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Axé, Tallahassee Capoeira!: A Local Manifestation of a Globalized Afro- BAbirgaail zChirlisitainne R eTharrdadition
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COLLEGE OF MUSIC
“AXÉ, TALLAHASSEE CAPOEIRA!”:
A LOCAL MANIFESTATION OF A GLOBALIZED AFRO-BRAZILIAN TRADITION
By
ABIGAIL CHRISTINE REHARD
A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music
2020
Abigail Rehard defended this thesis on March 30, 2020. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Michael B. Bakan Professor Directing Thesis
Panayotis League Committee Member
Vincent Nicholas Joos Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express the utmost gratitude to my family members, friends, and mentors who have consistently been my biggest champions throughout this endeavor. I am grateful for the wisdom and guidance my committee members Dr. Michael Bakan, Dr. Vincent Joos, and Dr.
Paddy League have given me during the course of this project and for the early encouragement from Dr. Frank Gunderson and Dr. Meg Jackson to dig into this research. Professor Taz and
Instrutora Texuga and the Tallahassee Capoeira community have been incredibly generous with their time and openness to this study. I thank you for welcoming me into your capoeira family.
Axé!
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ...... v Abstract ...... vi
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Background ...... 4 Purpose and Significance ...... 7 Survey of Literature ...... 8 Theoretical Approach ...... 13 Methodology ...... 14 Overview of Chapters ...... 16
CHAPTER TWO: CAPOEIRA CONTEMPORÂNEA: A SPECTRUM OF STYLES ...... 18
CHAPTER THREE: CAPOEIRA IN TALLAHASSEE ...... 33 Capoeira in the Tallahassee Area ...... 33 Building the Academy: Tallahassee Capoeira’s Origin Story ...... 39 Teaching and Evaluating Capoeiristas ...... 42 Connecting to a Larger Capoeira Network ...... 45
CHAPTER FOUR: MAKING MUSIC AT TALLAHASSEE CAPOEIRA ...... 48 Instruments ...... 52 Capoeira Songs...... 55 “Quero Aprender” / “I Want to Learn” ...... 59 Altered States of Mind ...... 64
CHAPTER FIVE: THE VITALITY OF AXÉ ...... 68 Defining Axé ...... 68 Building Axé ...... 70 Practicing an Afro-Brazilian Tradition ...... 75 A Search for Authenticity ...... 78 Concluding Remarks ...... 83
APPENDICES ...... 85 A: ACL Testing Requirements ...... 85 B: Selection of Songs from Tallahassee Capoeira ...... 92 C: IRB Approval Letter ...... 101 D: Sample Consent Form...... 102
Bibliography ...... 103 Biographical Sketch ...... 108
iv LIST OF FIGURES
2.1. Early depiction of capoeira...... 20
3.1. Allied Capoeira League and Tallahassee Capoeira logos...... 39
3.2. Standardized corda levels for adult and kids in the Allied Capoeira League...... 44
3.3. Tallahassee Capoeira’s network with capoeira academies in the surrounding area...... 46
4.1. Pensador throwing a kick during the ACL tournament hosted by Tallahassee Capoeira. .... 50
4.2. Layering of instrumental toques in Tallahassee Capoeira bateria...... 54
v ABSTRACT
The Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance form known as capoeira has spread extensively around the world in recent decades. Today, capoeira academies may be found worldwide in cities large and small, especially throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. This thesis investigates the transnational study of capoeira, focusing on a capoeira contemporânea academy located in Tallahassee, Florida. Through participant-observation fieldwork, interviews with instructors and students, and musical analyses, I highlight the experiences of non-Brazilian practitioners teaching and learning capoeira and explore how these same individuals find meaning more broadly in their engagement with this Afro-Brazilian tradition. I examine how
Tallahassee Capoeira participants negotiate their ties to notions of Afro-Brazilianness through axé, a malleable force of power that is inherent to capoeira’s practice. In a successful capoeira roda, or circle, capoeira players maximize the axé of the space by being fully engaged in the movements within the game and by participating in music making. Axé encompasses the capacities of resilience, adaptability, strength, and communal solidarity that define the idealized capoeira experience in all of its myriad manifestations. It is that sense of axé, from the traditional realms of the Afro-Brazilian martial art to the globalized markets of the international fitness industry, that weaves together this diverse cultural complex. Exploring the vitality of axé within capoeira’s transnational settings, with a particular concentration on Tallahassee Capoeira, is the focus of this thesis.
vi CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
“All riiiiight, since I’m hearing sleepy voices this morning, we’re going to pick things up and have a…Capoeira Battle!” Professor Taz announces to the group of seven summer camp kids. It was the last day of a week-long capoeira camp. Music class was right before their lunch break at the park, and despite their insistence on singing the songs Taz creatively inserted their apelidos, or nicknames, into earlier that week, the volume of their singing had diminished as did their energy right before lunch. The idea of a sing-off instantly jolted their batteries.
To begin the battle, Professor split us into two teams—Maracajá, Pipoca, Jacaré, and myself against Coelha, Sapinho, Coruja, and Furacão. We knelt on the blue tumbling mats Taz had placed on opposite sides of the training floor. “We’re going to see which team can sing the loudest and the best,” Taz explains. “Now, we’re not yelling, but we’re using our best, loudest singing voice. Based on how each team sings the responses, I’ll be pushed away or pulled toward a team.” He notes that he will sing songs they already know the responses to but also songs they aren’t familiar with. The goal is to listen and sing it back to the best of our abilities.
Calling our attention to the start of the game, Taz begins playing a series of triplets on the berimbau before starting the São Bento Grande rhythm. He playfully sways back and forth between the two teams and begins calling easy songs with short responses like “AEIOU,”
“ABC,” and “Sim, sim sim, não, não, não” and longer songs they all know by heart like “Paraná
ê,” “Zum, zum, zum,” and “Santo Antônio quero água.” Kneeling on the mat and leaning their bodies toward Professor as much as possible without falling over, the kids sing the responses back, trying to draw Professor nearer to their mat. The closer their voice was to Professor physically, the better he will be able to hear them.
1 The songs began getting progressively faster and wordier as Taz starts calling tongue twisters like “Vivo no ninho de cobra.” “Vivo no ninho de cobra, sou cobra que cobra não morde, uma cobra conhece outra cobra, não precisa dizer quem é cobra.” With each word running into the next, we garble the Portuguese lyrics into nonsensical syllables, desperately trying to match the speed and contours of the melody. At an even faster tempo, Taz sings,
“Sereno cai, sereno cai, eu ralo tanto no cumbuco do balaio” before ending with the standard finale for Tallahassee Capoeira events: “La la é.” Chanting the response with all their might,
Coelha, Sapinho, Coruja, and Furacão manage to draw Professor all the way to their side by the end of the song, ending the Capoeira Battle.1
Musical interactions like the one described above are commonplace for the participants at
Tallahassee Capoeira. While the game-like structure of that music class would be familiar to many people in the United States, many would not recognize the Portuguese song lyrics and instrumental accompaniment that are tied to the Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance form known as capoeira. The music of capoeira is unfamiliar to many people outside of Brazil, but the physical movements of the capoeirista’s body accompanied by the music have captured the global imagination as the practice has spread extensively around the world in recent decades.
Today, capoeira academies may be found worldwide in cities large and small, especially throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. Such academies retain diverse types of relationships to their Brazilian counterparts, yielding interesting and problematic issues for the transnational study of this Afro-Brazilian cultural form. Within this framework of capoeira as a globalized cultural export of Brazil, I will focus on a capoeira contemporânea academy located in Tallahassee, Florida. I will examine how Tallahassee Capoeira participants negotiate their ties
1 Author’s field notes, August 2, 2019.
2 to notions of Afro-Brazilianness through the concept of axé that is inherent to capoeira’s practice, and also examine how these same individuals find meaning more broadly in their engagement with this transnational tradition.
Axé, or aṣe, as defined by dance scholar Barbara Browning (1998), is a Yoruba word meaning “pure potentiality, the power-to-make-things-happen.”2 This malleable force is expressed in many Afro-diasporic practices in Brazil, including candomblé, samba, and capoeira.3 Capoeiristas, or capoeira players, often invoke the term as a form of salutation or to describe the energy of the space. The success of interactions within the capoeira roda, or circle, formed by participants in which two capoeiristas play the game accompanied by music, is ensured through the concept of axé. Capoeiristas manipulate the axé of the space by being completely engaged in the movements within the game, supporting one another’s endeavors, and fully participating in the singing and clapping along to songs. Collective music making is the most powerful way to generate good axé, as was demonstrated in the summer camp music class.
Each capoeirista’s loudest and best singing voice, regardless of correct pronunciations, served to intensify the energy of the space and drew Professor in like a magnet. This was axé in action, for axé’s potential to move and inspire has lent itself to varied interpretations historically up to the present, from the time of its violent uprooting from Yoruba lands during the Atlantic slave trade, through its reinscription into Afro-Brazilian traditions, and on to its diverse manifestations by capoeira practitioners around the world today. Axé encompasses the capacities of resilience, adaptability, strength, and communal solidarity that define the idealized capoeira experience in all of its myriad manifestations. It is that sense of axé, from the traditional realms of the Afro-
2 Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 177. 3 Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 28-29.
3 Brazilian martial art to the globalized markets of the international fitness industry, that weaves together this diverse cultural complex. Exploring the vitality of axé within capoeira’s transnational settings, with a particular concentration on Tallahassee Capoeira, is the focus of this thesis.
Background
My initial introduction to the musicultural world of capoeira took place years before my move to
Tallahassee in 2018. I first encountered capoeira through a nontraditional route within the walls of the “Music Building,” as the late Bruno Nettl would have described it.4 A large portion of my graduate percussion studies at Northern Illinois University concentrated on the berimbau, the
Afro-Brazilian musical bow integral to the expression of capoeira. During my time there, I was a member of Projeto Arcomusical, a berimbau sextet that promotes the performance of contemporary chamber music on the instrument. Our treatment of the berimbau in the ensemble’s repertoire was far removed from its performance practice in capoeira, but to better understand the instrument’s customary context, we decided to begin training capoeira Angola with a Brazilian contramestre in Chicago. We hoped that by rooting ourselves in capoeira, and the traditionalist style of capoeira at that, our deep engagement with the instrument would be perceivable in our performances. By embodying the berimbau’s cultural context, we reasoned, we could transform our interpretations to respect its traditions and appropriately represent its performance practice. The approach of this thesis is related yet distinct. I am returning to the study of capoeira, but with an emphasis on how non-Brazilian practitioners, rather than
Brazilians, commit to the sustenance of the capoeira tradition—especially its musical practices—
4 See Bruno Nettl, “Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture (An Essay in Four Movements),” Yearbook for Traditional Music 21 (1989), 1-16.
4 while at the same time extending that tradition’s scope and range through various processes of musicultural transformation. 5
Widely believed to have developed as a disguised form of slave rebellion during Brazil’s colonial period (1500-1815), the practice of capoeira has survived multiple periods of prohibition and marginalization over the course of centuries.6 In recent years, however, its status as a cultural symbol of Brazilian identity and nationhood was elevated by UNESCO’s 2014 designation of capoeira as a form of Brazilian “intangible cultural heritage.”7 Within the capoeira roda, martial and dancelike movements flow seamlessly in a corporeal conversation between two capoeiristas at a time. The two players are encircled by a group of fellow capoeiristas, who either play percussion instruments or clap while singing songs about the history of slavery, that elude to famous mestres and leaders, and songs about day-to-day life—working in the port, going to the market, and playing capoeira—in Brazil.8
Capoeira is passed down from mestre, or master, to student in a dynamic, oral-aural mode of transmission for the purpose of preserving and evolving cultural knowledge and values.
Within the context of such transmissions, the style of movements, the importance of ritual, and the use of certain songs and rhythms vary across capoeira groups. Discourse typically divides these distinctions into two main styles: the “whitened,” sport-like capoeira regional and the
“Africanist,” ritualistic capoeira Angola.9 The most widespread style of capoeira contemporânea
5 See Michael B. Bakan, World Music: Traditions and Transformations, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw- Hill Education, 2018). 6 Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2005), chap. 1. 7 “Capoeira circle,” Intangible Cultural Heritage, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, accessed January 13, 2020, https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/capoeira-circle-00892. 8 For song examples, see “Cajuê,” “É roda vem jogar,” “Jogo capoeira de Angola,” “Marinheiro só,” “No Mercado Modelo tem acarajé,” “Vou dizer ao meu sinhô,” and “Vou vender minha novilha” in Appendix B. 9 See Lewis (1992: 104-114), Downey (2005, chap. 11), and Griffith (2016, chap. 1).
5 avoids these sharp delineations, however, sliding along a spectrum of variation or simply affirming that “capoeira is capoeira,” that there is essentially just one capoeira.
Largely practiced by working-class Afro-Brazilians in urban public spaces in its early history, capoeira was linked with street violence and vagrancy by mainstream Brazilian society.
By the 1930s-40s, capoeira was taken off the streets and institutionalized by the likes of Mestre
Bimba and Mestre Pastinha.10 Their capoeira academies attracted more and more middle-class practitioners in Brazil, and by the 1970s, capoeira had become a Brazilian cultural export with mestres emigrating to teach this tradition in the United States and Europe. Capoeira’s popularity as a global fitness phenomenon has spread extensively in recent decades with an ever-increasing number of upper and middle-class capoeiristas living in and outside of Brazil. As a result of its globalization, various aspects of the tradition have been altered by its cultural commodification.
Like many other North American cities, Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, has become host to an active capoeira scene. Central to this scene is Tallahassee Capoeira, located in the city’s
Midtown district. As noted, this capoeira contemporânea academy will be the main focus of this thesis, which will situate Tallahassee Capoeira’s operation within the broader sphere of capoeira’s cosmopolitan, international status as a globalized cultural export from Brazil.
Tallahassee Capoeira is one of four academies belonging to the consortium Allied Capoeira
League (ACL), which also has branches in Gainesville, Florida; Macon, Georgia; and
Sacramento, California. According to the league’s founder, Mestre Aranha, “[ACL’s] focus is on using an objective-based, progressive curriculum to promote well-rounded students who use the
10 Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2005), 125.
6 core values and traditions of our art to stay modern in a uniquely authentic way.”11 While the
Tallahassee branch of ACL was formally launched in 2014, the Tallahassee-native instructors—
Professor Taz and Instrutora Texuga—have been teaching capoeira classes since 2009.
Purpose and Significance
This research explores how the Afro-Brazilian tradition of capoeira adapted to become relevant for Tallahassee capoeiristas, who are primarily young, white, middle-class families with adults ranging in age from late twenties to forties and children from three to seventeen years old.
Traditions like capoeira are not stagnant—they develop and adjust according to the values of the people practicing them, responding to new situations and experimenting with new ideas. As capoeira has become a global sport and its community has become increasingly diverse, are there certain values and traditions that remain fundamental to its practice? How do they compare to those of Tallahassee Capoeira and the Allied Capoeira League? Does Tallahassee Capoeira’s recontextualization of this tradition yield novel approaches or elements relative to capoeira’s mainstream practice? How do these capoeiristas in Tallahassee engage with the cultural context of capoeira? How are those renegotiated values represented in their musical practices? While the academy has shifted away from more traditional approaches in their organization and pedagogy,
I argue that Tallahassee capoeiristas maintain the art form’s traditional values by cultivating axé through their physical movements and active music-making, and in building community through positive results of ritual practices.
This study is significant in its focus on an emerging global trend of non-Brazilian capoeiristas teaching this tradition to other non-Brazilians. Scholarship has largely been skewed
11 Mestre Aranha, “Allied Capoeira League Going Strong After 3 Years on Greatmats,” Newswire, May 30, 2018, accessed May 13, 2019, https://www.newswire.com/news/allied-capoeira-league-going-strong-after-3-years- on-greatmats-20501740.
7 toward the more traditionalist style of capoeira Angola in Brazil, focusing on its African and
Afro-Brazilian roots. As the practice has flourished for a number of decades around the world, however, it has shifted to suit the needs of its diverse practitioners. Recently, scholars including
Aula (2017), Delamont and Stephens (2017), and Robitaille (2014) have published articles on international capoeira practices outside of Brazil. In these cases where capoeira outside of Brazil is discussed, it is still usually in reference to the tradition being taught by a Brazilian. This remains a very new area of research, however, and with the exception of a single master’s thesis
(Humphrey 2018), capoeira taught by non-Brazilians outside of Brazil has remained unexplored by ethnomusicologists.
My research adds to the limited discourse on capoeira contemporânea and the increasing number of non-Brazilian instructors. Additionally, I focus closely on the treatment of axé and music making within these contemporary expressions of capoeira and examine how capoeira music is produced and consumed by Tallahassee capoeiristas. With a number of families participating in Tallahassee Capoeira’s events, I have included the voices of children and adult capoeiristas alike in my discussion. Their combined voices, in dialogue with my own, offer a nuanced interaction with the Afro-diasporic concept of axé, which is fostered through participatory music making in ways that bind Tallahassee Capoeira together with the larger transnational capoeira community.
Survey of Literature
While there is an increasing amount of contemporary scholarship on capoeira, there are some texts that have remained formative to the discourse of this tradition. These include J. Lowell
Lewis’s book Ring of Liberation (1992), as well as several publications by Greg Downey, including his ethnography Learning Capoeira (2005), which focuses on the capoeirista’s
8 apprenticeship process; and his 2002 article “Listening to Capoeira,” which focuses more on embodiment and musical interactions in the capoeira roda. Both authors draw from their experiential knowledge based on their training in the art of capoeira Angola in Brazil, setting the standard (or perhaps showing the inevitability) of deep, participatory engagement for non-native scholars wishing to study capoeira.
Influenced by Geertz’s structuralist concept of “deep play,”12 Lewis provides a semiotic reading of capoeira by examining how capoeiristas play out acts of conflict and liberation from their everyday lives inside the capoeira roda. His approach, utilizing Victor Turner’s view of ritual as a social drama and capoeira’s performance of deceptive discourse, is of particular interest to my research, as I examine the emotional by-products of successful and failed rituals.
Downey examines how knowledge is passed on from mestre to student, how capoeiristas evoke the origin and development of capoeira through shared histories and song evocations, and how capoeiristas’ sense of cunning, bodily awareness, and vulnerability developed in the roda translate to their everyday lives. Though he was taught by a Brazilian mestre, his experiences learning as a non-Brazilian capoeirista informed my own at Tallahassee Capoeira.
Matthias Röhrig Assunção and Gerard Taylor’s works both put contemporary capoeira practices into a historical context and discuss how capoeira has developed globally. Assunção wraps the history of capoeira from slave culture to the present into a discussion of Brazilian nationalism in his book Capoeira: A History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (2005). He problematizes the cultural significance of Afro-Brazilian and Brazilian identity in capoeira as it became globalized and argues that capoeira is able to act as an instrument for racial desegregation. Taylor’s second book, Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to
12 See Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973: 412-454.
9 Cyberspace (2007), continues his critical engagement with capoeira from the start of the twentieth century to its more contemporary manifestations around the world. His discussions of capoeira’s multiple grading systems, increased interactions with dance, and representations in films, computer games, and cyberspace highlight how the tradition has transformed as it has become commodified. The historical contexts supplied by Assunção and Taylor helped me situate Tallahassee Capoeira in the spectrum of capoeira expressions around the world.
Sara Delamont and Neil Stephens, Laurence Robitaille, and Jason Stanyek give more pointed discussions of capoeira as a global sport phenomenon, its representations through non-
Brazilian bodies, and communities built on interactions with embodied Afro-Brazilianness.
Cultural sociologists Delamont and Stephens have written prolifically on diasporic capoeira
Angola communities in the United Kingdom. Their book Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of
Diasporic Capoeira (2017) is just one example that explores the experiences of non-Brazilian adults learning capoeira at a variety of levels and how Brazilian teachers experience their own re-enculturation as they embody the exotic, Afro-Brazilian other.
Cultural theorist Laurence Robitaille largely focuses on the commercialization of capoeira contemporânea in North American markets as immigrating Brazilians brought the Afro-
Brazilian practice abroad and used their embodied knowledge for economic gain. She argues that a number of other indirect outcomes came from this cultural commodification as they also
“generated affective communities, disseminated a Brazilian imaginary soon transformed into symbolic capital, and arguably transmitted an embodied memory that can be traced back to the practice’s African ancestry.”13
13 Laurence Robitaille, “Capoeira as a Resource: Multiple Uses of Culture under Conditions of Transnational Neoliberalism,” PhD diss., York University, 2013, ii.
