Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [11]
“Oh, no. I have few people who can talk with me. My name is Fernando. I am at university here.”
“May I ask you questions about capoeira?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’d be delighted. I am not a teacher, of course, but I can share with you what I know.” We walked together to a nearby cafe for fresh tropical fruit drinks that I had quickly grown to love. As we walked, I tried to ignore his remarkable beauty.
Fernando told me that it wasn’t until the 1930s that capoeira began to acquire some standing as a valued traditional Brazilian art, and this was largely because of the efforts of a few powerful teachers in Salvador. At that time, capoeira split into two loose groups. One, commonly known as capoeira regional, incorporated moves and practices from Eastern martial arts and other innovative practices. Capoeira regional was quickly adopted by the Brazilian middle class and was considered a “modernist” form of the art. The other major form, known as capoeira angola, was considered to have preserved the original African-Brazilian practices of capoeira and was the “traditionalist” form. Over the decades, Brazilian middle-class society had taken aspects of capoeira for themselves, transforming it in the process from a dangerous and mysterious practice that threatened social order into the National Brazilian Sport.
In Salvador, Fernando told me, capoeira angola was still practiced largely by the African-Brazilian lower-class. (He was an exception, Fernando said. “I’m middle class – no, lower middle-class, not really poor, but we aren’t rich.”) Despite cultural co-option, capoeira angola had remained, for all people who played and trained, a central part of their social and spiritual lives. And despite its lethal potential, capoeira angola was considered a “game” in Brazil and the verb used to describe its practice was to “play.”
After about a week of talking with Fernando, I decided to ask him if he would like to work as my research assistant for a few hours a week. I reflected sadly that this relationship of employer-employee would stifle any potential romance, but I had determined before arriving in Salvador that I was not going to get sexually involved while in Brazil, anyway. Fernando accepted my offer with delight. “It’ll help me pay for university,” he said.
We wandered Pelourinho, and Fernando began to tell me about it as perceived through his sharp eye and knowledge. He said that at some point, the Portuguese upper classes moved away and the huge houses became tenements, inhabited by the descendants of the very people who had previously been subjected to the whipping posts. The area became a rough neighborhood the middle classes avoided.
It appeared that the major commerce in the area was drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and con artistry. The only tourists was young backpackers who hung out on street corners, lured by the music, beauty, drugs, and prostitution. The con artists pounced on them as everyone watched. We saw a tourist get robbed one day while I was with my capoeira group. Our teacher shrugged and looked at me.
“They can afford it,” he said. “And they’re stupid. They just come to take what they can and get it cheap.”
As I began to get more and more involved with the capoeira group, I met few foreigners and found myself mostly in the company of young men. Nearly all foreigners playing capoeira angola in Salvador seemed to be with one very organized group that catered to them. I met almost no women players, Brazilian or otherwise. Of those few women who did play, I met almost none who were any good.
I became intoxicated by the training, play, and camaraderie; even as a novice player, I experienced a wonderful sense of joy, laughter, balance, and real play in every sense of the word within this practice that was also, as Alexandra had said, a symbol of African-Brazilian power and male sexual virility.
One Friday, about six weeks after I began training capoeira, I walked up the long hill to the Praça Sãnto Antônio, my