Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

192 CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA
capoeira provides so much fun that people get almost addicted to it. Furthermore, as anybody attending a
capoeira event will testify, capoeiristas are usually very good at celebrating at animated parties and enjoy
the good side of life to the extent that many find it hard to stop and go back to daily tasks.
If capoeira, as a creole art of the diaspora, thus seeming to embody coolness almost to perfection, the
question is to what extent the growing popularity of that attitude can still count as ‘resistance’. If it is true
that coolness usurps the work ethics and family values hitherto dominant in the West, it is also bound to
become the ‘dominant mindset of advanced consumer capitalism’. 126 The dialectic of resistance and cooptation
also works for globalized capoeira—it rarely is exclusively one or the other. M.Jelon Vieira
declared recently: ‘Globalization means Americanizing the world, and capoeira can decolonize the body and
the mind’. 127 Many practitioners around the world seem to subscribe to this view. Yet, without denying the
‘decolonizing’ virtues of the art, it is also clear that capoeira is, at the same time, an important tool of the
globalization process.
Contemporary styles
Changes in capoeira style are due to a number of intertwined factors linked to societal change. Analysing
postwar youth subcultures in Britain, Dick Hebdige suggested that they constituted mediated responses to
the presence, in Britain, of a sizeable black community. Subcultures represent ‘symbolic challenges to a
symbolic order’, and this author interprets subculture as a ‘form of resistance in which experienced
contradictions and objections to this ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style’. 128
In some ways, capoeira constitutes a youth subculture, since the great majority of its practitioners are under
30, abide to specific codes of behaviour and dress, and identify their practice as a form of resistance against
a hegemonic world order. At the same time the presence of older players, in particular the mestres who are
responsible for maintaining tradition and introducing innovation, likens capoeira to other forms of social
organizations and identification. Martial arts organizations, just like churches or political parties, tend to
divide themselves into feuding factions, especially when they experience periods of sustained growth.
Substyles might be the result of bricolage with tradition and innovation, but they also express clear
messages that make practitioners come together. Change in formal aspects of the art, and the emergence of
new styles is thus always significant because it expresses changes in social context and cultural meanings.
Following the examples of Burlamaqui, Bimba and Pastinha, other capoeira teachers have tried to
establish styles of their own. Carlos Sena (sometimes spelled Senna) made one of the earliest attempts. Born
in 1931 in Salvador, he started training with Bimba in 1949. He became one of the mestre ’s best students,
partaking in the exhibition for President Vargas in 1953, and became technical director of Bimba’s academy
in 1954. Yet in 1955 he decided to open his own school called Senavox and to teach a different, more
stylized capoeira. What distinguished Sena was his critique of the ‘folklorizing cultural stagnation’ of capoeira
exhibitions and his eagerness to ‘sportify’ capoeira. He created an elaborate set of formal regulations
supposed to rule over training and rodas. 129 ‘Greatest order, rigid discipline, absolute respect and
uncorrupted morals’ were the basics to be kept ‘inside and outside the temple of capoeira’. 130 Sena—among
others—also claims to have invented the colour belt system and systematically advocated the martial
capoeira salute ‘Salve’. The rules he invented appealed to the armed forces and sympathizers of the military
regime. Sena brought capoeira to the elite clubs of Salvador and its military secondary school (Colégio
Militar). He also contributed to drafting the ‘Technical Rules of Capoeira’ that were adopted by the
Brazilian Boxing Confederation in 1972. 131 During the 1960s Sena was often considered to represent a third
style, different from Angola and Regional, usually referred to as ‘stylized’ capoeira or just Senavox. 132 Yet,
despite initial success and his good connection with the military, Sena’s style did not break through in the