10 In his dissertation, ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek devotes a chapter to the issues of representation of capoeira in the United States and examines the capoeira roda as a complex, permeable, and corporeal boundary that allows capoeiristas to continually interact with and shape individual and national identities. Utilizing Mark Slobin’s concept of “affinity intercultures,” Stanyek believes capoeira communities in the United States are “constructed across racial, gender, ethnic and class boundaries that don’t evaporate just because diverse populations feel an affinity for a mode of creative production” and problematizes the simplified notions of cultural tourism and exoticism with which these communities are often labeled.14
These forms of affinity interculture produce unity among people who normally would not have the opportunity to communicate.
Beyond Delamont and Stephens, Robitaille, and Stanyek, several other scholars have contributed to the literature on capoeira as a transnational phenomenon (Aula 2017, Brito 2012,
Fernandes 2018). Recently, Ashley Humphrey’s ethnomusicological thesis (2018), centered on her fieldwork with the Michigan Center for Capoeira, problematizes the impact American culture has had on capoeira aesthetics in its representations through American capoeira academies and the media. She argues that dominant social structures in the United States ultimately highlight performance and devalue various Afro-diasporic rituals and practices. The engagement with capoeira’s transnationalism informed by these works has influenced my approach on multiple levels, and by focusing on the day-to-day practices within a local academy run by two Floridians,
I hope to highlight the Afro-Brazilian rituals and practices that underpin the musicultural processes of the genre’s internationalization specifically.
14 Jason Stanyek, “Diasporic Improvisation and the Articulation of Intercultural Music,” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2004, 193.
11 Within these readings of the increasingly rapid globalization of capoeira, issues concerning the importance of nationality, racial identity, tradition, and authenticity have proliferated. Anthropologist Lauren Miller Griffith discusses these debates throughout her book
In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition
(2016). Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage, of studying an art form with a local master at its place of origin, Griffith examines how non-Brazilians learn capoeira Angola and claim legitimacy while navigating issues of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation. With her educational background in philosophy, dance, and performance studies,
Ann Cooper Albright focuses on issues of phenomenology, gender, and sexuality through dance and cultural theory. Her book Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (2013), a collection of her publications over the past twenty-five years, includes a chapter on her involvement in capoeira in which she applies a phenomenological approach. From her insights into the practice’s particular approach to movement, Albright believes it can be used to dissolve strict boundaries between the identities of self and other. Thomas Turino’s discussions on participatory music making and authentic practices in old-time music and dance in his book
Music as Social Life (2008) have also provided me a frame with which to consider Tallahassee
Capoeira. While their approaches to teaching and playing capoeira may differ from more
‘traditional’ concepts of the art form, they ought to be considered just as meaningful.
In terms of interpreting capoeira as a form of ritual practice, I have been informed in this work by my readings of Victor and Edith Turner and Randall Collins, especially with respect to their insightful and varied approaches to discussing the diverse functions and outcomes of ritual practices. According to Victor Turner, in his book The Ritual Process (1969), the liminal states within rituals, where participants are able to exist in a time and place outside of normative social
12 behavior, emphasize a communion of equal individuals, or communitas. Edith Turner’s work further develops the idea of communitas, applying it to a variety of social situations (festivals, music, sports, work, disaster, revolution, etc.) and exploring its relation to collective joy more specifically in her book Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (2012). Similar to the
Turners, Randall Collins (2004) proposes that successful rituals create social connections and leave individuals with collective effervescence, while failed rituals drain emotional energy.
Individuals are drawn to those interactions that give them the best emotional energy payoff. My theoretical framework for Tallahassee Capoeira draws largely from these discussions on ritual practices, especially those of Collins.
Theoretical Approach
Even though capoeira has itself been institutionalized and commodified, its transnational practice at Tallahassee Capoeira continues to emphasize community building alongside individual growth through rituals. Rituals, according to Randall Collins, are mechanisms of “mutually focused emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality,” which generate group solidarity and individual emotional energy.15 Rituals are processes constructed from a combination of factors with varying levels of intensity when human bodies come together in the same place, with some barrier to outsiders, where they can experience heightened mutual awareness and emotional arousal. Focusing on micro-situational processes, Collins’s theory on rituals shows how and when symbols are created and when they dispel, why they are sometimes full of magnetism and why they sometimes fade into indifference.16
15 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. 16 Ibid., chap. 2.
13 The roda, the game of capoeira, is one of the most important rituals within the capoeira community. In the roda, the participatory music-making and improvised, corporeal conversations between capoeiristas lead to what Collins refers to as entrainment, or a syncing up of bodies physically and mentally. When successful, these sorts of interaction rituals create social connections and leave individuals with higher levels of confidence, enthusiasm, and initiative, motivating them to return for more. Underlying the ritual interactions at Tallahassee Capoeira is the group’s agency in shaping the positive axé. Axé is a transformative power, and similar to rituals, it can either be positive or negative depending on the interactions between individuals within a space. Gerard Béhague notes that like all types of force, axé is transmittable; it is conducted by material and symbolic means and transmitted to objects or to human beings.17 In a successful roda, capoeiristas manipulate the axé of the space by being fully engaged in the movements within the game and participating in music making. The effervescence felt by
Tallahassee capoeiristas from imbuing the academy’s space with their singing voices, their playing of instruments, their clapping, and their cheers during a roda to the final “Axé, capoeira!” that has been called out at the end of the day is contagious. By invoking this Afro- diasporic concept, Tallahassee Capoeira practitioners actively work to ensure positive interactions that create strong social connections in this globalized sport. This communal solidarity defines the idealized capoeira experience in all of its myriad manifestations.
Methodology
The bulk of my fieldwork research centers on the various activities at Tallahassee Capoeira from the end of May to mid-October of 2019, including training sessions, music classes, and rodas as
17Gerard Béhague, “Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Religious Musics: A Case of Cultural Pluralism,” Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 94.
14 well as special events such as the week-long summer camp for advanced kids and fall batizado, or baptism, ceremony. Utilizing a reflexive approach throughout this timeframe, I participated in capoeira training and music class within the teen and adult beginners class division twice a week on Monday and Wednesday evenings and played in the academy’s weekly Friday roda while observing and engaging with fellow capoeiristas. I also observed, and oftentimes participated in, the music classes offered for children ranging in age from six to twelve years old before Friday rodas.
As a twenty-eight-year-old, white, female graduate student, I was within the average age range of the teen and adult beginner classes, which were also pretty evenly balanced in terms of gender. Like all beginner capoeiristas, I experienced periods of intense aching muscles and blistered soles along with feelings of frustration, embarrassment, and anxiety. There was a great sense of commiseration among myself and my informants. The large amount of joking during classes and the “AHA!” moments of learning a sequence of moves counterbalanced the other discomforts. After integrating myself into the academy’s culture over the summer, I conducted formal and informal interviews during the fall with a majority of the Tallahassee Capoeira instructors and adult participants, covering such topics as their personal experiences with capoeira, cross-cultural learning and teaching, musical functions, song lyrics, and community building. Typically lasting an hour, formal interviews took place in quieter establishments near the academy or in informants’ homes. Shorter, informal interviews and follow-up conversations were held before and/or after events at Tallahassee Capoeira as well. The names of my informants are kept confidential, but I will refer to them using their apelidos, or nicknames, or in one case, their artist pseudonym. 18
18 According to Mestre Poncianinho, “Capoeiristas assumed “apelidos” (nicknames) to avoid detection from the police. This custom is still used today when capoeiristas assume capoeira nickname at their first “batizado”
15 My participation and observations focused on how music functions in the Tallahassee
Capoeira space and how participants of all ages interact with capoeira music inside and outside of the academy. I analyzed the recorded music and live music played at the academy, finding out how capoeira music is consumed and produced by participants. I also studied their style of singing and playing capoeira instruments during events geared toward children and adults to provide as rich a description of the soundscape of Tallahassee Capoeira as possible so that readers of the thesis will be well equipped to understand how music is transmitted and how it functions within capoeira’s space.
Overview of Chapters
In the following chapter, I will contextualize Tallahassee Capoeira within capoeira’s broader history, discussing the stylistic developments of capoeira Angola, regional, and contemporânea in Brazil, the emigration of Brazilian mestres searching for better economic opportunities, and the emerging trend of non-Brazilians teaching capoeira outside of Brazil. Through the works of
Assunção (2005), Griffith (2016), Lewis (1992), and Taylor (2007), I highlight how the customs, beliefs, music, and histories of these styles have always been in flux throughout capoeira’s existence in Brazil. I explore how the dichotomies were created between capoeira regional and
Angola and how those tensions play out in capoeira contemporânea academies today.
Chapter three concentrates on a local manifestation of capoeira within this globalized practice. Founded in 2014, Tallahassee Capoeira has become a compelling part of the capoeira network in the southern United States. In this chapter, I consider how the city of Tallahassee is conducive to the development of a vibrant capoeira scene and how the Tallahassee Capoeira
(baptism or grading ceremony).” In Essential Capoeira: The Guide to Mastering the Art (Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2007), 12.
16 academy emerged within this urban environment. I look at how their class schedule, curriculum, graduation system, and community compare to other capoeira academies and how they might reflect the values of the idealized capoeira experience.
The fourth chapter delves into the music making practices at Tallahassee Capoeira.
Described as the life force of capoeira, music is critical to the everyday operations inside the academy. This chapter explores the various functions of music in a capoeira game through the types of instruments, rhythms, and songs used. I consider questions surrounding musical traditions and transformations such as: Which aspects of capoeira’s musical tradition have or have not been retained? How is the music of capoeira, and the inherent values of axé and community building, taught to non-Brazilian capoeiristas? How do primarily English-speaking
Tallahassee capoeiristas connect with Portuguese lyrics of capoeira songs?
The final chapter considers the vitality of axé through the rituals of Tallahassee Capoeira.
Applying Randall Collins’s theory of interaction ritual chains, I maintain that axé is built on previous interactions—good or bad—among individual agents through learned rituals within the daily operations at Tallahassee Capoeira. These rituals, in turn, connect individuals to a larger community. Influenced by Thomas Turino’s discussion of participatory versus presentational music styles (Turino 2008), I argue that the participatory aspects of capoeira music are what ensures good axé, culminating in positive, collective energy from these interactions. By fostering axé through music, Tallahassee capoeiristas not only connect with one another within the space of the capoeira roda, but they also encourage ties to capoeira’s roots in Brazil.
17 CHAPTER TWO
CAPOEIRA CONTEMPORÂNEA: A SPECTRUM OF STYLES
É roda, vem jogar! It’s roda, come play! Berimbau tá tocando; The berimbau is playing; O jogo é regional. The game is regional.
É de ioiô, é de iaiá It’s from the elders Capoeira de Angola jogar Capoeira Angola is playing Lá na beira do mar. There by the seashore
Passed down as an oral tradition, the importance of ritual, the lexicon of physical movements, and the use of certain songs and rhythms in capoeira inevitably varies across capoeira groups. Stylistic differences in capoeira are based on the emphasis of certain elements like how capoeiristas move their bodies, what narratives are perpetuated, how practitioners are dressed, and what music is performed. These distinctions typically fall into two categories: the sport-like capoeira regional created by Mestre Bimba and the ritualistic capoeira Angola attributed to Mestre Pastinha. The most widespread style, capoeira contemporânea, avoids these sharp delineations, however. Songs, like the two listed above that reference either capoeira
Angola or regional, are embraced by contemporânea academies like Tallahassee Capoeira. In these spaces, the sounds, movements, and stories of both styles intermingle and create a multidimensional history of capoeira.
Commonly written off as a hybrid between capoeira Angola and regional, capoeira contemporânea has largely been ignored by scholars. Instead, discourse is greatly skewed toward the style of capoeira Angola in Brazil, focusing on its African and Afro-Brazilian roots. This chapter will briefly overview the history of capoeira before addressing the stylistic developments of capoeira contemporânea and the emerging global trend of non-Brazilians teaching capoeira to other non-Brazilians. How did the dichotomy between capoeira regional and Angola emerge?
18 What is capoeira contemporânea and what are its distinguishing stylistic features and values?
How do they relate to the more commonly referenced styles of capoeira Angola and regional?
How did this art form that originated during Brazil’s colonial period find its way to present-day
Tallahassee, Florida? An exploration into how axé, the divine power of transformation in Yoruba religion, became ingrained in capoeira will also be woven into this history.
Brazil, the largest country in South America both geographically and in population, is also home to the largest population of African descendants outside of Africa with at least 3.65 million slaves shipped to its shores,19 and the current estimated population of Brazilians of
African descent is 14.5 million.20 As a colony of the Portuguese empire from 1500-1888, Brazil largely served as an exporter of goods like hardwoods, coffee, sugar, and precious metals.
Portuguese colonizers transported vast numbers of Africans, more than any other European country, from regions in West and Central Africa to Brazil. Researching the remaining ties to
African cultures, Nina Rodrigues identified cultural elements from Nagô (Yoruba), JeJe (Ewe),
Minas (Fanti/Ashanti), Haussá (Hausa), Tapa (Nupe), Gurúnci, Fulá (Fulani), Mandinga
(Mandé), and Bantu groups in Brazil.21 Sometime between the horrific journey over the Atlantic and intensive labor conditions on Portuguese plantations to the abolishment of slavery in 1888 and urbanization of Brazil, the art form of capoeira was born.
With limited surviving documentation, historians have been unable to pinpoint the exact circumstances of capoeira’s origins. Most capoeiristas agree that capoeira was a vehicle for resistance and liberation for African slaves who developed this practice as self-defense on
19 Thomas Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17-20. 20 “Tabela 1.3.1 - População residente, por cor ou raça, segundo o sexo e os grupos de idade - Brasil – 2010,” IGBE Census, 2010. 21 J. Lowell Lewis, Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.
19 colonial Brazilian plantations. Through this belief, the violent movements of capoeira were disguised in the form of a dance accompanied by music so slaves could practice under the eyes of their plantation owners (see Figure 2.1).22
Figure 2.1. Early depiction of capoeira. Jogar Capoeira ou Danse de la Guerre, engraving by Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, 1825, published in 1835.
Capoeira’s creation myths—its remote origins, its invention in Brazil by runaway slaves, and its disguise as a dance—have been widely circulated by capoeiristas and reproduced by scholars in books, academic journals, and dissertations, even though they ignore the lack of evidence and overlook that which contradicts these claims. These myths are significant, however, in forming identities through the processes in which communities decide to remember and construct these narratives. According to Matthias Assunção, capoeira was critical in “the formation of national, regional, and ethnic identities and in the interaction with these processes organized its own foundational myths and transcendental meanings.”23 Assunção goes on to deconstruct the master narratives surrounding capoeira that focus on Eurocentric repression, a
22 Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 91-92. 23 Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (Routledge: New York, 2005) 9.
20 search for Brazilian nationalism, variations based on racialized theories, and Afrocentric viewpoints.
Flowing through this expression of Afro-Brazilian culture is the power of axé. As a syncretic extension of aṣe from Yoruba rituals, axé manifests in a number of Afro-Brazilian traditions like capoeira, samba, and candomblé, and it has been explored by scholars including
Elbein dos Santos (1976), Béhague (2006), Browning (1995), Robitaille (2013), and Stanyek
(2004). In her definitive book Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (1992), Margaret
Thompson Drewal outlines the concept of aṣe in Yoruba ritual dances in Nigeria, defining it as a power of transformation—the power to bring things into existence, to make things happen.
“Humans possess this generative force and through education, initiation, and experience, learn to manipulate it to enhance their own lives and the lives of those around them.”24 This divine energy allows orixás, Yoruba deities, to take the stage—and the bodies of the dancers—during these rituals. Their presence brings significance to the dance.25 Axé is not restricted to the sacred realm. It can exist within a secular rhythm such as samba or capoeira, though they likely entered these traditions through practitioners of candomblé.26 Drawing upon her many years of experience dancing in candomblé houses and practicing capoeira in Brazil and the United States,
Barbara Browning has greatly enriched the discourse surrounding axé through her writings and related activities. She argues that within the roda de samba or roda de capoeira, “the human body
24 Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 27. 25 Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion, 28-29. 26 Many capoeiristas in early twentieth-century Bahia were actively involved in candomblé groups. Commonalities between capoeira and candomblé can be found in their circular formations and the moments of performance associated with specific toques, or rhythmic patterns. The three berimbaus in the capoeira bateria echo the use of the three atabaque drums in candomblé. The alteration of the state of mind produced by playing capoeira has been linked to the accounts of trance in candomblé as well. In Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (2005), 116-17.
21 assumes a heightened level of significance.”27 The potentiality of axé contained within capoeiristas—the power to transform one’s surroundings—courses through capoeira’s history, allowing it to survive, adapt, and flourish in a variety of environments.
The practice of capoeira has survived multiple periods of repression and attempted of eradication over the course of Brazil’s history. After the Portuguese court moved to Rio de
Janeiro in 1808, an official police guard was established in Brazil. Their criminal records, for the first known time, indicated that capoeira was vehemently condemned and criminalized. After
Brazil’s proclamation as an independent republic in 1889, the extinction of capoeira ranked even higher as a governmental priority as they sought to present the country on par with European nations.28 “For the new rulers, inspired by the authoritarian ideologies of conservative modernization such as positivism and social Darwinism, the elimination of capoeira became part of the necessary hygienization of Brazil’s capital.”29 Capoeira was a practice of the lower class and African barbarism in the eyes of the ruling elite, and official edicts formally outlawing capoeira followed. The Criminal Code of 1890 dedicated one chapter to vagrants and the practice of capoeira—the first three articles criminalized idleness, while the last three dealt with capoeira.30
As European racial theories in the nineteenth-century spread, Brazil’s largely mestiço population became the focus of discourse among the country’s ruling elite and intellectuals. Most discussions tended to lament the racial handicap of Brazilians whose ancestors were primarily
Africans or indigenous peoples. Since European racial theories espoused the belief in white superiority but differed over issues like miscegenation, some Brazilian scholars handpicked
27 Browning, Samba, 28. 28 Assunção, Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art, 9-10. 29 Assunção, 11. 30 Ibid., 11.
