Capoeira: The Brazilian Dance That Is Also a Martial Art
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Watch capoeira for the first time and you will not be sure what you are looking at. Two people move around each other in slow sweeping arcs, their legs tracing enormous circles through the air, their bodies bending impossibly low, their eyes locked together. They are fighting. They are also dancing. The line between the two is the entire point.
Capoeira was born in Brazil among enslaved Africans, most likely in the 16th and 17th centuries. The theory most historians accept is that enslaved people needed a way to train combat skills without their captors realising what they were doing. So they disguised a fighting system as a dance. The kicks looked like movements. The takedowns looked like acrobatics. The combat looked like celebration.
The music is inseparable from the practice. The berimbau — a single-string instrument made from a wooden bow and a gourd — controls the entire fight. Its rhythm sets the speed, intensity and style of the match. When the berimbau speeds up, the fighters speed up. When it slows, they become more deliberate. Practitioners learn to read the instrument before they learn to read their opponent.
After Brazilian independence, capoeira went through periods of being outlawed and driven underground. It survived because its communities kept it alive, particularly in Bahia in the northeast, where African cultural traditions ran deepest. In 1932 a capoeira master called Mestre Bimba opened the first formal school and began the process of bringing it into the open.
Today capoeira is practised in over 150 countries. It is recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The disguise is no longer needed. The art it protected survived everything.
