser, for example,
bore all the loose, noisy hallmarks of a Latin ballroom party, complete with
ethnic food and a strong emphasis on dance and entertainment. Even at formal
functions such as the annual batizado ceremony (where class members are “baptized” into
the group and awarded level belts),capoeira is very much a spectator sport. In fact, events
such as these depend on the audience clapping along to give them life, which
contrasts wildly with the reserve often found in other martial arts ceremonies.
While the musical allure of capoeira is easy enough to put into words, the physical
grace and composition displayed in its various formations — the roda (group
circle) and maculelê (one-on-one stickplay) — simply have to be witnessed.
Like the blues or other African-derived artforms that
arose in the Western Hemisphere, capoeira
embodies the festivity, spirit, and strength that can grow out of oppression. A
dance sequence called Puxada de Rede (“Fisherman’s Dance”) that the students performed at the fundraiser
demonstrated this in a particularly sublime fashion.
As Russell provided sole musical
accompaniment on hand drums and sang the narration, a group of about 20 class
members acted out a story about a fisherman who dies at sea after his wife has
a premonition and tries in vain to warn him. With breathtaking restraint, the
dancers conveyed the story’s mournfulness using just their movements but making
virtually no sound. As the events unfolded, a veiled female
figure in blue — Iemanji, goddess of the sea —
waved her arms at half the speed of the music and the rest of the dancers,
establishing her character’s otherworldliness. The piece showed the
doomed sailor (played by Fischer) after his demise standing in counterpoint to
both the goddess figure and his wife and concluded with his wife alone,
kneeling in silence. Especially with the language barrier, the performance
achieved the resonance and poetic power of opera.
If
you spend time with class members, you quickly notice how much they adopt
Portuguese phrases into their speech. To the casual observer, their enthusiasm
might seem to veer dangerously close to a fetish, an attraction to something
exotic.
The Rochestercapoeiristas’ approach, however, comes across as
refreshingly respectful and sincere when you consider that, in the US,
it’s hardly unusual for people to lift symbolism from other cultures with
little understanding of or regard for their meaning within the cultures they
come from. Everything from tattoos of tribal designs or characters from Asian
languages to dreadlocks, “world music,” and religious icons and mythology is
treated as if it’s there for us to consume and turn into fashion.
In that light, Dlugosz
has her own ideas about why Capoeira draws people towards
Brazil.
“Keep in mind that we’ll never really know
it,” she says, “because we’re not Brazilian. We don’t come from the same kind
of circumstance that caused this art to evolve. Even people that were training
in Brazil in
— I don’t know, the ’60s? — their reality was much
different than us living in Rochester
in 2006. It doesn’t translate completely if you don’t know where it came from.”
But what about the
self-defense aspect? How effective can a newcomer expect capoeira to be?
“I’ve taken women’s self-defense classes in
college,” she explains, “but they didn’t really give me much assurance, because
it’s just yelling ‘NO!’ and going for the groin. Whereas here, we do all kinds
of different grappling, so it’s not just that one reaction. I wouldn’t say that
I went into it with women’s self-defense as my first objective, but inevitably,
it has made me able to fight back if the situation calls for it.”
Dlugosz and
Fischer both imagine that life without the Rochester Mandinga
group would feel somewhat lonely and disorienting. “I’d be pretty much on my
own,” Fischer says. “I would have to say what I’d miss the most is the people.”
For Fischer, though, above all else, it’scapoeira’s overarching
philosophy, malÃcia,
that holds the most power. In writer and capoeira
expert Nestor Capoeira’s words, when the capoeirista opens up and embraces this philosophy, “that is
when strange things begin to occur — the sensation of ‘being there’ during a
game.” He sums up malÃcia as nothing short of “the knowledge of humanity, of life, of the suffering and
the motivation and fantasies of human beings.”
For more information about CapoeiraMandinga Rochester,
visit www.comexpressao.com or call 319-6521.
Fast facts
CapoeiraMandinga Rochester’s current membership of over 50 students
now includes UR students taking capoeira as an accredited class in the Movement and Dance
program.
Many of the musical, dance, and
cultural elements that coalesced into capoeira
originate from the southern Atlantic coastal region of Africa
in what is present-day Angola.
Capoeira
played a key role in the formation of Palmares, a
slave-founded community that achieved self-governing independence from
Portuguese colonial authority for nearly 100 years. The historical record
indicates that one of Palmares’ leaders, Zumbi, was not only a masterful warrior and strategist but
an expert in the art of capoeira. Zumbi
is a figure of mythic proportions in present-day Brazil,
and November 20th is celebrated as a holiday in his honor.
As a form of defense for the
Brazilian slave population, capoeira was not looked
upon favorably by the white Portuguese ruling class. Long outlawed by the
Portuguese and Brazilian governments, capoeira became
heavily intertwined with banditry and the Brazilian criminal underworld.
The practice of capoeira
was illegal in Brazil
until 1920. Two capoeira masters, MestreBimba and MestrePastinha, were instrumental in raising capoeira’s
profile to legitimate status. Capoeira continues to
sprout groups in many corners of the globe — including Scandinavia,
Australia, Japan,
and Brazil’s
Japanese population.
The primary instrument used in capoeira is the berimbau, which consists of a string that runs alongside a
wooden bow stuck into a metal gourd-shaped base and played with a stick to
create a melodic, elastic-sounding drone. Hand drums are also used to create capoeira’s rhythmic foundation.
Several recordings of capoeira music are readily available in the US
and online. Instructor Todd Russell recommends releases by MestreSuassuna and his group Cordão
de Ouro. Other recordings include Smithsonian
Folkways’ CapoeiraAngola 2: BrincandonaRoda and Curso de Capoeira
Regional featuring MestreBimba.
Russell’s recording, Crianças de Mandinga, is the only capoeira
recording to feature choruses sung exclusively by children. Recorded in 2003
and 2004 in Emeryville, California,
while Russell was teaching at an elementary school in Oakland’s
Chinatown, the CD artwork shows Russell holding a
smiling student in a headlock.
Capoeiristas
are known and referred to within the community by a Portuguese nickname. Though
the nicknames are often chosen in a whimsical spirit, instructor Russell
explains the use of nicknames is heavily steeped in tradition — originally,
nicknames were used to evade identification by the authorities, but for
modern-day capoeiristas, the name that they are
“baptized” with becomes an integral part of their identity. Todd Russell is
known as Carcará,
OlaDlugosz as Xarope, and
Martin Fischer as Rebobinar.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.