22 aspects of different theories that suited them best. Prominent among these was the theory of branqueamento, or whitening, where a population with inferior racial characteristics could gradually improve over time through the continuous influx of European immigrants. While capoeira was being eradicated from the streets of Rio de Janeiro, its criminalization was increasingly questioned by a growing number of middle-class Brazilians. Some considered it a possible tool in the construction of Brazilian identity. For capoeira to become a marker of brasilidade, or Brazilianness, its slave origins had to be hidden and its mestiço character emphasized.31
As miscegenation in Brazil was beginning to be marketed as a symbol of national identity, rivalries among European countries in the decades prior to World War I increased. In response to the growing tensions in Europe, physical training for men was emphasized, marking the development of physical education and gymnastics programs in countries like Denmark and
Germany. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 contributed to the questioning of the stereotype of the effeminate East and awakened Western interest in Oriental martial arts, in particular the
Japanese judo. Jiu-jitsu masters started to travel around the world to show their skills and challenge local fighters, resulting in an intense interaction between Eastern and Western martial arts. 32 For Brazilian nationalists, these developments confirmed the urgency to identify and develop a national fighting art, and once again they turned their attention towards capoeira.33
31 Assunção, 11-15. 32 With a decrease in European immigration and a heightened need for coffee workers during the early twentieth century, Brazil signed an agreement with Japan to open its doors to immigrant workers. Japanese immigrants searching for better economic opportunities began arriving in Brazil in 1908. See Meiko Nishida’s Diaspora and Identity: Japanese Brazilians in Brazil and Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018). Brazil’s first jiu-jitsu schools were established in Belém and Rio de Janeiro in 1914 and 1927, respectively. See Assunção’s Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art, 127. 33 Assunção, 14-15. Examining connections that may exist between the processes of institutionalization and the affirmation of national identity in capoeira and those present in other Afro-diasporic martial art forms in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as ag’ya in Martinique, chatou in Guadaloupe, and rara and tire machèt in Haiti—
23 In one of the first detailed reports on capoeira (1906), Lima Campos compared the characteristics of French savate, Japanese jiu-jitsu, English boxing, Portuguese stick fighting, and Brazilian capoeira. In his report, the slave origins of capoeira were negated or greatly diminished. Instead, capoeira became an indigenous tradition, which had the advantage of appearing truly Brazilian.34 In 1928, Anibal Burlamaqui designed the first method for a Brazilian national gymnastics practice based on capoeira. Burlamaqui departed from earlier nationalist views by recognizing capoeira’s slave origins. According to him, runaway slaves invented the art. They did not build on previous African traditions but they developed a “strange game of arms, legs, head and rump, with such an agility and such violence, able to give them a fabulous superiority [over the slave catchers]” in Brazil.35
After 1920, racial theories became increasingly scrutinized. Anthropologists like Franz
Boas (1858–1942) and Ashley Montagu (1905–1999) challenged the common assumptions of racial inferiority of non-whites and the existence of human races. Gilberto Freyre, a student of
Boas, became particularly influential through his essay The Masters and The Slaves (1933), which valorized, for the first time, the miscegenation of white masters and enslaved Indians and
Africans. His work was paramount to formulating Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, a belief of racial harmony through miscegenation, that still maintained ideologies of white dominance in social hierarchies through the progressive whitening of Brazilian society.36
After the 1930 revolution, Getúlio Vargas was installed as interim president by the military from 1930-1934 and would later serve as a constitutionally elected president from 1934-
as well as Eastern martial arts like jiu-jitsu, karate, taekwondo, and kung fu—would be a fruitful avenue for future research. 34 Assunção, 15. 35 Ibid., 17. 36 Gilberto Freyre, Samuel Putnam, and David Maybury-Lewis, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
24 1937, and dictator from 1937-1945. One of Vargas’s goals was to reduce socioeconomic class conflict by integrating lower-class individuals into Brazilian society and elevating their folk traditions to the level of national culture.37 The Vargas regime greatly expanded the budget for education and created new institutions to foster cultural development and support patriotic causes. During this time, capoeira was de-criminalized and became institutionalized through the efforts of Mestre Bimba and his newly developed style of capoeira, named A Luta Regional
Baiana and later referred to as capoeira regional. His school became officially licensed by the
Brazilian government in 1937.38
The previously mentioned narratives that highlight either Brazilian nationalist or
Afrocentric discourse are the basis for the dichotomies between capoeira regional and capoeira
Angola, the style of capoeira that is believed to keep the traditions held before Bimba’s creation of regional. The codification of capoeira regional was essential to its popularity and elevation as a national sport, leading to the institutionalization of capoeira Angola by Mestre Pastinha in
1941.
Mestre Bimba was born Manoel dos Reis Machado on November 23, 1900, in the neighborhood of Engenho Velho in Salvador, Bahia. His father, a famous batuqueiro, was born in Feira de Santana, and his mother, a descendant of indigenous Brazilians and a member of a candomblé de caboclo, came from Cachoeira. He was initiated into capoeira at the age of twelve by an African nicknamed Nozinho Bento.39 Bimba grew increasingly dissatisfied with capoeira as it was practiced at the time. For him, public exhibitions put too much emphasis on show, and kicks were not efficient enough to face more serious challengers, especially those trained in the
37 Maya Talmon-Chvaicer, The Hidden History of Capoeira: A Collision of Cultures in the Brazilian Battle Dance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 114. 38 Lewis, Ring of Liberation, 60. 39 Assunção, 128.
25 new martial arts coming from abroad. In response, Bimba developed a new style later referred to as capoeira regional that added kicks and other movements from other Afro-Brazilian competitive, circle dances like batuque, a form of dance that combines leg wrestling, and maculelê, a mock stick-fighting dance, as well as Greco-Roman wrestling, jiu-jitsu, judo, and
French savate to those commonly used in the existing capoeira practice.40 He saw no problem in introducing kicks from other martial arts, as long as they were effective and could be executed from capoeira’s basic dance movement, the ginga.
Beyond introducing new moves into the capoeira language, Bimba moved capoeira off the streets and into academies, and he developed a system of teaching that utilized sequences of movements. He also instituted two new rituals into his regional style: the batizado, or baptism, and the graduated corda (belt) system. Batizados were held when a new student was allowed to play in the roda for the first time. After the game, Bimba gave an apelido, or nickname, to the novice standing in the middle of the roda, followed by general applause. Following a further training period during which the baptized student had to acquire the basic skills of how to play in a roda, he would graduate. The graduating students would then receive a colored silk scarf depending on their skill level. The introduction of colors to represent levels of hierarchy similar to Japanese judo. Group identity was reinforced through uniforms, which resembled the style of port workers’ clothes, the abadá—collarless shirts and trousers ending just below the knees.
Bimba adopted white abadás with the emblem of the school sewn onto the shirt. Well-acquainted with Afro-Bahian traditions from his parents, Mestre Bimba favored “Axé” as his choice for the capoeira regional greeting.41
40 Assunção, 129. 41 Ibid., 143.
26 His institutionalization and introduction of a formalized hierarchy among students represented the modernization of capoeira. J. Lowell Lewis notes, “Perhaps the most significant thing about Bimba’s academy was his special interest in attracting students form the middle and upper socioeconomic sectors of Bahian society.”42 On July 23, 1953, Bimba met Getúlio Vargas who allegedly said on that occasion, “Capoeira is the only truly national sport.”43 Many capoeiristas, however, were critical of Bimba’s innovations. “Because Bimba’s structured hierarchy required long-term enrollment and payment, it excluded poor Afro-Brazilians. This has led many to consider Capoeira Regional “whiter” than Capoeira Angola, despite the fact that
Capoeira Regional groups today are quite racially diverse.”44
Mestre Pastinha, born Vicente Ferreira Pastinha, immortalized the style known as capoeira Angola when he opened the Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola on February 23,
1941. The son of a poor, Spanish immigrant and an Afro-Bahian housewife, Pastinha grew up learning capoeira from an African named Benedito in Salvador, Bahia.45 Pastinha opposed
Bimba’s incorporation of other martial art movements into capoeira. Throughout his career, he upheld the ludic aspects of the game over the martial art elements and dedicated himself to preserving the African traditions in capoeira. He established which instruments were a part of the capoeira bateria and which songs, movements, and types of games were acceptable. Like Bimba,
Pastinha moved trainings and rodas off the street, created uniforms, and started teaching capoeira to new audiences. When the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) emerged in Brazil during the
1980s, its proponents turned towards Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions like capoeira in search
42 Lewis, 60. 43 Assunção, 18. 44 Lauren Miller Griffith, In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro- Brazilian Capoeira Tradition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 31. 45 Assunção, 152.
27 for a Black alternative to hegemonic Western values. During this time, capoeira Angola was being revitalized by Mestre Moraes who put forward more explicitly the idea that capoeira, and in particular the Angola style, symbolized African identity. Capoeira Angola was reclaimed as a positive symbol, as a metaphor for tradition.
Mestres Bimba and Pastinha have provoked passionate debates about tradition and transformation in the capoeira community. Prominent among the early critics was Brazilian ethnologist Edison Carneiro, who asserted, “the popular, folkloric capoeira, the heritage of
Angola, has nothing to do with Bimba’s.”46 Later, the celebrated Bahian writer Jorge Amado stated, “Regional does not deserve respect and is a distortion of the old capoeira ‘angola,’ the only genuine one.”47 Similar to the Eurocentric or Brazilian nationalist viewpoints, the
Afrocentric narrative can become one-sided in its approach. The over-emphasis on capoeira’s
African traits also reduces history into black and white thinking. It can lead to views that freeze culture in a static pre-modern and non-Western state of authenticity, regarding purity over transformations.48 Lauren Miller Griffith observed the distinctions between these two styles have been overtly exaggerated in a way to maintain clear boundaries between the two. A capoeirista’s stylistic leaning is believed to be detected through the ways in which they move their body. In capoeira Angola, there is an aspect of mandinga, or trickery, that capoeiristas will use to lure their partner into a particular part of the roda that is said to not be found in regional. Angola is said to be played slower and lower to the ground compared to the flashy, upright movements of regional capoeiristas. “Regional is fighting so Angola must be ludic; Regional allows no shirt so
46 Waldeloir Rego, Capoeira Angola: Ensaio Sócio-Etnográfico (Salvador: Itapuâ, 1968), 269. 47 Ibid., 269. 48 Assunção, 27.
28 Angoleiros have to tuck in their shirts; Regional wears their pants low and sexy so Angola wears their pants up high.”49
Categorizations such as white, bourgeois, or Western are still popular among practitioners of Angola style and capoeira scholars. The problem with reified conceptions of
African and black, white and Western is that their meaning was and is an object of constant renegotiation. Assunção argues, however, that “behaviors, customs, and symbols are seldom easily identifiable with one of these poles.”50 From her years of practicing capoeira and dancing candomblé in the United States and Brazil, Barbara Browning noted, “Regional and angola styles strike me rather as in dialogue with one another, and speaking, finally, the same double-talk, whether or not you call it ‘up-to-date.’ …[T]he majority of capoeiristas, at least until very recently, did not necessarily ally themselves with one camp…How do you make rigid alliances in a world where you must trust everyone but can’t trust anyone?”51
The formation of capoeira academies in Brazil under the influence of Bimba’s regional style brought drastic changes in training methods, even for Pastinha’s Angola academy.
Previously in charge of managing the local street rodas, the mestre assumed the role as the head of an academy, organizing the finances and day-to-day operations of the school. With this added responsibility, the mestre had to delegate his authority to a contramestre, a new instructor role created for the needs of the academy. With the growth of academies, the process of relegating authority and breaking training into various levels through which a student must pass and graduate became more and more structured.52 Throughout the 1950s and 60s, capoeira regional academies became far more prevalent than those of capoeira Angola. After the mid-1960s,
49 Griffith, In Search of Legitimacy, 25. 50 Assunção, 141. 51 Browning, Samba, 114-15. 52 Lewis, 63.
29 Pastinha’s academy may have been the only one dedicated to capoeira Angola.53 Pastinha was forced to vacate his academy located in the historic Pelourinho district of Salvador in the
1970s.54 After Mestre Pastinha’s departure from the capoeira scene, regional became more visible throughout Brazil due in large part to the incentives of the new military government established in 1964, which stressed the importance of sports and physical education.55 In 1972,
Brazil officially declared capoeira a national sport.56
The 1970s also saw a great expansion of capoeira beyond Brazil’s borders, especially to
Europe and the United States. Better economic opportunities elsewhere were a pull factor for many capoeira mestres, and touring folkloric dance troupes also took capoeiristas outside the country with some choosing to stay in the cities where they performed.57 I also argue that the political tension and economic instability in Brazil during this time would have been push factors for Brazilian capoeiristas as well. Following the military coup in 1964, leftist politicians, intellectuals, academics, and artists began fleeing Brazil in exile. The dictatorship used indiscriminate arrests, kidnapping, and horrific forms of torture on its left-wing opponents throughout the early 1960s and 1970s.58 From 1970 to 1980, Brazil’s inflation rate grew from
16.4% to 110% due to the OPEC oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and the rocketing interest rates on
Brazil’s foreign loans.59 Under these circumstances, capoeiristas found fertile ground for the growth of capoeira in Europe and the United States because it appealed to a wide demographic that included both martial artists and dancers, as well as students of African-American history.60
53 Griffith, 32. 54 Assunção, 166. 55 Talmon-Chvaicer, The Hidden History of Capoeira, 123. 56 Gerard Taylor, Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace, Volume Two (Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2007), 9. 57 Taylor, Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace, 162. 58 Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 158-69. 59 Skidmore, 169-72. 60 Taylor, 164.
30 Capoeiristas such as Jelon Vieira, Loremil Machado, Bira Almeida, Marcelo Pereira,
Ricardo Suassuna, Nestor Capoeira, and many other pioneers emigrated to the United States.61
Vieira, a dancer, choreographer, and capoeira mestre, is credited as the first to introduce capoeira to the USA, arriving in New York in 1975. Finding engaged audiences and interested students, he began teaching workshops and serving as a guest instructor at Yale University’s African-
American Studies Department in 1982 and taught at a number of dance companies, universities, and cultural institutes across the country.62 In the early 1980s, there were only four capoeira academies in the United States—Mestre Jelon and Loremil taught in New York City, Mestre
Acordeon in San Francisco, and Eusebio da Silva Lobo in East St. Louis (Illinois).63 The number of capoeira academies has exploded since then with the art being taught in all fifty states now.
Most senior teachers are Brazilians who left Brazil in search of a better life, teaching capoeira to foreigners. Twenty-five years after capoeira’s introduction into the country, a number of North
Americans have now graduated and are now in positions to teach capoeira. Some have even been granted the title of contramestre and mestre.64
With the proliferation of individualistic styles growing exponentially in the United States and Europe, a new generation of capoeiristas is starting to refute the regional/Angola dichotomy.
Tallahassee Capoeira and its fellow academies under the Allied Capoeira League subscribe to this belief and embrace the label capoeira contemporânea. Professor Taz of Tallahassee Capoeira describes the contemporânea style as a spectrum between regional and Angola. “We can play in both realms.”65 For him, these blurred stylistic lines started with the creation of capoeira regional
61 Ashley Humphrey, “Where’s the Roda?: Understanding Capoeira Culture in an American Context.” Master’s thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2018, 26. 62 Taylor, 164. 63 Assunção, 190-191. 64 Ibid., 191. 65 Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020.
31 by Mestre Bimba, which incorporated new movements from other martial arts. Following his innovations, Bimba’s students then began further experimenting with what worked best in their game. Taz explained, “You won’t have the same game as some guy who is six-foot-four. You won’t move the same way in the roda. Students would connect with the style that suited them best. There are no set boundaries between the styles—it’s a sliding scale.”66
Capoeira was just capoeira at the beginning, and some capoeiristas affirm that these sharp distinctions should dissolve. While capoeiristas learn the values, styles, and histories of capoeira from their mestre, they will always have their own approaches to moving their bodies within the capoeira roda. As it has become a global phenomenon, capoeira has shifted to suit the needs of its diverse practitioners. Capoeira contemporânea can encompass the customs, beliefs, songs, rhythms, and histories of both Angola and regional depending on the values of its practitioners.
The following chapter will discuss how these shifting values are exhibited within the local context of Tallahassee Capoeira.
66 Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020.
32 CHAPTER THREE
CAPOEIRA IN TALLAHASSEE
Quem vem lá? Sou eu. Who goes there? It’s me. Quem vem lá? Sou eu. Who goes there? It’s me. Berimbau bateu. The berimbau played. Capoeira sou eu. Capoeira is me.
The overall axé of a particular academy like Tallahassee Capoeira has developed gradually over many years through the accumulation of daily interactions and rituals happening inside its walls. But how did Tallahassee Capoeira come to be? As previously mentioned,
Tallahassee Capoeira belongs to the Allied Capoeira League (ACL), a North American capoeira contemporânea consortium that also has academies in Gainesville, FL, Macon, GA, and
Sacramento, CA.67 The Tallahassee branch of ACL was formally established in 2014, though the
Florida-native instructors—Dr. Brandon Alkire, otherwise known as Professor Taz, and his wife
Joyleigh, or Instrutora Texuga—have been teaching capoeira in town since 2009. In this chapter,
I explore the various geographic, socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors that contribute to this capital city being an urban space favorable to the development of an active capoeira scene and how Tallahassee Capoeira emerged within this urban environment.
Capoeira in the Tallahassee Area
Tallahassee is located within Leon County in Florida’s Big Bend and Panhandle regions, only fourteen miles from Georgia’s border. With an estimated population of 193,551 in 2018, it is the seventh-largest city in Florida.68 As the state capital, the host city of two state universities and a
67 The academy in Gainesville is led by Mestrando Mico, while Monitor Camburão runs the one in Macon, and Mestre Aranha is in charge of the Sacramento academy. 68 “Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2018,” United States Census Bureau, Population Division, accessed December 2, 2019, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk.
33 large community college, and a center for trade and agriculture in the region, Tallahassee is a significant hub of political action, research and education, arts and culture, and business and finance for the state of Florida—and for the northern portion of the state in particular. The Visit
Tallahassee website describes the city as “a place where college town meets cultural center, politics meets performing arts, and history meets nature.”69
Tallahassee’s early history bears comparison to that of certain cities and regions in Brazil during the colonial period. It is a history filled with violence through multiple periods of settlement by Spanish and British colonists, who either forced out or decimated the Apalachee and Seminole tribes living in the region, and also through its participation in the plantation economy.70 After the territory of Florida was ceded to the United States by Spain, Leon County became one of the largest cotton plantation counties in the state, and the city of Tallahassee was a center for Florida’s slave trade prior to the Civil War.71 The structural violence and persecution of the slavery era persisted post-emancipation in Tallahassee as well—as was also the case in countless other Southern cities—through myriad forms of racial oppression including lynchings and policies of legal racial segregation that persisted through the mid-1960s.72 Recently, in a
2015 report by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, Tallahassee was ranked as the most economically segregated city in the United States.73
69 “About Tallahassee,” Visit Tallahassee: A Division of Leon County. Leon County Division of Tourism, accessed December 2, 2019, https://www.visittallahassee.com/about-tallahassee/#history-4. 70 “History and Characteristics,” City of Tallahassee, accessed April 4, 2020, https://www.talgov.com/place/pln-ac-history.aspx. 71 See Larry E. Rivers (1981) and Julia Floyd Smith (1973). 72 For an in-depth discussion on Tallahassee residents’ contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, see Glenda Alice Rabby’s The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida (1999). 73 This report has been disputed by Tallahassee government officials. See Karl Etters, “Chamber refutes economic report,” Tallahassee Democrat, February 25, 2015, accessed April 4, 2020, https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2015/02/25/report-calls-tallahassee-economically-segregated/24030153/.
34 Higher education institutions play a significant role in Tallahassee’s demographics and everyday operations. The city’s two universities, Florida State University (FSU) and Florida
Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), in many ways define the flow of cultural life from football to finance, with Tallahassee Community College (TCC) contributing to this flow in substantial ways as well. Established in 1887, FAMU is the oldest HBCU in Florida,74 and according to its website, FAMU is “the highest-ranked public HBCU in the U.S. according to
News & World Report's list of national public universities.”75 TCC is also a large, highly ranked state college that serves as a feeder school to FSU and FAMU, as well as to other state universities, and that also offers a range of workforce development and professional trade programs that directly qualify graduates for key local positions from hospitals to state government agencies.
These institutions attract a population of students and faculty from across Florida, the
United States, and abroad, many of whom seek to engage with different perspectives, experience diverse cultural expressions, and find outlets for stress release while living in Tallahassee. As the state capital and seat of state government, Tallahassee has a large number of residents with sufficient disposable income and desires for fitness and stress reduction programs for themselves and their children to provide a solid economic base for an institution like Tallahassee Capoeira.
Several of Tallahassee Capoeira’s current participants are affiliated with either FSU or FAMU as graduate students or faculty members, often training capoeira in conjunction with their kids.
College towns are ideal environments for capoeira academies and communities and there are two
74 “About Tallahassee,” Visit Tallahassee: A Division of Leon County. Leon County Division of Tourism, accessed December 2, 2019, https://www.visittallahassee.com/about-tallahassee/#history-4. 75 “HBCU Excellence,” Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, accessed December 2, 2019, http://admissions.famu.edu/.
35 universities and a community college here. FAMU is an HBCU and capoeira connects to a broad
Afrocentric ideal, which may be another attraction for this art in this city.
Pensador, a graduate student in clinical psychology at FSU, first learned about capoeira from playing the video games Tekken III (1997) and Tekken IV (2001) as a child, and he eventually tried a drop-in capoeira class as an undergraduate student in Oakland, CA. “I always knew about capoeira, and I just thought it was cool and beautiful, but I had a lot of social anxiety when I was younger and was just more inhibited and scared to try things like that.”76 He started taking classes at Tallahassee Capoeira shortly after he moved from California to Florida to begin his program in fall 2018. “I saw a therapist for three sessions that fall semester because I was overwhelmed and stressed, and she assigned me some homework to find a hobby like doing something outdoors or something like. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a perfect opportunity to start a physical hobby,’ and capoeira was something that I’ve always wanted to do.”77
Careta, a recent graduate of FSU’s English Literature Ph.D. program, started training at
Tallahassee Capoeira over a year ago, but his eight-year old son Sapinho has been taking capoeira classes there for four years now. “I was really busy with the Ph.D. work, so even though
I wanted to [join] even at the beginning, I didn’t feel like I had enough time…We were just taking [Sapinho] to the practices on Mondays and Wednesdays. We’d go to the batizados, and those were always really, really fun. I always wished that I was a part of it, you know? I didn’t know about the Friday rodas until the summer I started. So, I took him to one Friday, and it was just, like, irresistible. I was, like, clapping. I was sitting on the side, but I was still clapping. I
76 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019. 77 Ibid.
36 wanted to sing the songs. I think there might have been one or two other adults who were around at that time…. I just couldn’t bear not being a part of it.”78
In its beginnings, Tallahassee Capoeira’s membership was primarily made up of adults, but it has shifted more toward children between the ages of six and twelve in recent years.
Currently, there are about thirty kids and ten adults who regularly train at Tallahassee Capoeira, with a near equal proportion of male and female participants. The community is made up of primarily white, middle-class, English speakers, though many other ethnicities are also represented, including Black or African-American, Indian, Lebanese-Armenian, New Zealander,
Puerto Rican, and Sri Lankan. The monthly membership fees, cost of uniforms, and biannual graduation testing rate may prevent those with little discretionary income to participate in capoeira. Free family classes and training sessions are offered intermittently to boost membership, and Professor and Instrutora often volunteer their time to present capoeira workshops at various schools and community events around town. The Tallahassee Capoeira community remains connected outside the walls of the academy through monthly e-mail newsletters, Facebook and Instagram posts, and GroupMe messages that announce upcoming capoeira or Brazilian-related events, share photos and videos, and post song lyrics and recordings.
On weekdays from 4:15pm to 8pm, the academy offers classes for preschoolers and for kids four and five years old to classes for ages six through twelve, as well as classes for teens and adults ages thirteen and up. Beyond those main offerings, classes for Intermediate kids,
Intermediate teens and adults, a teens and adult strength and conditioning session, and a teens and adult music class fill up the schedule. Each week culminates with a Friday evening roda,
78 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019.
37 open to all ages, which follows a kid’s music class, and a Saturday morning Capo-Tot class for eighteen-month old to three-year old kids with their parents followed by a family class for all ages. Tallahassee Capoeira is currently the only academy within the Allied Capoeira League that offers stand-alone music classes as part of their schedule.
The entrance to Tallahassee Capoeira is nestled between a Cuts by Us hair salon and an
Edible Arrangements branch in a shopping plaza next to the bustling Publix supermarket across from Lake Ella Park.79 Its entryway features a table of flyers of the academy’s weekly schedule, various graduation level requirements, and other Tallahassee events alongside a cubby unit for participants to stow their shoes, water bottles, and other personal belongings while they train.
With a quasi-open floor plan, the main training space is bordered by a carpeted waiting area lined with chairs and a hallway that leads to a back playroom filled with toys, books, and art supplies for kids. The bright, teal walls display many capoeira-related artworks drawn by kids involved with Tallahassee Capoeira and the ACL, creating a vibrant, inviting atmosphere for participants young and old.
Lit with fluorescent lights, the main training space has light wooden floorboards with a ten-foot diameter circle traced on the floor with blue painters’ tape. The front wall is covered with floor to ceiling mirrors, which are often scrawled with sequences of capoeira movements and various Portuguese song lyrics written in dry-erase marker. The side wall features a large,
Styrofoam coin covered with the Allied Capoeira League’s logo, which prominently features capoeira’s chief musical instrument, the berimbau, as does the logo for Tallahassee Capoeira (see
Figure 3.1). Gymnastic rings hanging from the high-vaulted ceiling are secured against the back
79 Prior to this location, Tallahassee capoeiristas trained in various shared spaces in community centers, gyms, dance studios, and other martial arts schools located on Jackson Street, Pensacola Street, Thomasville Road, and North Monroe Street. Their location in Midtown opened in early 2018.
38 wall, and the back corner is filled with a host of Brazilian instruments, kicking pads, tumbling mats, weight lifting equipment, and a bundle of hula hoops.
Figure 3.1. Allied Capoeira League and Tallahassee Capoeira logos.
Building the Academy: Tallahassee Capoeira’s Origin Story
As the parents of four homeschooled daughters ranging in age from one to twelve years old and owners of two private businesses, Tallahassee Capoeira and Body Mechanix Physiotherapy and
Fitness, Taz and Texuga are an industrious team who divide the academy’s teaching load depending on the other’s availability. Currently in their early forties, the two have been practicing capoeira in Florida for roughly twenty years. When asked about their early years in capoeira, Texuga responded, “Brandon and I, we both have had times where either I would walk away from it for some reason—maybe it was a baby or when I was nearing the end of my degree, and I didn’t have time. He walked away from it less than I did because of babies, but he had an injury at one time, and I was the only one training. But we just both kept coming back to it—it was something we enjoyed doing.”80
80 Instrutora Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019.
39 Like most young adults growing up in the United States during the 1990s, Taz first learned about capoeira from seeing the movie Only the Strong (1993) and playing video games like Tekken III (1997).81 By the time he was an undergraduate at Florida State University in
1999, he had been studying kung fu for seven to eight years under the instruction of a man named Roger, or Cachorrão, who was trying to learn capoeira at that time. Since there were no capoeira instructors in Tallahassee, Cachorrão and Taz would intermittently travel to Sarasota,
Florida, and practice with Mestre Rony Costa at Capoeira Volta ao Mundo.82 They would come back to Tallahassee and train capoeira in a warehouse off of Tennessee Street until their next trip down to Sarasota. Shortly after Taz started learning capoeira, he began dating Texuga and invited her to try it out. She had never heard of capoeira prior to meeting Taz but came to relish its rewarding physical challenges coupled with her blossoming relationship with Taz.83
Concerned with the quality of information that was getting transferred through these sporadic trips, Mestre Rony contacted his students Aranha and Mico and asked that they move to
Tallahassee to teach capoeira. Both men were at various stages in the teaching level cordas with
Aranha being higher-ranked than Mico. At that time, Aranha was teaching in Ukiah, CA, and
Mico was in Sarasota, FL. They were both living in Tallahassee and offering capoeira classes by
2000. Aranha and Mico eventually cut ties with Volta ao Mundo and became affiliated with
Capoeira Maculelê, headed by Mestre Fran, in Atlanta, GA.84 Around 2010, Mico left
Tallahassee to establish a capoeira academy in Gainesville, FL, and Aranha moved to
Sacramento, CA, to do the same, so Taz, Texuga, and their fellow advanced-level students
81 Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020. 82 Mestre Rony graduated in Brazil and has been teaching since 1985. According to Texuga, his school in Sarasota has one of the largest kids’ programs in the country. 83 Instrutora Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019. 84 Mestre Fran is a capoeirista from Londrina, PR, Brazil, who founded the Associação Cultural de Capoeira Maculelê in 1991 and established the academy in Atlanta in 2003. See “Mestre Fran,” Capoeira Maculelê Decatur Brazilian Art Center, accessed March 19, 2020, http://capoeiraatlanta.com/mestre-fran/.
40 Camburão and Jibóia formed a committee and began teaching capoeira classes in Tallahassee even though they had not yet earned their teaching cordas. These academies remained tied to
Mestre Fran and Capoeira Maculelê but under the supervision of Aranha.
Over the years, Aranha, Mico, Taz, Texuga, and Camburão became frustrated with the large capoeira organizations that they were involved with and eventually set out to establish their own—the Allied Capoeira League. Their primary dissatisfaction stemmed from capoeira mestres’ seemingly indiscriminate practices for graduating students and the inability to level up for those capoeiristas who want to continue developing their skills without becoming a capoeira instructor. Texuga commented that in some capoeira schools, students only receive higher cordas if they master acrobatic moves, while in other schools, capoeiristas will get to a certain point in the corda system and will not graduate unless they travel to give workshops. “There are these other expectations—that aren’t necessarily capoeira-based—placed on students, and [Mestre]
Aranha wanted to minimize that. He wanted to make sure it was about the movements, about the music. So that’s what the curriculum does.”85 Taz also noted, “It’s not standardized across the schools, so one mestre might just level up a kid just because they’ve been training for a couple of months. We also wanted to reward the kids that were developing past their age bracket.”86
While Texuga and Taz were first studying capoeira under the umbrella of Volta ao
Mundo, batizados were elaborate events that involved workshops held over the course of three or four days. Mestre Rony would invite anywhere from eight to twenty big-name mestres to come in and lead these workshops. A $200 registration fee would be required to attend these batizados, which covered the cost of a t-shirt, corda, workshop, and travel fees for the visiting instructors.
The paradigm of these enormous batizado events was also a source of discord for the instructors
85 Instrutora Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019. 86 Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020.
41 of ACL. Anytime their students wanted to level up, they would have to travel to one of these large batizados in Sarasota or in Atlanta once they became affiliated with Capoeira Maculelê. If they wanted to host a local batizado, they would have to front the money to buy plane tickets and lodging for all the visiting mestres. Mestre Aranha wanted to make this optional so more intimate, pared-down batizados would be perfectly acceptable as well. With smaller batizados, students are able to play more compared to the big events where many capoeiristas come to train with visiting mestres and oftentimes the newer players do not get the opportunity to play as much.87
Since the formation of the Allied Capoeira League, group identity for ACL capoeiristas is enforced through uniforms, which resemble the traditional white abadás endorsed by Mestre
Bimba and his students, and through apelidos given by one’s teacher. The black, red, and yellow- colored logo of the Allied Capoeira League is embroidered on the front of the abadás and printed on the fronts and backs of t-shirts and tank tops. Though not a hard rule, capoeiristas are expected to wear their uniforms and corda to every class and roda, especially after their first batizado. Chosen based on an individual’s idiosyncrasies, an apelido is also an important component of the capoeira community. Receiving a Portuguese nickname from one’s main instructor marks a capoeirista as being officially a part of the ACL community. Generally given after a capoeirista’s first batizado, the apelido serves as an alter identity used only within capoeira-related social contexts.
Teaching and Evaluating Capoeiristas
The ACL instructors have continued to refine their approaches to teaching and practicing capoeira. Larger capoeira organizations do not typically have written curriculum, but the ACL
87 Instrutora Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019.
42 instructors wanted to systematize how and why students graduate to higher corda levels. Taz started working with Mico in Gainesville, who also has a large kid’s program, to create a rubric built on kids’ developmental abilities. “The rubric is based on their listening, leading, and movement—are they listening first time, every time? Are they able to lead by example?”88
According to the ACL rubrics, the yellow bracket rewards students who listen and follow directions, the orange bracket rewards those who show determination and accept failure as a normal part of growth, while the teal bracket rewards students’ leadership skills and those who motivate and encourage others.89
Utilizing his background as a physical therapist, Taz categorized movements into difficulty levels based on developmental abilities. For example, in the first level, the yellow bracket, there are no rotational kicks or defense moves. Once a student moves up into the orange bracket, they get some rotational moves and they are asked to sequence those movements on their own, adding an extra mental capacity requirement on top of the physical development. By the time kids graduate through the five cordas of the yellow bracket, they should be able to clap correctly with the music and be able to play pandeiro in the correct rhythmic pattern. The orange bracket rubric requires students to consistently clap and play the basic rhythms on atabaque and pandeiro and regularly play in time on the berimbau before graduating into the teal bracket, which has no further musical requirements listed. The kids’ corda levels are instituted up until they are thirteen years old to protect them from adults playing them in the roda. The visual difference of the cordas between kids and adults should inform an adult to play with more care
(see Figure 3.2).90
88 Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020. 89 See Appendix A for the ACL’s rubrics for kids and adults. 90 Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020.
43
Figure 3.2. Standardized corda levels for adult and kids in the Allied Capoeira League
For adults, the path to graduado, or graduated, is divided into four brackets—Novice,
Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced—with five cordas in each bracket. The goals for each division develop from mastering the four basic kicks (meia lua de frente, queixada, armada, and meia lua de compasso) while maintaining basic ginga form and demonstrating proper escapes to adding movement and dimension into the game, and finally proving mastery of strategy and control of the game through more advanced kicks, escapes, and acrobatic moves. There is still no curriculum for the teacher brackets—Monitor, Instrutor, Professor, Mestrando, and Mestre. ACL capoeiristas in these brackets can only advance up a level at the discretion of Mestre Aranha.
Those graduations are still largely based on time and teaching experience according to Graduado
Raptor.91
Expectations for acquiring fluency in capoeira music are also incorporated into the requirements for each adult level bracket. Novice players should be able to play the São Bento
91 Graduado Raptor, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, October 15, 2019.
44 Grande rhythm on the berimbau and play pandeiro and atabaque in time with São Bento
Grande.92 They should attempt to sing along to most choruses and be able to clap along with the music. Beginners must demonstrate that they can consistently produce a quality sound on the berimbau, always come in on the right beat on the berimbau, atabaque, and pandeiro, and sing the correct words for many simple choruses. Intermediate capoeiristas should be able to sing the lead part to five songs, consistently sing the responses for other songs, improvise variations while playing berimbau, be able to sing while playing any of the instruments, and tune the pandeiro and atabaque as necessary. The musical requirements for the Advanced bracket include being able to lead twenty songs while playing berimbau and being able to tune and lead the various instruments of the bateria.
Connecting to a Larger Capoeira Network
Since Tallahassee Capoeira is linked to several other academies in north/central Florida and central Georgia, the infrastructure for an academy in Tallahassee was readily available (see
Figure 3.3). Professor and Instrutora maintain connections to their previous capoeira organizations and make frequent trips to Sarasota and Boynton Beach to attend workshops, tournaments, and batizados at Volta ao Mundo and Maculelê. Instructors and students of the
Allied Capoeira League academies in Tallahassee, Gainesville, and Macon travel to visit one another throughout the year.
Graduado Raptor and Sabiá also actively build relationships with other capoeira academies, trying to attend as many events as they can in the area and elsewhere in the States during work trips. Sabiá explained, “We try to go to all the events in Florida, and it’s probably better for him as a teacher to make that connection with other schools, and I just do it for fun.”
92 Capoeira rhythms like São Bento Grande will be discussed in further detail in chapter four.
45 With Raptor nodding in agreement, Sabiá added, “It’s fun to play different people that you’ve never played before and lots of higher ups.” Turning to Raptor, I asked, “Why are those connections important with the other schools?” He clarified by saying, “From an academy stand point, it’s good to make those friendships with other schools not only for expanding your reach but also just to give to their school. The more friendships that you make with other academies, the more people will come out to your academy to make your events bigger, make your events more enjoyable for your own students. There’s more energy involved when there’s more people.” Reflecting on their experiences outside of Tallahassee Capoeira, Sabiá also mentioned,
“Every school has a different style so you can learn everyone’s style. Like in Boynton Beach, they’re super handsy.” “What school is that?” I asked, and they both answered Karkará. “We’ve slowly been developing a good relationship with their school going down to their events and having them come up to Gainesville,” explained Raptor.93
Figure 3.3. Tallahassee Capoeira’s network with capoeira academies in the surrounding area.
93 Graduado Raptor and Sabia, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, October 15, 2019.
46 These recent changes may seem like the Allied Capoeira League is further institutionalizing capoeira with their curriculum and rubrics and playing into the American ethos of upward mobility, but Tallahassee Capoeira and the other Allied Capoeira League schools are also aiming to make their graduation system more reflective of capoeira’s main values by prioritizing the mastery of both movement and music and not just acrobatics. They are striving to cultivate personal growth in each student by allowing capoeiristas to continue to advance toward a goal without having to become a mestre. The Allied Capoeira League places value on being a part of the community and developing respect, determination, and motivation in each capoeirista through movement and music making.
47 CHAPTER FOUR
MAKING MUSIC AT TALLAHASSEE CAPOEIRA
La lauê lauê lauê lauá La lauê lauê lauê lauá Lalaêlauê Lalaêlauê Em cada som, em cada toque, In every sound, in every rhythm, Em cada ginga, no estilo do jogo In every ginga, is the style of the game.
On the first Friday of September, 2019, twenty-two capoeiristas—ten children and twelve adults—came to play capoeira. For the first time during a regular roda at Tallahassee Capoeira, there were enough participants to have a full bateria, and I could sense the excitement rippling through the room. Professor ran through the rules of roda for the kids, the first rule being “Don’t blast your buddies!” followed by the second, “Always pay attention.” Building off of the energy already in the space from having a full bateria and so many people attending, Professor started the roda with the greatest hits—“‘Tamos Juntos,” “Santo Antônio quero água,” “ABC,”
“AEIOU,” “A hora é essa,” “O dendê,” and “Cajuê”—so everyone would be singing along, loudly.
With her determined eyes locked on her partner and a wicked grin planted on her face,
Biscoitinha was set on taking down the higher-ranked players like Instrutor Salamandra, Monitor
Morcego, and Graduado Raptor. Though she was unsuccessful, it was exhilarating to watch her long limbs move nimbly around the roda. Professor eventually paused the game for a water break and had us split into two rodas—one for kids and one for adults—for the second half of roda.
Instrutora had placed colorful rubber circles on the floor to help the kids maintain a circular formation. Once Salamandra and Pensador entered the roda, my anxiety rocketed from watching their rapid-fire exchange of spinning kicks and near misses. Taz’s high energy was never-ending; he didn’t pass the berimbau off once, shouting, “Iê!” throughout various games, and engaging
48 with other bateria players by turning to look at them and making faces when there were some close calls from the capoeiristas playing inside the roda.
He called “Uma volta só” towards the end of roda to bring the energy up even more. In this part of the game, anyone can buy in at any time, so games between two players are shorter and faster. Professor switched over to the academy’s traditional closer, “La la é” after sensing the energy dwindle. The last game dissolved into a dance party as everyone, including the bateria members, gathered in the center of what was once the roda, jumping up and down and pumping their fists back and forth into the air, breathlessly chanting the response, “La la é, la la é, la la é a la é la.” After the last note of the berimbau was struck to end the roda, we huddled up to listen to
Professor’s take on the evening. He said he cut off the game because he wanted “to end on a high note” to which Viking immediately started singing in falsetto. We all chuckled at his antics and stacked our right hands together into the middle of the huddle to begin the closing ritual. “UM,
DOIS, TRÊS!” Professor yelled, to which everyone responded, “AXÉ, CAPOEIRA!” as we threw our hands up into the air.94
Taking up space, being aware of one’s own physical body, and conversing with another body through improvised movements are of crucial importance when playing capoeira, but these movements would be meaningless without the music accompanying it. Music is the life force of capoeira—there is an intimate interdependence between the music and the movement in capoeira. As the physical movements within the roda change, so will the music, and if the music changes, the players will take note and adjust accordingly. J. Lowell Lewis argues that music is the “privileged domain of comradeship (communitas) relative to the physical interaction, which tends to foreground competition…” and “instrumental music is preferentially weighted toward
94 Author’s field notes, September 6, 2019.
49 the expression of cooperation, as a check against the violent tendencies of physical play.”95 He goes on to claim that capoeira’s agonistic styles like capoeira regional place less importance on music compared to the more ludic style of capoeira Angola. Though Tallahassee Capoeira may resemble more of the regional style in movement, music is still emphasized throughout its everyday operations.
Figure 4.1. Pensador throwing a kick during the ACL tournament hosted by Tallahassee Capoeira. While the rapid physical movements may resemble regional, music still plays a significant role in ACL academies.
For Texuga, “[The music] gives the mood; it can tell the players the intention of the game. If the music is bad, usually the capoeira is bad…It has a huge influence on how the capoeira is played and what the intentions are.”96 The music dictates the mood of the game by setting the tempo and the style of the game through the toques, or distinct rhythmic patterns, played. Maintaining that relationship, the mestre plays a role similar to that of a DJ by getting a feel for the room and manipulating the energy of the space. Various factors like the songs
95 J. Lowell Lewis, Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 146. 96 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019.
50 chosen, shifting tempos, indoors versus outdoor settings, and even room temperature can play into the energy of a game. In our conversation, Viking observed the differences between
Mestrando Mico and Professor Taz’s approaches to calling songs, noting, “When Mico is calling, he’s got a pattern that he follows. It starts out, it builds, then there’s a couple of really big [songs] like everybody is throwing axé, and he brings it back down. He follows a rising and falling action. It really depends on who’s playing, how it’s going, if people are participating. There’s a lot that factors into it.” “Have you noticed that with Professor calling?” I asked, thinking back on last Friday’s roda. Viking answered promptly, “It seems like a lot of his [song choices] are what comes to mind. And sometimes he’ll react. As people are coming up, he’ll change the song.
When he sees what might a particularly really good match up, he’ll change to something else like he’ll do “Laué” or he’ll throw one of the songs that have no lyrics like (singing) “La la é” to get everyone pumped up for it. Or if the action is falling too much, he’ll change tact.”97
Many of my informants expressed it was the music that originally attracted them to
Tallahassee Capoeira. Elunacy, a computer programmer and amateur DJ who frequently composes metal and electronic music that incorporates his collection of world music instruments, began attending classes in January 2019 after seeing Taz and a group of others performing in
Tallahassee’s Cascades Park. “I saw Taz with the berimbau, so since I had one, I was like,
‘Whooooaaa, look somebody with a berimbau!’…I knew about the berimbau because of a band from Brazil called Sepultura and later Soulfly. I knew that it was used in capoeira, but I never got into the martial art aspect of it, more of the music partially because of the berimbau by itself.”98
After attending a couple of Tallahassee Capoeira’s family classes with his daughter Coruja,
Viking had a similar attraction to capoeira, stating, “When I learned of capoeira and learned
97 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019. 98 Elunacy, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 22, 2019.
51 about the musical component to it, how much emphasis there is on learning the songs, participating, singing along, clapping, playing the instruments…that was probably the biggest hook for me, the music.”99
Instruments
Live music always accompanies rodas and larger events at Tallahassee Capoeira, whereas recorded music from CDs and YouTube or Spotify playlists sound through a Bluetooth speaker during training sessions.100 A full bateria, or percussion ensemble, at Tallahassee Capoeira consists of the following instruments: three berimbaus (one-stringed musical bow), one atabaque
(tall, rope-tension drum), and one pandeiro (tambourine). Some instruments may or may not be doubled depending on the number of capoeiristas available and occasionally the agogô (double bell) will be added to the bateria. Other schools may include the reco-reco, or wooden scraper, within the bateria as well. With a smaller number of participants, it is rare to have a full bateria in Tallahassee outside of special events like batizados and tournaments, so rodas are typically accompanied with just a berimbau and an atabaque or pandeiro. All participants will alternate between sparring, singing and clapping, and playing instruments.
Capoeira games begin with the sound of the berimbau. The berimbau is a single-string musical bow from Brazil. It determines the style of game played by its rhythm and leads the capoeiristas’ movements in the roda, manipulating the tempo of the game. The berimbau is made of a verga, a staff traditionally made from indigenous biriba wood about four to five feet long, that is strung from one end of the verga to the other with a steel string or arame that is often pulled from the inside of a car tire. Acting as a resonator, the cabaça, or dried gourd that has
99 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019. 100 Only during conditioning class does the music switch over from capoeira to metal, which many of the adults, including Taz, are avid listeners of.
52 been opened and hollowed-out, is positioned about a hand’s width from the bottom of the verga with a loop of string, creating a bridge that divides the arame into two pitches—one high, one low.
The instrument is secured in the left hand by wrapping the two middle fingers around the verga and placing the top joint of the pinky finger under the cabaça's string bridge. Learning to balance the top-heavy instrument on that joint and build the stamina to support the weight of the berimbau is often a great challenge for novice capoeiristas. Even more experienced players will continue to joke about the numbing pain in their left pinky. The dobrão, a small stone or coin, is held between the left hand’s index finger and thumb, while the cabaça rests against the player’s stomach. The right hand holds a thin, wooden stick called the baqueta with the thumb and index finger and a caxixi, or shaker, is looped through the two middle fingers. One strikes the arame just above the bridge of the cabaça with the baqueta to produce an open string sound. Beyond the open string of the berimbau, the dobrão is used to manipulate the pitch of the instrument, either producing a buzzing sound by lightly pressing the dobrão to the arame or playing a raised pitch by firmly pressing the coin into the wire. The berimbau’s sound can also be altered by moving the cabaça back and forth from the stomach, producing a wah-wah effect. There are three berimbaus in capoeira: the gunga, médio, and viola. The gunga has the lowest tone of the three, followed by the médio which is tuned to the raised pitch of the gunga, and the viola, the berimbau with the highest tone, tuned to the raised pitch of the médio. The gunga is reserved for the highest-ranking capoeirista who will also lead the songs. The médio holds down a complementary rhythm to the gunga, and the viola improvises around the main rhythm of the gunga. If there are not enough qualified berimbau players available, the gunga alone suffices for a roda.
53 To begin a capoeira game, the gunga player, typically the most senior member, may play
Cavalaria, a rhythmic call for the participants to know the roda is about to start and they need to circle up. A string of four groupings of eighth-note triplets is then played, which quickly transition into the São Bento Grande rhythm, while the médio player layers in with a counter- rhythm to São Bento Grande,101 followed by the viola playing São Bento Grande. After the berimbaus have all entered, the atabaque player will add to the lower spectrum with its deep, booming voice playing the underlying rhythm of two eighth-notes followed by a quarter note and keeping the tempo steady. The pandeiro will follow shortly, and lastly, the ringing, metal agogô, which hovers sonically over all the other percussion instruments. Slight variations on the instruments are typically welcomed as long as they do not disrupt the flow of the music. Once all the instruments of the bateria have entered, the gunga player (typically Professor or Instrutora) will begin to lead songs in Portuguese.
São Bento Grande toque
Counter-rhythm to São Bento Grande
São Bento Grande + improvising
( ) ( )
Palma de Bimba
Figure 4.2. Layering of instrumental toques in Tallahassee Capoeira bateria.
101 This counter-rhythm is the same as the Benguela toque played for Benguela-style games. In our interview, Taz explained he usually just refers to the médio part as a counter-rhythm to São Bento Grande, though he might teach it as Benguela if that is how a student is able to understand it better.
54 Capoeira Songs
A capoeira Angola game always begins with the ladainha, or litany, which is a solo sung by the most senior member present, who is playing the gunga. These songs can be improvised but are usually chosen from a canon of preexisting ladainhas. They may speak of moral values, praise
God, recount histories and legends, and honor historical figures. Two players crouch at the foot of their mestre and listen attentively to the ladainha before beginning to play. Once the person singing finishes, they will begin to sing the call-and-response sections—the chula, which primes the participants to get ready by invoking God, the mestre, and capoeira, followed by a string of corridos, shorter songs that often analyze the rules of the game and comment on the players’ actions. The corridos are always accompanied with clapping in the palma de Bimba rhythm— two eighth-notes followed by a quarter note—or the palma de terreiro rhythm, a syncopated three quarter-note triplet pattern. Once a first call and response has been sung, the gunga player will motion with the instrument for the two capoeiristas to begin playing and when another player may buy into the game.
Regional and contemporânea schools like Tallahassee Capoeira commonly leave out the ladainha and chula and begin singing a corrido or a quadra, a four-line solo verse, followed by the response and accompanied with clapping throughout. Each song form has a different length of calls and responses. The calls often change or vary slightly as well. Taz believes about seventy percent of the songs sung are corridos, and most contain themes about places and people important to capoeira like the historic quilombo Palmares; Aruanda, a former slave port; Bahia; and the sea. From analyzing the compilation of songs that I have gathered during my fieldwork, there is a mix of songs that reference both capoeira Angola and capoeira regional as well as other
55 Brazilian cultural references like samba, dendê, and Santo Antônio, one of the saints celebrated during the Festas Juninas in Brazil.102
New capoeira songs are created all the time and are circulated throughout the capoeira network via YouTube videos of rodas,103 Spotify and SoundCloud playlists, and among participants at special events like workshops and tournaments. Styles of songs have gone through phases, from longer poetic forms in the 2000s to a more “bubblegum pop” stage as Mestrando
Mico describes the current emphasis on catchy corridos. Often referred to as “capoeira’s greatest hits” by Taz, a handful of songs like "Paraná ê,” “La la é,” and “Santo Antônio quero água” appear at some point during the weekly Friday evening roda at Tallahassee Capoeira. The poetic nuance and the improvised lyrics in the conveyed histories, morals, and myths of the ladainhas would not translate to English speakers at Tallahassee Capoeira. As shorter call-and-response song forms, corridos and quadras serve to maximize participation for a community of non-
Portuguese speakers and even they can be difficult for non-Brazilian capoeiristas to learn.104
Tallahassee capoeiristas familiarize themselves with Portuguese the more they train, acquiring vocabulary here and there when words are translated at the academy. Beyond picking
102 See Appendix B for Tallahassee Capoeira’s song repertoire. 103 YouTube video clips of the Sunday rodas at the historic Praça da República in São Paulo, Brazil, are popular among ACL instructors. Some subscribe to capoeiraviva.net to pay to watch the complete rodas. The weekly capoeira roda at the Praça was established by Mestre Ananias in 1953 and is frequented by capoeiristas from various schools. Street rodas like those at Salvador’s Mercado Modelo and the Praça da República often explore the boundaries between games and fights. They sometimes turn into real fights and often result in injuries. In Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art, 195. Tourists frequent this area as well, and the capoeiristas play to their crowd, staging games with knives and other weapons. 104 The only English lyrics that may appear during a roda at Tallahassee Capoeira are those to the “Happy Birthday” song. Birthday rodas are celebratory events that can happen during part of a regular Friday roda where each person will play the capoeirista with the recent birthday in succession until everyone has played them. Professor begins by playing the São Bento Grande toque on the berimbau and calling the Portuguese “Happy Birthday” lyrics “Parabéns pra você nesta data querida. Muitas felicidades, muitos anos de vida,” and everyone responding in Portuguese. The music continues in this call-and-response fashion as people buy in to play with the birthday capoeirista. Taz eventually switches to singing the English version in which the person’s apelido will be used instead of their real name. By the end, the capoeirista with the birthday is utterly exhausted after playing a long sequence of games. Careta’s fortieth birthday coincided with one of the largest rodas of the year, and he ended up playing seventeen games in a row.
56 up translations for capoeira moves, apelidos, numbers, and some song lyrics during classes, they may or may not engage with the Portuguese language any further, depending on their desire and amount of time willing to spend on learning another language. Pensador expressed, “I’d like to learn Portuguese too, but it’s not something I’m going to prioritize heavily, you know? I started doing some Duolingo classes when I was in California but then stopped.”105 When asked how his
Portuguese has improved the more he has trained, Careta said, “We were practicing Portuguese with notecards just to get some vocab down, but we’ve slacked off on it.”106 For Elunacy, a native Spanish-speaker, Portuguese song lyrics are easier to translate. “For the most part, I already know what the hell they’re singing, and sometimes I’m like can you translate that word for me? And when they say it, I’m like oh, that makes sense to me because it connects to the
Spanish word.”107
The relationship of the teachers and students at Tallahassee Capoeira to the Portuguese language is fragmented. Though they may not engage with the language outside of classes, many of my informants believe that being able to understand Portuguese is an important aspect of practicing capoeira. Pensador shared, “I often ask what songs mean. I always want to, but I often don’t because it seems annoying, and I would do it every time, you know? And when I could just look it up myself. I find it harder to connect with the songs because I don’t know what they mean a lot of the time and I don’t know how to say them. When I learn what a song means, I like it so much more.”108 When asked about her future goals as a capoeirista, Texuga answered she wanted to get better at leading the music and understanding Portuguese. “One of the reasons why knowing more Portuguese would be really helpful [is] because you never know when someone’s
105 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019. 106 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019. 107 Elunacy, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 22, 2019. 108 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019.
57 just singing songs because those are the songs they sing and they fit well together or whether they’re actually trying to tell the people in the roda something. Whereas if I think you were fluent in the language, if we were singing English songs, we would know if someone started something that applied to what we were doing right then or not.”109 Whatever degree they choose to engage with the Portuguese language, the participants of ACL have been ingrained with the idea that being fully engaged in singing trumps their semantic understanding of the lyrics. Careta recalled a roda led by ACL-Gainesville’s leader, Mestrando Mico, “He stopped the roda, and he was like, ‘Even if you don’t know the words, you just mumble through it. You’re still singing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the words.’ So I still do that. I took that to heart.”110
With all participants contributing their voices, songs should flow seamlessly from one to the next during a roda. Texuga reminded me, “We talked about the lifeline, so if you stopped singing, the energy goes down for the players inside the roda. One of the nuances, something that in the last two or three years that I’ve really worked on, is not switching songs in the middle of someone’s game because that can change the game. Waiting until the right time to change the song is important.”111 Most capoeira songs can be sung over a variety of toques, though Viking noted there are certain songs like “Canarinho da Alemanha” that stylistically fit better with a particular toque. “The song “Canarinho da Alemanha” works a lot better with a Benguela toque than São Bento Grande. It’s a slower, more deliberate toque which matches the patterns that song uses. That song is traditionally done in a Benguela style. It’s a little slower; it’s a song of mourning. The response for it: ‘Eu vou encontrar só, Canarinho da Alemanha que matou meu curio,’ is ‘I am going to find the German canary who killed my brother’,” explained Viking. I
109 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019. 110 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019. 111 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019.
58 paused, thinking those lyrics sounded familiar. “Were we singing that on Friday?” “Yes, we were,” Viking verified, adding, “That one is a mourning and vengeance song. So, all the songs have different moods that they fit. “Zum Zum Zum” is a good reactionary song when somebody gets the snot knocked of them. The words go ‘Zum zum zum capoeira mata um’ so ‘another one dies; another capoeirista dies.’112 And then ‘Where’s the wasp? Ahh zum zum zum’ and then
‘Quero ver bater, quero ver cair,’ ‘I wanna see hits; I wanna see strikes’.”113
“Quero Aprender” / “I Want to Learn”
Stand-alone music classes are not always offered at capoeira academies. For Tallahassee
Capoeira, these classes emphasize the importance of music in capoeira, starting off with the goal that all students sing and play instruments. The curriculum was developed after years of experience and communication among teachers. Texuga explained, “How we can get a student to come in, who doesn’t have a music background, who may not even like music, and get to a point where they’re comfortable playing and singing at the same time in a foreign language? I mean, that is a huge jump. And how to do that without making it scary and not letting that scare them out of capoeira because I think sometimes that’s the breaking point.” When asked what sort of strategies they use, Texuga answered, “I think just breaking it down. You know starting off with just clapping and singing. That’s one of the things. Then building on that, starting with pandeiro and atabaque and learning the berimbau. Introducing the instruments at the beginning but not having high expectations until later on.” Music classes are especially important spaces for adults to relinquish some of their anxieties about playing and singing in front of others. “We’re much more self-conscious. Adults get used to not making mistakes in front of people, and capoeira is
112 This is not an entirely accurate translation of the lyrics. A literal translation would be ‘Zum zum zum, capoeira kills one,’ expressing the deadliness of capoeira. 113 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019.
59 just full of that. It takes someone who really loves capoeira or they’re not taking themselves so seriously.”114
Sabiá was one of those students who came into Tallahassee Capoeira having never played a musical instrument before. “[The music] brought me out of my comfort zone,” said Sabiá, laughing at herself. Raptor, also chuckling, agreed, “Yeah, for sure, for sure.” Thinking back on previous music classes and noticing Sabiá take on more of a leadership role, I countered, “I mean you lead songs too…” She quickly responded, “But it took a very long time. “She used to never sing at all,” added Raptor. “She couldn’t even sing in front of me.” Sabiá laughed at that and said, “It took a really long time. And still. There’s a couple songs I could lead right now that I just haven’t because I haven’t done it before in music class…I’m super shy.” After I asked her which songs she wanted to be able to lead, Sabiá answered, “There’s the “Sabiá cantou” one. I know that song, but when I sing it out loud, it doesn’t sound right to me…I know a lot of the songs. I could lead a lot of them…but then coming with the instrument at the right time. It’s hard for me to do the two at once. (laughs) I’ve never played any instrument before so I have no musical…like no rhythm or what’s the word I’m looking for? Musical…knowledge.” “Just like musical sense,” Raptor interjected. Laughing once more at herself, Sabiá said, “I’m a hot mess,” and added, “But it’s fun once you get it!”115
Many of the adult participants at Tallahassee Capoeira do have a musical upbringing of some sort—Professor played viola up until college; Corva, a junior in high school, currently plays in the Leon High School steel band program; Viking, a software consultant, studied composition and clarinet at a performing arts high school in the Orlando area; Pensador grew up in a musically gifted family and sang in a cappella groups throughout his undergraduate studies
114 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019. 115 Sabiá and Graduado Raptor, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, October 15, 2019.
60 at UCLA; and as mentioned before, Elunacy frequently composes metal and electronic music that incorporates his collection of world music instruments. Though their previous musical backgrounds help them learn rhythms and song lyrics at a faster rate, it also built in expectations of tuning and singing on key.
When asked to explain why she did not care for some of the capoeira songs, Corva shared, “A lot of people in capoeira can’t sing so it’s sort of like…it’s like when I went to this church function for a friend, and they had this mariachi band. The mariachi band was out of tune and one of the persons was singing slightly off key, and it was driving me nuts.”116 Pensador had similar sentiments, stating, “I think what’s been frustrating to me from the beginning with the music classes in particular is that the berimbaus are not tuned to each other and they’re also not tuned to the voices so that people are constantly singing in a different key from the berimbaus and they’re constantly changing key within the song. I hate to sound so annoying about it, but it’s basically just always frustrating to me how the singing is…bad because that’s like the part I most connect with, you know? Or I want to most connect with but don’t.”117
Despite the varying levels of musical background, most capoeiristas regularly attend music class. Taz often mentions to the group that music classes are there to prepare for and enhance rodas in the future by giving everyone extra practice singing certain songs and learning more repertoire to cycle through during the roda. If Professor’s voice goes out, if he needs to restring a berimbau, or if he and Instrutora need to tend to their infant daughter, there are others who can lead songs. Music class functions as an experimental lab where people can try playing different instruments, test out variations, try singing along while playing each instrument, and get used to hearing how their part fits in with the rest of the ensemble.
116 Corva, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 23, 2019. 117 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019.
61 Musical concepts are taught in an inclusive, encouraging environment through the use of imitative techniques. Standing in a circular formation, participants mimic the space of the roda in which capoeiristas would play during a game. Their physical arrangement implies a sense of unity and movement. Everyone is given the opportunity to lead songs during class. Usually the more experienced players like Raptor will jump in with a round of songs they want to lead, teaching the words to the response if necessary. Lyrics are written on the mirrors to help students visualize and retain the foreign words, though Professor does not always offer translations or explain the meaning of songs. Nonverbal cues convey most musical instruction. Like learning the physical movements in training classes, rhythmic patterns are learned by watching Professor or Instrutora play and replicating their actions. There are different levels of difficulty between the instrumental parts for students of varying experience to choose from. The pandeiro and atabaque have simpler rhythmic patterns that are not as physically demanding compared to the berimbaus, whose rhythms are more involved and require more coordination between both hands
(and the voice). Classes may focus on practicing variations, swapping instruments, reviewing the different functions of instruments, discussing song lyrics, or learning songs depending on the week.
Games like Capoeira Hot Potato and Capoeira Radio are played to help kids learn song lyrics, practice singing and clapping loudly, and feel more comfortable leading songs. For
Capoeira Hot Potato, everyone sits cross-legged in a circle and whoever is holding the small, teal rubber ball gets to choose a song to lead. The ball is quickly thrust from one set of hands to the next around the circle after the first call has been sung and everyone else joins in singing the responses. Once the responses have concluded, whoever is last holding the ball gets to select and lead the next song. It results in lots of giggling and often strategic displays of their knowledge of
62 response lengths if they want a particular friend to lead a song. In Capoeira Radio, any of the players can request their favorite capoeira ‘hit’ song and either lead it themselves or ask
Professor or Instrutora to lead while the rest of the group sings the responses. “Paraná ê” and
“Zum, zum, zum” are favorites among those who have seen the movie Only the Strong. Shorter capoeira songs for kids like “AEIOU” and “ABC,” which teach the vowels and the first three letters of the alphabet in Portuguese, are part of the canon in the kids’ music class, though longer, tongue twisters like “Vivo no ninho de cobra” or songs that have their apelidos in the lyrics like
“Fogo queimou” are frequently requested by the kids. In a music class during one of the summer camp sessions for Advanced kids, Professor began improvising lyrics, inserting their apelidos into known capoeira songs to their great delight. Texuga likes to teach the song “Só prestar atenção” because it emphasizes the various instrument parts and encourages improvisation.
Hands-on activities like creating their own berimbaus out of papier-mâché cabaças and vergas made of myrtle and oak branches collected locally allows younger capoeiristas to actively engage with similar processes for making the instrument traditionally.
A large portion of musical learning happens outside of class. Many of the higher-ranking members like Raptor, Careta, Viking, and Sabiá take the initiative to learn songs and practice instruments on their own time. Texuga tends to write down the lyrics to visualize the words as she tries to sing along. She states her biggest struggle is with the language, the pronunciation of the words and the memorization.118 Careta has a notebook filled with lyrics to songs he wants to try to learn how to sing. His process for learning songs starts with listening to the YouTube and
Spotify playlists he and Sapinho created and eventually being able to sing along to the lyrics during their car rides. He then attempts to write the words down in Portuguese if he knows them
118 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019.
63 or he writes them phonetically and searches on Google for the rest of the lyrics. “That’s super hilariously hard thing to do,” Careta explained to me. “I try to hear the chorus, and I don’t know the Portuguese word, but I think it looks like this, and I misspell it and can’t find it. Sometimes I search for like forty-five minutes to an hour for a song, and I end up searching a couple words strung together and I do ‘capoeira song’ and ‘gavião pegou.’ Sometimes I’ll ask Raptor or
Professor too. It’s a more reliable, timely way to do it. Singing the songs in the car and then trying to play it and sing at the same time is really hard. The berimbau has got a couple extra notes, you know, and it’s also a little more complex, so I start with the pandeiro, just the three beats, try to sing it with that and try to figure out where the words are hitting with the hands.”119
Altered States of Mind
Accumulating musical knowledge leads to successful interactions during rodas since the music plays a significant role in altering states of mind. Lewis notes, “Scholars of play emphasize the feeling of flow in describing how one can ‘lose’ oneself in the activity. This also relates to an altered sense of time, which many agree is an important characteristic of play states. Many capoeiristas report that they experience altered states during play, and they relate these states specifically to the music, but they are not often consciously aware of the structures which help to create, for example, the sense of flow.”120 Viking describes the ways in which he reacts to the music during rodas, saying, “The berimbau is a very hypnotic instrument. When you combine it with the full bateria when everyone is singing and clapping—if one lets oneself—you get into this trance with it where you feel more than here.” “I’ve noticed you moving around a lot in roda or in music class playing around. It seems like you’re very engaged,” I remarked. “I let go.
119 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019. 120 Lewis, Ring of Liberation, 145.
64 That’s one of the few places where I feel like I let go.” I asked Viking if he felt like that in his previous musical experiences in school. “Mmmhmm like in symphony classes or composition when I was working with headphones on, using the ancient technology of the time where you had to put the notes as code. But the trance state that I feel when we’re practicing in music class or practicing in roda is a lot deeper.” “How so?” I inquired further. “I don’t notice the passage of time. There’s a sense of loss of self and sense of community in place of that that I experience through that that I didn’t get elsewhere. Not even recreational drugs.” 121 For Corva, capoeira felt more relaxed and fun compared to her experience training karate. “I think it just gives you something to focus on that isn’t capoeira while you’re doing capoeira. It’s really intense, and half the time, I’m just thinking, ‘Ow, my legs. When’s water break??’ But during roda, I’m sort of focused on the music so you sort of flow with it. Like capoeira is all about flow, it’s less about taking people down.”122
These states of mind are reliant on the quality of the music. When asked about his emotional connection to the music during a Friday evening roda, Pensador responded, “That’s a good question. I don’t think I was connecting emotionally to the music today. It wasn’t that good. (laughing) I’m such a critic. I think it’s most helpful to be honest…When there’s a full bateria and there are a lot of advanced people, it’s way better. And also, when someone who can sing on pitch and sing loudly is leading, that’s so much fun. When Morcego was singing tonight, he has a little bit more flair when he sings.” “He was growling!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, he growls and he makes the songs his own and he sings on key, so I think I was feeling it a little bit more
121 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019. 122 Corva, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 23, 2019.
65 and just enjoying listening to it more. And when Professor Taz sings, he kinda shouts. He’s trying to get the axé up.”123
Others mentioned how the energy from capoeira’s music creates social bonds. Pensador believes the music brings capoeiristas together. “If you all know the same song or the same set of songs, it’s good for bonding…other functions—it creates axé, you know? When the music is hopping and everyone is singing and clapping, it’s just exciting! I think it feeds back and forth from the game to the music and the music to the game, so you can boost the other one by focusing on it. I also think it serves to function keeping modern capoeira tied to its roots.”124
Careta reflected, “I think people probably have a similar experience in church. When I was young, I went to church. When I was in high school in the early 90s, that seemed to be the thing people cared about the most, and it started to be such an issue, at least at my church, that they had a whole other hour in between the two services that was just worship service. I think people really felt connected to the music. It feels similar to that.”125
The capacity for states of flow and social bonding in capoeira are based in the participatory music style features that Thomas Turino outlines in Music as Social Life (2008).
Participatory music making is driven by the value of inclusion and favors musical strategies like short, repeated forms, dense textures, wide tunings, constant rhythmic groove, slight variations, and few dramatic contrasts that downplay individual virtuosity. The continuous stream of corridos and quadras that can be repeated as long as the lead singer wants to and the overlapping texture of berimbaus, atabaque, pandeiro, hand-clapping, and different voices enhances participation. Variations are concentrated on the viola or lead singer, but other instruments are
123 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019. 124 Ibid. 125 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019.
66 able to vary their parts for short periods of time as long as they do not disrupt the groove.
Virtuosic soloing subtly merges with the overall sound of the group and provides a space for more advanced musicians to be challenged so they can stay interested in the activity and experience flow as well. The consistently loud volume, wide tuning among of the pitches of the berimbaus and voices, and slightly out of phase rhythmic groove from the bateria, and the buzzy timbres from the caxixi are all aspects that “provide a crucial cloaking function that helps inspire musical participation.”126 Without scripted music and movement, participants have to be hyper- focused on the sounds and interactions of others on a moment-to-moment basis. For Turino,
“This need to pay attention results in a kind of heightened, immediate social intercourse; when the performance is going well, differences among participants melt away as attention is focused on the seamlessness of sound and motion. Moving together and sounding together in a group creates a direct sense of being together and of deeply felt similarity, and hence identity, among participants.”127 Through participatory music making, the music of capoeira generates solidarity among participants, and as many of my informants mentioned, it is also a conducting agent of axé, which will be discussed further in the following chapter.
126 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 46. 127 Turino, 43.
67 CHAPTER FIVE
THE VITALITY OF AXÉ
‘Tamos juntos, misturados, We’re together, mixed together, Quando berimbau tocar. When the berimbau plays. Me diga quem é você; Tell me who you are; Vamos vadiar. Let’s hang out and play.
During my first music class at Tallahassee Capoeira, the song “‘Tamos Juntos” was chosen by Professor to end with an ear worm. He first heard the song during a roda at the ACL academy in Sacramento and said it changed the roda completely. Standing around in a tight circle either playing the tall atabaque drum, the top-heavy berimbaus, or the more manageable pandeiro, Raptor, Sabiá, Careta, Sapinho, and I learned the lyrics to this new song by imitating
Professor and repeating short phrases back to him, occasionally stumbling through the
Portuguese pronunciations. I glanced into the floor-to-ceiling length mirrors to observe the five of us concentrating on the coordination between our hands playing the instruments and our voices forming the foreign words on our lips. At the end of the class, everyone instinctively gathered in a circle and extended their right hand into the middle. I timidly placed my hand into the mix, and at the count of “três,” we threw our hands up into the air and yelled, “Axé, capoeira!” My venture to unearth the meaning of axé had begun.
Defining Axé
Capoeiristas often invoke the word axé as a form of salutation or to describe the energy of the space. It is simply defined as ‘energy’ or ‘spirit’ by Tallahassee Capoeira members. Viking distinguished axé as “the energy that somebody has in the roda, the energy that the crowd has, and there’s this thought or concept in capoeira that the capoeiristas have their own axé they bring to it, but then the crowd, it’s their job to pile it on so that within the ring, so it just builds. It
68 produces a really good, high quality, meaningful game, or set of games as a group, so everybody
128 is important.”
Pensador, Sapinho, and Careta cited the need to be fully engaged in the present to have axé. Pensador described it as “…a combination of energy, kind of like a vibe of excitement, and then also there’s a component of love and respect for the game. And enjoyment of what’s happening in the moment, being really present with the game, being engaged, everyone’s clapping, everyone’s singing, everyone’s watching. People who are playing are just on fire or at least focused, and it just feels good for everyone.”129 During our conversation in a local coffee shop, Careta turned to his son, Sapinho, and asked, “What does it look like when somebody has axé? Like if you see somebody in roda and they have axé, what does that look like?” Sapinho looked up from his blueberry muffin and emphatically stated, “They’re really energetic and ready.” “Really energetic and ready,” Careta repeated. Then he asked, “What does it look like when somebody doesn’t have axe?” to which Sapinho responded, “They’re tired and not feeling it.” As Sapinho returned to eating his muffin, I asked Careta how he feels axé personally. “I don’t know. It’s easy to kind of be clapping. Do you feel like this? To be clapping and watching the game and kinda zone out a little bit? I think that’s losing some of the axé. So sometimes I have to be real conscious and be like I gotta sing…I’m making a conscious effort to clap loud, to sing loud, and then be a part of it or feel present. I think maybe the axé comes from that. I don’t think it’s just a passive feeling of energy, but I think I can feel it.”130
Their descriptions of axé parallel those illustrated by Drewal and Browning. In her detailing of the features of aṣe in Yoruba rituals, Drewal states, “The concept of axé presupposes
128 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019. 129 Pensador, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 30, 2019. 130 Careta and Sapinho, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019.
69 the instrumentality of actors as agents in structuring, in processing, in contextualizing, in playing tropes off one other [sic], at once performing operations on structure, process, and context and improvising on, in, with, and around them...Improvisations take diverse forms: transformations of esoteric verses into narratives, spontaneous interpretations, recontextualizations, drumming, dancing, chanting, parody, ruses, reconstitutions of conventions, competing interests, and individual interventions into the ritual event.”131 Axé, for Tallahassee capoeiristas, is a form of energy they themselves possess that can be multiplied and manipulated to enhance their surroundings as long as they are in a state of active intention focused on the present.
Building Axé
The success of interactions within Tallahassee Capoeira like the music class described earlier and those occurring within the roda is determined by axé. Processes through which the academy fosters axé are analogous to the same methods required for successful ritual interactions Randall
Collins discusses in his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2004). “At the center of an interaction ritual is the process in which participants develop a mutual focus of attention and become entrained in each other’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions.”132 Chains of successful ritual interactions create group solidarity; individual emotional energy built on confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative; symbolic meaning among participants; and feelings of morality, while failed rituals have the opposite reactions. Failed rituals are missing ingredients like shared attention and initial emotion. People are attracted to successful rituals with their higher degrees of emotion, motivation, and symbolic charge and are repelled by lesser interactions.133
131 Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 27. 132 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2004), 47. 133 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 51.
70 Axé is built on previous interaction chains—good or bad—among individual agents through learned rituals within the daily operations at Tallahassee Capoeira. These interactions are defined and promoted through weeks, months, and years of work setting the culture of the group, as well as teaching the values of capoeira, expectations for classes and rodas, and daily rituals to participants. Instrutora shared, “We really want it to be kind of like a family. I hope that that’s what it’s like for people. It’s hard to say from where I’m standing because it’s something
Brandon and I have worked hard to create and we’ve seen it for…we’ve had sets of years where we did not have adults and it was just kids that were coming. We had a time where there was a couple of guys that had bad axé, and it was so hard to teach them. We were trying to facilitate a positive space where people can have fun exercising and can have fun learning capoeira so I guess that’s what we’re going for…To see the way it is now, we’re so thankful for all of you guys that come, and it’s so great because this is the way capoeira is supposed to be.” Bouncing her youngest daughter on her knee, Texuga added, “We want it to be able to be that way, and it happens here which is really fun.” Her daughter squealed with delight as her dad’s voice resonated from the other room while he called songs during the kid’s music class.
Taz and Texuga strive to make the culture of their space as welcoming as possible, beginning with a simple ritual, the capoeira hello. Kids and adults, alike, will greet one another at the academy with a high-five followed immediately by a fist bump. 134 Another daily ritual occurs after classes at the academy, which will always end with a line-up of everyone according to their corda levels, highest to lowest. Starting with either Professor or Instrutora, everyone will high-five and fist bump the highest-ranked capoeiristas followed by the next highest until they
134 This form of greeting is common across many capoeira academies according to Taz. “Yeah, the high five and fist bump is just a capoeira thing. It’s like a secret handshake, and once you learn it, you’re like, ‘Man, I belong!’ We all look for tribes—it’s one of the identifiers to that tribe.” Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020.
71 reach the end of the line. There, he or she will stand and high-five/fist bump the next capoeirista(s) if they are lower ranked. Words of encouragement are exchanged between each capoeirista as they walk through the line. These positive exchanges at the end of every class motivate capoeiristas to continue training. Taz explained, “Capoeira tends to be a sport where there’s both…it’s not quite an individual sport; there’s also a group, a team dynamic to it. The line-up at the end is where you’re connecting to and congratulating each person. ‘You put in good effort today!’ You’re looking out for each other and building each other up. The line-up is deliberate to focus attention on being there for each other.”135 Following the line-up or after the end of a roda, everyone circles up and piles their right or left hand into the middle. Professor rapidly counts to three in Portuguese, “um, dois, três,” and everyone throws their hand into the air, shouting, “Axé, capoeira!” This ritual was created by Mestre Aranha in his early years teaching and has been continued by the rest of the ACL instructors.136 These learned greeting and closing rituals connect individuals to the community and create axé.
Studying its role in the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé, ethnomusicologist Gerard
Béhague observed that axé can diminish or grow according to the ritual activity and the behavior of candomblé initiates.137 Stanyek and Robitaille maintain that axé is the fuel for the improvisatory dimensions of the capoeira game. Capoeiristas are able to engage in bodily dialogues with each other while using personal agency to shape the flow of the game for their own advantage. For Robitaille, “[C]apoeira only really comes to its full materialization in the roda where the games are improvised, the outcomes are uncertain, and the balance of power is unstable and always potentially changing. Only in those conditions will capoeiristas come
135 Professor Taz, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, February 10, 2020. 136 Ibid. 137 Gerard Béhague, “Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Religious Musics: A Case of Cultural Pluralism,” Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 94.
72 together to play, compete, and collectively create energy – axé – all of which then drives the roda and the interactions therein.”138 While axé is manipulated through the improvisatory physical dialogues between participants described by Stanyek and Robitaille, it is the music that ultimately drives the energy of these interactions. The power of transformation relies on musical sound. Through his research in candomblé rituals, Érico de Souza Brito found that axé is irrevocably tied to sound. “[S]ound emitted by the practitioners, both through speech and through instruments, becomes strength, axé. To produce axé, the sacred force, the energy of the orixás, sound is necessary…Sound needs axé, and axé needs sound.”139 Béhague also maintained, “Through speech and sound, the orixás [the pantheon of deities in candomblé] will be able to communicate directly with human beings. As an extension, the sounds of ritual instruments and all of their symbolic contents are also conducting agents of axé.”140 The participatory aspects of capoeira’s music ensure mutual, focused attention on the actions in the roda that add axé to the game, resulting in a successful ritual interaction and the collective effervescence of the group.
The force of axé is malleable—it can be present or not, and either good or bad, depending on the agents creating and manipulating that energy. Capoeiristas strive to accumulate good axé within the game of capoeira through music making. During one roda at the end of May,
Professor was recovering from a cold, and his voice was beginning to crack as he called songs.
The group’s responses, in turn, became less and less concentrated. He eventually paused the game to sternly instruct us to sing and clap louder to build up the energy. After starting up the
138 Laurence Robitaille, “Capoeira as a Resource: Multiple Uses of Culture under Conditions of Transnational Neoliberalism,” PhD diss., York University, 2013, 334. 139 Érico de Souza Brito, “O axé do som e o som do axé: multiplicidades sonoras em um terreiro de candomblé da nação ketu,” Ponto Urbe (Online) 23 (December 2018), accessed June 24, 2019, http://journals.openedition.org/pontourbe/5716. 140 Gerard Béhague, “Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Religious Musics: A Case of Cultural Pluralism,” 95.
73 roda again and with everyone enthusiastically singing the responses, the arame on his berimbau snapped. Taz joked that it was too much axé and began to call a new song, inserting improvised lyrics like “a corda quebrou | the cord broke.”141 On a separate occasion, Raptor, taking the lead on vocals and berimbau, stopped the music in the middle of a game, stating, “There’s no energy.”142 Viking explained, “Sometimes the roda will stop when people are standing around and not clapping or not singing or whatever. Sometimes they’ll stop the whole thing because it’s killing the axé…You can feel the difference. Especially in the roda, when the roda itself isn’t working.”143
It can take considerable effort to build good axé and ensure positive interactions, and capoeiristas are not always effective. When asked how he actively contributes or adds good energy into the roda, Viking said, “I’ll remind the kids, ‘Hey, we’re supposed to clapping and singing,’ and I make sure that we keep the ring [formation]. I’ll make sure people stay spaced out so we still have the ring formation. If I’m on the atabaque, I’ll stop and put my arms up and clap really loud…And then I’ll sing louder. Move around a bit. Throw my arms up and down. If I’m at the boca getting ready to go in and the energy is just zapped while I’m crouched, I’ll start throwing my arms around. ‘Hey, let’s get excited; let’s build this back up’.” “I definitely noticed you doing some of those moves on Friday!” I laughed. “Well, yeah, the kids were dead tired.
And the adults were too.”144 While leading songs and playing berimbau during roda, Professor will often shout requests for everyone to “fix the roda!” sometimes even stopping the game entirely to address the issue. Capoeiristas, especially younger players, frequently wander off from the roda to check in with their parents who are observing from the waiting area or clump
141 Author’s field notes, May 31, 2019. 142 Author’s field notes, September 20, 2019. 143 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019. 144 Ibid.
74 together to talk or giggle with one another, creating wide gaps in the circle. Both Taz and Texuga stress the importance of maintaining the circle formation during rodas, so the energy does not escape the space. Drawing connections between her practice of contact improvisation and capoeira in the United States, dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright references the need to keep energy contained within the game, explaining, “…the roda creates a protective ring that insulates the players from outside interference, and keeps them focused…It is important to keep the circles evenly spaced so that there are no black holes, no breaks in energy. This is a question of safety, of course, but the cohesive energy of the circle also creates an uncanny attentiveness that draws out the magic within these interactions and encourages the participants to realize their fullest potential.”145
Practicing an Afro-Brazilian Tradition
Axé in the context of American (US) capoeira academies is not always viewed in a positive light.
For ethnomusicologist Ashley Humphrey, axé represents the disconnect between Brazilian and
American knowledge base of the influence of the African diaspora in capoeira. During her fieldwork at the Michigan Center for Capoeira, Humphrey observed, “A problem arises when
American capoeira academies and their students attribute axé and other concepts within capoeira as only relevant to capoeira, inadvertently omitting spiritual contributions of Afro-Brazilians from the African-diaspora.”146 Through her understanding of Afro-diasporic cultural values within American capoeira academies, students do not consider capoeira history or contributions of Afro-Brazilians to be the most important aspect of their interaction with the art form. “This is
145 Ann Cooper Albright, Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2013), 228. 146 Ashley Humphrey, “Where’s the Roda?: Understanding Capoeira Culture in an American Context.” Master’s thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2018, 52.
75 not because of ignorance or lack of access, but because of a shift in values within the capoeira community which is a result of the migration of the sport.”147
With the increasingly rapid globalization of capoeira, issues concerning the importance of nationality, racial identity, tradition, and authenticity have proliferated.148 However, a shift of values is a natural part of the tradition-making process. Tradition, as defined by Michael Bakan, is “a process of creative transformation whose most remarkable feature is the continuity it nurtures and sustains.”149 The ethnomusicologist Henry Spiller believes traditions teach, reinforce, and create social values of their producers and consumers.150 Traditions like capoeira and axé are not static objects stuck in the past—they grow and adjust according to the values of the people practicing them, responding to new situations and experimenting with new ideas.
Though she states she prefers the game of Angola, Barbara Browning defends the validity for capoeira regional’s modifications of the game, “cannibalizing gymnastics, kick-boxing, ballet, and, in the ‘80s, breakdancing,” and is moved by the speed, athleticism, flexibility, and precision within the regional game. She argues the history of capoeira must constantly be reaffirmed though. “Hot dog regionalistas can spin so fast they sometimes lose sight of the past, and the present, Browning quips. “The postmodern cultural critic must acknowledge that she, too, is a product of the times. We’re sometimes giddy with the new language available to us for expressing our enthusiasms for cultural cross-fertilization. But in rejecting a restrictive, strict notion of cultural authenticity, we risk losing some of the political potential of rootedness.”151
147 Humphrey, “Where’s the Roda?,” 53. 148 Despite the changing demographics of capoeiristas, blackness, Brazilian nationality, and masculinity remain at the top of the capoeira hierarchy of traditional claims to legitimacy as argued by Lauren Miller Griffith. These issues are further explored through the context of apprenticeship pilgrimages in her book In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition. 149 Michael B. Bakan, World Music: Traditions and Transformations, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2019), 31. 150 Henry Spiller, Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4. 151 Browning, Samba, 124.
76 Capoeiristas at Tallahassee Capoeira are mindful of their participation and contributions to capoeira’s traditions. Texuga voiced her concerns about capoeira maintaining its ties to Brazil:
“I hope capoeira doesn’t lose its Brazilian culture. I know that that happens. There’s been a lot of discussion about that. Brazilian capoeiristas don’t want it to lose that and that makes good sense because if you look at some of the other martial arts, they have kind of lost their background.”152
Considering the academy’s approach to discussing capoeira’s history, Careta shared, “I think when we’re singing the songs, that’s where it is emphasized. But it’s not emphasized in an academic way. If you know the lyrics in the verses and what they mean, the translations, that’s where it comes in…the main things I’ve learned though from the songs that I didn’t know, is how much capoeira is not just about slavery. A lot of its history is after slavery with black communities in cities.”
When asked about how he connects to capoeira’s historical background, Viking responded, “On a superficial level, it’s really easy to rationalize away anything. Hey, it’s fun.
I’m working out. On a different level, on an introspective level, for me, just as important as practicing the moves, is understanding the history and having a bit of respect or reverence for where it came from. To me, it’s really important that I’m mindful as I practice of where it came from…And so, practicing it, being mindful of where it came from, having respect for it, I think is important in order to honor the tradition without appropriating. I don’t profess to be an expert at this; I’m merely learning a tradition and doing my bit to keep it alive.”153 I asked Careta what traditional aspects of capoeira he believes are still being practiced in the United States. “My sense of it is that it’s like an oral history. I think there are discussions and debates about this, at least what little I could pick up on social media, about what’s authentic and what’s not. …I think
152 Texuga, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 16, 2019. 153 Viking, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 11, 2019.
77 what’s passed down is…it may not be authentic in the way that it’s just like the past, but in a different way. Maybe this is a debate, but there’s an authenticity about the fact that it’s still a community, it’s still practicing the same moves, the same rituals but maybe in a different form.”154
While they are aware of the capoeira’s roots in the African slave experience in Brazil, most of the capoeiristas at Tallahassee Capoeira define it as a Brazilian martial art form, omitting the ‘Afro’ prefix. Graduado Raptor, however, made the distinction in our interview. “I describe it as an Afro-Brazilian martial art that was cultivated by African slaves in Brazil. It combines kicks, dodges, acrobatics, and music, and it’s very culture and community oriented.” Sabiá bemoaned, “I always forget to say the ‘Afro’ part. I always just say it’s a Brazilian martial art.”
“Do you think that’s an important distinction?” I asked them. “For sure, yeah,” Raptor answered, adding, “It’s more accurate…The history is very important. I think a lot of times people can leave out the culture and the history aspect and just focus on the flips and pretty moves, but there’s a lot of history behind it.” I asked him if he found that being the case at Tallahassee. “Not so much. I think our teacher does a good job of, where he can, fitting in lots of aspects of the culture whether that’s during music, or how certain moves came to be about, the different styles of capoeira, he does a good job of making those distinctions.”155
A Search for Authenticity
From Bimba’s institutional and stylistic innovations to the art form to the fluidity of modes in contemporary capoeira academies around the world, anxieties over authentic expressions of capoeira have flourished. The maintenance of cultural traditions has preoccupied adherents in all
154 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019. 155 Graduado Raptor and Sabiá, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, October 15, 2019.
78 parts of the world. In chapter six of Music as Social Life (2008), ethnomusicologist Thomas
Turino examines issues of authenticity between two settings old-time music and dance in the
United States—one where these events are attended by local, rural people and serve as a fabric of their community’s social life and one where these events involve white, middle-class participants from urban and suburban backgrounds who did not grow up with this music and dance as a basic part of their community. In the first setting, individuals are enculturated from an early age with the habits needed to perform this music and dance in culturally appropriate ways, resulting in little self-consciousness about performance and creative liberties. Here, the values guiding performance complement the values of social life. In the other setting, the middle-class participants involved with old-time music and dance came to it on their own because of an attraction to the style as well as the imagery and the participatory values that surround it. “They are an intentional interest group that forms around a particular style complex, as well as a particular discourse about the style and activity which, in this case, involves notions of ‘folk’ community and ‘traditional’ Americanness.”156 These events contrast their everyday lives and social networks. “The style of interaction and values of the middle-class old-time cohort stand in stark opposition to the basic tenets of the capitalist cultural formation which prominently influenced participants’ socialization. The importance of this cohort for many of its members is precisely that it provides a temporary alternative to the values and lifeways of the ‘modern’ capitalist formation.”157 When questions of authenticity emerge, Turino believes the middle-class scene should be considered a unique tradition with its own evolving values, practices, and styles.
One is not more authentic than the other.158
156 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 161. 157 Turino, 161. 158 Ibid., 161-163.
79 Like the middle-class scene in old-time music and dance, Tallahassee Capoeira is a unique tradition that has its own evolving values, practices, and style. My informants affirm that their practicing of capoeira is not any less authentic or meaningful because it is not in accordance with the tradition. Many believe their involvement in cross-cultural learning is an integral part to society today. Referring to his collection of world music instruments and interest in other cultures, Elunacy contended, “I have so much stuff from around the world because I love it. I was born Puerto Rican so I’m going to stick with only Puerto Rican stuff? Hell no…There’s so much in other rich cultures that you can learn from and apply to your daily lives… If you want to learn something from our culture and want me to teach something in Puerto Rican, I will do it.
By all means, learn it, share it. That’s the whole point. People gotta learn from other cultures so they actually can understand and not have a problem with it.” “Does it make a different if it’s taught by a culture-bearer or not?” I asked. Elunacy paused for a second, sighing. “The thing is, if you are from that area, you’re born and raised there, and you’re showing it to other people, better yet. Because you’re the root of everything. But in this case, if it’s taught by somebody who learned from somebody else like…well, it’s not like you’re going to find a perfect Brazilian capoeirista anywhere, on every corner, every city. It’s not like that. So you gotta learn from somebody else who actually knows about it.”159
When asked the same question about learning from culture-bearers, Corva also had no concerns about learning capoeira from non-Brazilians, believing it would be more of an issue if people did not learn about other cultures. “If no one practiced a little bit of other people’s cultures, no one would understand anybody… you’re learning about the culture and learning to respect it. You’re not saying it’s our culture now. It’s their culture, but we’re enjoying it too…I
159 Elunacy, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 22, 2019.
80 really wouldn’t mind if someone decided to partake in Middle Eastern traditions. My mom is from Lebanon. But if they make tabbouleh wrong, I’m going to shame them. Like people eat hummus all the time. I can’t say that’s cultural appropriation because everyone eats hummus.
But I can see it as cultural appropriation if you make your tabbouleh without tomatoes,” Corva said, laughing. “Can you apply that to capoeira with things that aren’t authentic?” I inquired.
“Yeah, I think it’s more like chai tea capoeira because you know you’re not making it super authentically. Like chai tea lattes, but it’s a twist on it.” “How is a normal chai tea prepared?”
“Well, it’s just tea and milk—it’s not frothy.” “Then what do you think is the frothy milk of capoeira in Tallahassee?” I asked, amused. “I’d say it’s the people because none of us are really
Brazilian. We’re just sort of…people respectfully practicing the traditions.”160
Does it make a difference to learn capoeira from a non-culture bearer? Can Tallahassee capoeiristas respectfully practice this tradition and adhere to its values? Do these delineations truly matter? Observing decades of scholarly discourse cataloguing categories of difference— differences in race and class, differences in physical ability and sexuality—and the subsequent marginalization of such distinctions, Ann Cooper Albright offers a direction for moving forward,
“The problem with an encyclopedic detailing of differences is that they run the risk of reifying the binary, reducing difference to a static, monolithic fact of difference. Rather than seeing difference as one set position, I am arguing for a positioning (and, by extension, a repositioning) that is always in motion.”161 For Albright, capoeira is a movement form that “incorporate[s] that physical confrontation with the other—in which difference can be acknowledged and still moved through, with, toward, under, beyond, in accordance with, etc.”162
160 Corva, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 23, 2019. 161 Albright, Engaging Bodies, 220. 162 Albright, 220.
81 The cartwheels, handstands, head spins, and other inverted movements in capoeira compel capoeiristas to see the world through a new perspective. For Tallahassee capoeiristas, the act of singing in a new language and performing on Brazilian instruments also adds another dimension to experiencing the world in a different light. Albright argues, “These forms train practitioners to circumvent the usual panic at finding oneself in odd positions, retraining one’s immediate physical responses by substituting a willingness to experience the sensation of being upside down or inside out. The willingness to be caught off guard, at risk, to enter unusual situations, is connected to the improvisational impulse in capoeira.”163
Postmodern critical theories have put into question long held dynamics of power and privilege, urging scholars to stop and reconsider the structures we operate within. While Albright fully agrees with these perspectives, she finds “…a hyper-awareness of difference brings people to a self-consciousness that can be completely debilitating. The result is that everyone retreats into their respective corners, so nervous about offending or being offended that the gulf between us all widens.”164 Similar to Corva and Elunacy’s sentiments, Albright believes we need to connect with others even at the discomfort of crossing secure boundaries. “[W]e must take the risk of failure, risk the embarrassments and the awkwardness, risk feeling uncomfortable and having our toes stepped on, in order to launch ourselves across that metaphysical slash between self/other. The first moves of any new partnership are rarely smooth, but we must take that chance and ask an “other” to dance.”165 The concern over whether or not capoeira should be taught and practiced by non-culture bearers is a debilitating one. Like Albright, I see
163Albright, 227. 164 Ibid., 220. 165 Ibid., 220-21.
82 contemporary capoeira practices around the world like those at Tallahassee Capoeira as “a sign of [capoeira’s] willingness to survive its own historical moment and continue to evolve.”166
Concluding Remarks
Capoeira as a tradition experiences constant processes of re-negotiation by its practitioners, but its capacities of resilience, strength, and communal solidarity continue to define the idealized capoeira experience. In its mutability, axé is the prevailing concept of the power of positivity— of actively manipulating one’s space and the community’s space to improve one’s circumstances—that has given meaning to capoeira in its myriad of manifestations. For Careta, capoeira represents the endurance of positivity, sharing, “I imagine as powerless as the slaves were, to think that something they created was spread worldwide and had a positive way of bringing people together, it’s hard for me to think that that would be something that they wouldn’t like. That they created something as positive that spread around the world.”167
Tallahassee Capoeira places value on cultivating positivity, community building, and individual growth through its daily rituals. The success of interactions within Tallahassee
Capoeira is ensured through axé—capoeiristas manipulate the axé of a space by being completely engaged in the movements within the game, cheering on one another, and fully participating in music making. Barbara Browning affirms, “…[I]t is undeniably a good thing to have axé. One uses the term not only to imply the capability to effect divine change. Having axé is akin to what we call in the United States having soul. It means you feel deeply, swing low— and carry African culture. The figure of cultural memory as a communicable agent carried in the blood is inherent in the notion of axé.”168 The effectiveness of axé sustains the cultural memory
166 Albright, 227. 167 Careta, interview with Abby Rehard, personal interview, August 13, 2019. 168 Browning, Samba, 178.
83 and values of capoeira’s creators in today’s global community of capoeiristas. “Society,” Randall
Collins states, “is held together to just the extent that rituals are effectively carried out, and during those periods of time when the effects of those rituals are still fresh in people’s minds and reverberating in their emotions…And the ‘society’ that is held together is no abstract unity of a social system, but is just those groups of people assembled in particular places who feel solidarity with each other through the effects of participation and ritually charged symbolism.”169
From Mestre Bimba’s innovations and Mestre Pastinha’s emphasis on capoeira’s roots to diasporic Brazilian mestres spreading the practice around the world, capoeiristas have imbued its practice with multiple layers of meaning that reflect, embody, and inform their diverse identities and more specific Afro-Brazilian cultural values.
Reflecting on my first music class, I hear the transnational expressions of capoeira, community building, and the value of music within a globalized capoeira culture resonate in the lyrics of “‘Tamos Juntos.” Music making practices permeate the space of Tallahassee Capoeira and create encouraging, communal bonds among participants. The vivacity of these experiences is built on their singing, their playing of instruments, their clapping, and their cheers during a roda to the final “Axé, capoeira!” called out at the end of the day. By invoking the Afro-
Brazilian concept of axé, Tallahassee Capoeira practitioners actively work to ensure positive interactions that create strong social connections in this globalized sport. Axé is a transformative power dependent on the interactions between individuals, and the more people playing capoeira, the better chance of maximizing good axé. No matter one’s background, as capoeiristas, “We are together, mixed together, when the berimbau plays. Tell me who you are; let’s hang out and play.”
169 Collins, 41.
84 APPENDIX A
ACL TESTING REQUIREMENTS
85
86
87 ACL Curriculum
The path to Graduado is divided into four brackets in the curriculum: Novice, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. There are five cords in each bracket. Please note that while each cord does not have specific requirements, each bracket does. Therefore, to advance from Novice to Beginner bracket, or Beginner to Intermediate bracket (and so on), there are specific sets of requirements that a student must meet.
The curriculum is specifically designed in brackets to ensure that all Allied Capoeira League students are reaching the same milestones, while giving the individual ACL teachers some freedom to manage their students' growth and progression.
This curriculum is designed to reward all students who put in the required time and effort to advance. Some people may skip several cords at promotion time, and others may only get the next cord, but no one who is giving effort should be held back entirely.
88 Novice Bracket
Bracket Goal: In partners, flow with the four basic kicks. Basic form and defense.
Required Moves: • Four Basic Kicks: 1. Meia lua de frente 2. Queixada 3. Armada 4. Meia lua de compasso • Martelo • Bencao • Vingativa • Esquiva • Esquivinha • Cadeira • Guarda Baixa • Guarda Alta • Leque • Meia Lua Troca • Au
Required Skills: 1. Demonstrate proper form of all required kicks. (4BK: land square queixada/armada; ML d C finish guarda baixa w/ weight on front foot, ML d F weight on toes on support leg; martelo-kick horizontal, strike with shin, opposite hand protect head; bencao-push forward with hips, support heel off floor) 2. Demonstrate proper form of escapes 3. Quickly use esquivinhas between a series of meia lua de compassos (alternating directions) 4. Follow or oppose the 4 basic kicks with queixada, armada, or meia lua de compasso 5. Use martelo as a counter kick versus the 4 basic kicks 6. Use leque as a response to bencao in a game 7. From ginga position (stationary stance) demonstrate ability to follow any of the 4 basic kicks with Meia Lua de Compasso by going straight in or doing Meia Lua Troca with proper form and in the appropriate direction. (step with or switch with) 8. Dodge 4 basic kicks with au 9. Consistently apply vingativa in training and sometimes in games 10. Show ability to use all required moves to create flow in games with partners.
Music: Play sao bento grande on berimbau keeping rhythm with the rest of the bateria Play pandeiro and atabaque in time with sao bento grande on the berimbau Attempts to sing most choruses Claps with the music
Ginga Correct arms up & elbow stays up Legs correct widths in ginga position
89 Beginner Bracket Bracket Goal: Add movement and dimension into the game. Required Moves (must be proficient): • base • negativa (de ataque); negativa (de defesa); negativa (de costa) • guarda baixa • role baixo (4 pts on floor, solid) from base; from negativa; from guarda baixa • cocorinha • queda de quatro • passar pra tras • xis • costura • queda de rim • voltar pra tras Secondary Moves (basic form): • chapeu de couro • tesoura de frente • rasteira do chao • rasteira do mao • role alto • negativa (lateral) • resistencia • bloqueado • passagem • cocorinha de costa • macaco Required Skills: 1. Can change directions at any point in negativa/role and guarda baixa/role 2. Regularly uses attacks in combination with transitions and defenses to build a dimensional game 3. Uses defenses for different purposes (changing positions, counter attacks, etc.) 4. Creates new sequences of transitions that are logical and effective for different purposes (change directions, reposition for attack, evade an attack) 5. Demonstrates spatial awareness in motion, can react and navigate around opponent’s maneuverings 6. Remains aligned with target throughout games and sequences (chest, hips, and toes square) 7. Can enter in 3 ways and exit in 3 ways each of the following moves: • negativa (de ataque) • negativa (de costa) • guarda baixa • queda de quatro • au • queda de rim • xis • costura • passar pra tras • voltar pra tras Music: Can consistently produce quality sound with the berimbau (sbg); Always comes in on the correct beat on berimbau, pandeiro, and atabaque; Demonstrates knowledge of many simple choruses (correct words) Ginga: Consistently demonstrates low, powerful hips in all 3 steps Shoulders back in base
90 IntermediateAdvanced BracketBracket Bracket Goal: Attacking counters and escapes. Bracket Goal: Reading and reacting, strategy, control of the game. Required Moves: • GanchoRequired Moves: All previous bracket moves should be done with excellent form • Chapa Giratoria • ParafusoRequired (queixada/martelo) Skills: • Tesoura1. Reads de costa and reacts to cues to set up traps in training from ginga and balanca • Rasteira2. In em partners, pe when given up to 3 sets of prescribed, paired movements, a student can identify • Banda despecifically costa how and at what moment to respond. 3. Can effectively do branching sequences (initiate move, gauge response, find appropriate • Arrastao Troca decounter). frente Eventually this can be done in partners with the other person doing required skill #2. • 4. Self reflects and recognizes errors (demonstrates higher understanding) Finta martelo • 5. Demonstrates basic flurry attack defense • Pendulo6. Must pass fitness test • Cabecada • Various quebradas Music: RequiredCan sing Skills:lead on 20 songs while playing berimbau. Can1. tuneCan bateria.attack queixada, armada, and martelo with gancho Can2. leadCan bateriaattack queixada,(sbg). armada, and chapa giratoria with chapa giratoria Can3. singCan whileattack playing queixada, all instruments armada, and martelo with martelo 4. Can attack martelo, queixada, armada, and vingativa with banda de costa Ginga:5. Can attack queixada, armada with tesoura de costa Demonstrates6. Can attack effective martelo and with appropriate rasteira em balanca. pe Demonstrates7. Can attack effective au, queixada, footwork armada, to and andfrom meia kicks, lua dodges, de compasso and repositioning with cabecada. in all directions (bridge footwork).8. Can attack meia lua de frente, queixada, armada, and meia lua de compasso with chapeu de Shoulderscouro up, chin down. 9. Can escape vingativa, tesoura de frente, banda de costa 10. Can escape counter martelos and ganchos 11. Can use parafuso as an attack 12. Demonstrate arrastao 13. Can use quebradas to disguise basic kicks (harder to counter) and add variety to the game
Music: Sings the lead on five songs Always sings the choruses Plays variations while playing berimbau Demonstrates the ability to sing while playing the instruments Can tune pandeiro and atabaque as necessary
Ginga: Body movement in all 3 positions with rhythm Consistently light on feet (weight on toes) but with deep center of balance (hips low).
91 APPENDIX B
SELECTION OF SONGS FROM TALLAHASSEE CAPOEIRA
The following songs represent a selection of the repertoire sung during my fieldwork at Tallahassee Capoeira. Bolded text signifies the lead singer’s part, while regular text signifies the chorus’s part. As part of an oral tradition, capoeira song lyrics vary. Sections of each song may be repeated and reordered at the lead singer’s discretion.
ABC O futuro da nação O A o B o A o B o C A e i o u O A o B o A o B o C U e i o a Eu não sei ler A e i o u vem criança, vem jogar Quero aprender Eu não sei ler Aquinderre Quero aprender Ai ai ai ai aquinderre a la é la é la O A de aú, o B berimbau, Ai ai ai ai aquinderre a la é la é la O C de capoeira Aquinderre O A de aú, o B berimbau, A la é la é la O C de capoeira O lê lê A la é la é la AEIOU Eu aprendi a ler A hora é essa Aprendi a cantar A hora é essa, a hora é essa E foi na capoeira Berimbau tocou na capoeira Que eu aprendi a jogar Berimbau tocou eu vou jogar A e i o u A hora é essa, a hora é essa U e i o a Berimbau tocou na capoeira A e i o u vem criança, vem jogar Berimbau tocou eu vou jogar Eu estudo na escola E treino na academia Aqui é minha casa Eu respeito a minha mãe Aqui é minha casa, O meu pai, e minha tia minha varanda, meu dendê A e i o u Aqui é minha casa U e i o a minha varanda meu dendê A e i o u vem criança, vem jogar Meu chapéu de palha, minha massapê Sou criança sou pequeno Meu chapéu de palha minha massapê Mas um dia eu vou crescer Cada um tem sua história é bom respeitar Vou treinando capoeira para conquistar minha varanda não foi Pra poder me defender fácil camará A e i o u Aqui é minha casa U e i o a minha varanda meu dendê A e i o u vem criança, vem jogar Aqui é minha casa Capoeira é harmonia minha varanda meu dendê E amor no coração Aqui é minha casa Capoeira tem criança minha varanda meu dendê
92 Batuque é diferente Canarinho da Alemanha Abre a roda minha gente Eu vou encontrar só Que o batuque é diferente Canarinho da Alemanha Abre a roda minha gente Quem matou meu curió Que o batuque é diferente Eu vou encontrar só É tumba, moleque é tumba Canarinho da Alemanha É tumba pra derrubar Quem matou meu curió Tiririca faca de ponta Capoeira vai te pegar Dendê Nhazinha do Tabuleiro Dendê o dendê Quem derrubou seu companheiro Lala é la, lala é la Abre a roda minha gente O dendê Que o batuque é diferente Dendê dendê Abre a roda minha gente Lala é la, lala é la Que o batuque é diferente É de ioiô, é de iaia Cajuê É de ioiô, é de iaia Cajuê Capoeira de Angola jogar Cajuê lá na beira do mar E manda Lecô É de ioiô, é de iaia Cajuê Capoeira de Angola jogar E manda Loiá lá na beira do mar Cajuê Mestre Bimba Ê me leva Cajuê Ê me leva Mestre Pastinha Vai jogar capoeira Cajuê Berimbau me leva Mestre Bimba Me leva ê Cajuê... Ê me leva O seu Traíra Vai jogar capoeira Cajuê Berimbau me leva Cobrinha Verde Cajuê É roda, vem jogar Canjiquinha É roda, vem jogar Cajuê Berimbau tá tocando Mestre Gigante O jogo é regional Cajuê É roda, vem jogar Ezequiel Berimbau tá tocando Cajuê O jogo é regional Seu Caiçara Escuta só quem está chamando Cajuê A roda já se formou O seu Nagé Agora é berimbau Cajuê Oi pandeiro, atabaque e agogô É roda, vem jogar Berimbau tá tocando O jogo é regional
93 Berimbau toca regional toque bonito é da Benguela O corpo se arrepia São Bento Grande do seu Bimba Criada por Mestre Bimba jogo duro é muito queda Esse jogo na Bahia Ooeeoo eu vou volta pra lá É roda, vem jogar Leleleleoo é hora de vadiar Berimbau tá tocando O jogo é regional Eu pisei na folha seca Regional Bimba criou Eu pisei na folha seca Essa luta eficiente Ouvi fazer xué xuá Essa luta só funciona Xué xué xué xuá Quando incorporada a gente Ouvi fazer xué xuá É roda, vem jogar Xué xué xué xuá Berimbau tá tocando Ouvi fazer xué xuá O jogo é regional Mas quem não pode com mandinga Não carrega patuá É tanto que peço a Deus Ouvi fazer xué xuá É tanto que peço a Deus Joga nego para cima É tanto que Deus me da Deixa o nego invadiar É tão pouco que eu mereço Ouvi fazer xué xuá Mas nada me faltara Xué xué xué xuá É tanto que peço a Deus Ouvi fazer xué xuá É tanto que peço a Deus É tanto que Deus me da Fogo queimou, fogo comeu É tão pouco que eu mereço Fogo queimou, fogo comeu Mas nada me faltara Mercado Modelo desapareceu Fogo queimou, fogo comeu Eu fui lá na Bahia Mercado Modelo desapareceu Eu fui lá na Bahia escutei berimbau tocar a roda já começou é hora de vadiar Gunga é meu Ooeeoo eu vou voltar pra lá Gunga é meu, gunga é meu Leleleleoo é hora de vadiar Gunga é meu Ooeeoo eu vou voltar pra lá Eu não dou á ninguém Leleleleoo é hora de vadiar... Gunga é meu, gunga é meu Capoeira lá na Bahia tem dendê Gunga é meu e tem muito axé Foi meu pai quem me deu você que é mandingueiro Gunga é meu, gunga é meu quero ver ficar de pé Ooeeoo eu vou volta pra lá Jogo capoeira de Angola Leleleleoo é hora de vadiar Jogo capoeira de Angola É terra de Bimba, Canjiquinha, Não é brincadeira e seu Pastinha Menino vem ver É terra de Valdemar Le le com a cabeça no chão a vontade de voltar pra Bahia Vai saindo de aú Ooeeoo eu vou volta pra lá Completando rolê Leleleleoo é hora de vadiar Jogo capoeira de Angola Comecei no jogo de Iúna Não é brincadeira
94 Menino vem ver A mare subiu Le le com a cabeça no chão Sobe mare Vai saindo de aú A mare desce Completando role Desce mare Olha a mare de mare La la é Fui pra ilha de mare O la la é, la la é, la la é a la é la Olha a mare de mare O la la é, la la é, la la é a la é la Fui pra ilha de mare O la la é, la la é, la la é a la é la O la la é, la la é, la la é a la é la Marinheiro só O lê lê Eu não sou daqui La la é la Marinheiro só O lê lê Eu não tenho amor La la é la Marinheiro só Eu sou da Bahia La lauê Marinheiro só La lauê lauê lauê lauá lalaêlauê De São Salvador La lauê lauê lauê lauá lalaêlauê Marinheiro só Que som, o que arte essa O marinheiro, marinheiro De luta brincadeira Marinheiro só Que roda maravilhosa é essa Quem te ensinou a nadar É axé capoeira Marinheiro só Em cada som em cada toque O foi o tombo do navio Em cada ginga, no estilo do jogo Marinheiro só Em cada som em cada toque O foi o balanço do mar Em cada ginga, no estilo do jogo Marinheiro só La lauê lauê lauê lauá Lá vem lá vem Lalaêlauê Marinheiro só La lauê lauê lauê lauá Ele vem faceiro Lalaêlauê Marinheiro só Todo de branco Lá na Bahia coco no dendê Marinheiro só Lá na Bahia coco no dendê Com seu bonezinho Lá na Bahia coco no dendê Marinheiro só Lá na Bahia coco no dendê Lá na Bahia coco no dendê Meu barco, minha canoa Pega devagar Meu barco, minha canoa Com dendê Não paro de remar Pega devagar Eu remo a favor da maré Com dendê Não deixo essa fonte secar Meu barco, minha canoa Maré tá cheia Não paro de remar Maré tá cheia ioio, a mare tá cheia iaia Eu remo a favor da maré Maré tá cheia ioio, a mare tá cheia iaia Não deixo essa fonte secar Maré tá cheia ioio, a mare tá cheia iaia Não deixo essa fonte secar Maré tá cheia ioio, a mare tá cheia iaia
95 Moleque é tu Paraná ê É você que é moleque Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Moleque é tu Vou me embora vou me embora, Parana Ê não me chama moleque Tão sedo não venho cá, Paraná Moleque é tu Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Ê moleque é você Se não for essa semana Paraná Moleque é tu A semana que passou, Paraná Ê moleque danado Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Moleque é tu Na roda de capoeira, Paraná Ê danado pra falar Deu o seu valor, Paraná Moleque é tu Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná É você que é moleque Puxa puxa, leva leva, Paraná Moleque é tu Leva pra cima de mim, Paraná Ê não me chama moleque Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Moleque é tu Capoeira de Angola, Paraná Ê mais moleque é você Capoeira é assim, Paraná Moleque é tu Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Eu sou braço de maré, Paraná No Mercado Modelo tem acarajé Mas não sou maré sem fim, Paraná No Mercado Modelo tem acarajé Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná No Mercado Modelo tem acarajé Ê Paraná ê, Paraná Io io io io Modelo Paraná Paraná ê Paraná Io io io io Modelo Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Oio io io Modelo Capoeira de Angola, Paraná Io io io io Modelo Quero ouvir vocês cantar, Paraná Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Parabéns pra você Quem não pode com mandinga, Paraná Parabéns pra você Não carrega patuá, Paraná Nesta data querida Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Muitas felicidades Quem não pode não intima, Paraná Muitos anos de vida Deixa quem pode intimar, Paraná Parabéns pra Você Paraná ê, Paraná ê, Paraná Nesta data querida Muitas felicidades Pomba voou Muitos anos de vida Pomba voou, pomba voou (Followed by “Happy Birthday” in English) Pomba voou, gavião pegou Pai é pai, mãe é mãe Pomba voou, pomba voou O pai é pai, mãe é mãe Pomba voou, voou, voou Eu sou xodó de papai, Pomba voou deixa voar Eu sou xodó de mamãe Pomba voou, pomba voou Pai é pai, mãe é mãe Pomba voou, voou, voou Eu sou xodó de papai, Eu sou xodó de mamãe Quem é você, o que vem de lá Quem é você, o que vem de lá Quem é você, o que vem de lá Eu vim da Bahia, vim me apresentar
96 Eu vim da Bahia, vim me apresentar capoeira Um arame, a cabaça, a moeda, Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar E um pedaço de pau capoeira Meu berimbau toca é assim Ela cantou ao som de uma viola Tchi-tchi, dim dim dim, Ela cantou ao som de uma viola tchi-tchi dim dom dom Vou fazer jogo de dentro, vou fazer jogo de Meu berimbau toca é assim fora Tchi-tchi, dim dim dim, Vou fazer jogo de dentro, vou fazer jogo de tchi-tchi dim dom dom fora Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Quem foi diz capoeira é só pra homem Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Quem foi que diz Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira é só pra homem capoeira Quem foi que diz Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira é só pra homem capoeira Mas não é, capoeira é para homem, Ela cantou ao som do berimbau menino, e a mulher Ela cantou ao som do berimbau Mas não é, capoeira é para homem, menino, e Vou fazer jogo de angola e também a mulher regional Vou fazer jogo de angola e também Quem vem lá regional Quem vem lá sou eu Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Quem vem lá sou eu Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Berimbau bateu Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira Capoeira sou eu Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira Quem vem lá sou eu Sabiá cantou, bonito de se ver Quem vem lá sou eu Sabiá cantou e é bonito de se ver Berimbau bateu Vou jogar a capoeira e bater maculelê Capoeira sou eu Vou jogar a capoeira e bater maculelê Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Roda no terreiro lá de casa Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Roda no terreiro lá de casa Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira é boa pra vadiar Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar capoeira Roda no terreiro lá de casa é boa pra vadiar Sai, sai Catarina Sai sai Catarina Sabiá cantou Saia do mar venha ver Idalina Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Sai sai Catarina Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Oi Catarina venha ver Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar Sai sai Catarina capoeira Ô saia do mato venha ver Idalina Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar Sai sai Catarina capoeira Oi Catarina venha ver Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Sai sai Catarina Sabiá cantou no pé da laranjeira Ô mas saia do mar venha ver, venha ver Vou tocar meu berimbau e vou jogar Sai sai Catarina
97 Ê saia do mar venha ver Idalina Aê aê aê aô Sai sai Catarina Sereno cai, sereno cai Ê saia do mar venha ver, venha ver Eu ralo tanto no cumbuco do balaio Sai sai Catarina Sereno cai, sereno cai Ê saia do mato venha ver Idalina Eu ralo tanto no cumbuco do balaio Sai sai Catarina Ê saia do mato venha ver Idalina Sim sim sim, não não não Sai sai Catarina O sim sim sim, o não não não Ê saia do mar venha ver, venha ver O sim sim sim, o não não não Sai sai Catarina Mas hoje tem amanhã não Mas hoje tem amanhã não Samba lê lê O sim sim sim, o não não não Samba lê lê bate a porta Mas hoje tem amanhã não Samba lê lê vai ver quem é Olha a pisada de Lampião Samba lê lê o meu amor O sim sim sim, o não não não Samba lê lê samba de pé Samba lê lê bate a porta Só prestar atenção Samba lê lê vai ver quem é Só prestar atenção Samba lê lê o meu amor que esse som é a capoeira Samba lê lê samba de pé A capoeira meu irmão Só prestar atenção Santo Antônio quero água que esse som é a capoeira Santo Antônio, quero água A capoeira meu irmão Santo Antônio, quero água Quero ouvir o som dos…atabaques, Quero água pra beber, berimbaus, pandeiro, agogô, vozes quero água pra lavar (solo on instrument) Quero água pra benzer, quero água Quero água pra beber, ‘Tá na hora de jogar quero água pra lavar ‘Tá na hora de jogar, vamos a vadiar Quero água pra benzer, quero água ‘Tá na hora de jogar, vamos a vadiar Eu vou, eu vou, vou vadiar Sereno cai Eu vou, eu vou, vou vadiar Sereno cai, sereno cai Eu ralo tanto no cumbuco do balaio ‘Tamos juntos Sereno cai, sereno cai ‘Tamos juntos, misturados Eu ralo tanto no cumbuco do balaio Quando berimbau tocar Quero papai, quero mamãe, quero Me diga quem é você dindinha Vamos vadiar Eu quero anel, quero dedo, quero linha ‘Tamos juntos, misturados Sou rapaz não tenho dinheiro Quando berimbau tocar A moça garante o cabelo Me diga quem é você Cascavel de vareta Vamos vadiar É danado pra bater chocalho Papai tu corta caminho Tem, tem, tem areia Que hoje vai cair orvalho Sereia mandou dizer Aê aê aê aô Sereia mandou falar
98 Que o mar tem muita areia Sinhozinho na fazenda Tem muita areia no mar Maltratava o erê Tem, tem, tem areia A mucamba na cozinha Tem, tem, tem areia do mar Lamentava por nada fazer Vento que balança cana no canavial Um pouquinho de dendê Vento que balança cana no canavial... Eu vim aqui buscar Capataz de madrugada Um pouquinho de dendê Acordava em desespero Eu vim aqui buscar Uma família de escravo Um pouquinho de dendê Havia fugido do cativeiro Morena morena me da Vento que balança cana no canavial Um pouquinho de dendê Vento que balança cana no canavial Morena morena me da Um pouquinho de dendê Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver Uma volta só Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver E iaiá mandou dá uma volta só Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Ô iaiá mandou dá Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver, eu vim Uma volta só Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver Ô iaiá mandou dá Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver Uma volta só Vim lá da Bahia pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver E mas que volta ligeira Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Uma volta só Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Ô que volta danada Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Uma volta só Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Ô iaiá mandou dá Pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver, pra lhe ver Uma volta só Ô me leva, ô me volta Vim no navio de Aruanda Uma volta só Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda ê Mas que volta ligeira Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda á Uma volta só Porque me trouxeram de Aruanda... Porque me trouxeram de Aruanda Vento que balança cana no canavial Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda ê Na varanda da casa grande Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda ê Coronel descansava na rede Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda á O negro no canavial Porque me trouxeram de Aruanda... Morria de fome e de sede Porque me trouxeram de Aruanda Vento que balança cana no canavial Vim no navio de Aruanda, Aruanda ê Vento que balança cana no canavial Na capela da fazenda Vivo no ninho de cobra Sinha ia se confessar Vivo no ninho de cobra Coberta com manto de renda Sou cobra que cobra não morde A joelhada no pé do altar Uma cobra conhece outra cobra Vento que balança cana no canavial Não precisa dizer quem é cobra Vento que balança cana no canavial Vivo no ninho de cobra Sou cobra que cobra não morde
99 Uma cobra conhece outra cobra Vou vender minha novilha Não precisa dizer quem é cobra Vou vender minha novilha Vou vender minha novilha Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Novilha ligeira, ligeira novilha Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Saiu pra carreiras pra Santa Lúcia que a manteiga derramou Vou vender minha novilha Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Vou vender minha novilha que a manteiga derramou Novilha ligeira, ligeira novilha Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Saiu pra carreiras pra Santa Lúcia que a manteiga derramou Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Zum, zum, zum que a manteiga derramou Zum, zum, zum capoeira mata um Ô a manteiga não é minha, Zum, zum, zum capoeira mata um é para filha de ioiô Onde tem marimbondo Vou dizer ao meu sinhô É zum, zum, zum que a manteiga derramou O A O A E Ô a manteiga é do patrão, Quero ver bater, quero ver cair caiu no chão e derramou O A O A E Vou dizer ao meu sinhô Quero ver bater, quero ver cair que a manteiga derramou
100 APPENDIX C
IRB APPROVAL LETTER
101 APPENDIX D
SAMPLE CONSENT FORM
Permission to Take Part in a Human Research Study
06/27/2019 IRB Approval Date Title of research study: “Axé, Tallahassee Capoeira!”: A Local Manifestation of a Globalized Afro-Brazilian Tradition
Investigator: Abigail Rehard
Key Information: The following is a short summary of this study to help you decide whether or not to be a part of this study. More detailed information is listed later on in this form. Why am I being invited to take part in a research study? We invite you to take part in a research study because you are currently taking classes or have taken classes at Tallahassee Capoeira.
What should I know about a research study? Someone will explain this research study to you. Whether or not you take part is up to you. You can choose not to take part. You can agree to take part and later change your mind. Your decision will not be held against you. You can ask all the questions you want before you decide.
Why is this research being done? The purpose of this research project is to explore and better understand how capoeira has transformed as it has moved outside of Brazil. This study aims to find out how and why Tallahassee capoeira players engage with this Afro-Brazilian tradition. Possible public benefits of your participation are that other communities may be able to benefit from the knowledge and insights that I learn from you.
How long will the research last and what will I need to do?
You will be contacted several times over the next eight months in both planned interviews in person or by phone and spontaneously in person before or after Tallahassee Capoeira events. Planned interviews will be scheduled in advance, and you may cancel if necessary. You may decline to answer any question, and you may stop any interview at any time. It is possible that I will request follow-up interview(s) with you during later phases of the research project, which may have a duration of up to 18 months, though this is not very likely. More detailed information about the study procedures can be found under “What happens if I say yes, I want to be in this research?”
Is there any way being in this study could be bad for me? As this is a research study, there may be risks that are unforeseeable, but are not expected to cause harm or discomfort that exceeds that which is ordinarily encountered in daily life. You have the option to keep all your responses confidential through use of a pseudonym. You will not be paid for participating in this study. More detailed information about the risks of this study can be found under “Is there any way being in this study could be bad for me? (Detailed Risks)”
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107 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Abby Rehard is a master’s student in the FSU Musicology program and a percussionist.
She is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, earning a B.M. in Percussion
Performance, and a graduate of Northern Illinois University, earning a M.M. in Percussion
Performance. Her research interests focus on embodiment in community drumming and movement forms in Brazil and facilitating mental wellness through participatory music making.
She directs and plays in Mas ‘n’ Steel on FSU’s campus and enjoys performing Shona mbira and contemporary percussion chamber music.
108