Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

198 CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA
‘Tourism distorts and sells off tradition’ claimed A Tarde and reported protest by M.Bimba and Jair Moura
against the commercialization of capoeira. 159 At that stage it looked like capoeira in Bahia was going to
survive only as a function of tourism, with famous mestres having to rely on tourists’ pittances to
supplement their meagre incomes. 160
Yet the complete folklorization of capoeira, as feared by many observers in the 1960s, did not happen,
mainly because capoeira practice expanded so much. Shows are still important for contemporary capoeira,
affecting the public image or the spread of the art. Capoeira for show remains rather a side line when
compared to the several million practitioners of the art around the world; in fact, shows now are often part
and parcel of a graduation ceremony to attract new students.
Many capoeira groups—all Angola groups but also a number of those broadly classified as Regional—
are not interested in stage shows nor do they hold any type of competition. They consider that the roda in
itself is the ultimate goal and supreme expression of the art, and that it provides all the necessary
components for practitioners to develop their skills, to experience the excitement of danger and the flows of
axé. They emphasize capoeira as an art, and thus this last modality tries to preserve the uneasy balance between
fight, game and dance. According to many practitioners, this holistic approach is what, ultimately, defines
capoeira.
Capoeira as a fight, capoeira as a sport, capoeira as a folkloric show, and capoeira as art denominate the
core modalities where contemporary capoeira happens. They represent trends, not neatly segmented
categories. Some practitioners perform in various modalities, others move from one to the other. Their play
changes accordingly. As in the past, skilled capoeiristas today are still able to play rough if necessary or set
free their mandinga for a game full of cunning and ritual. That ambiguity is still at the very heart of the art
for most practitioners.
Play in different modalities relates to difference in style, but style entails much more than the difference
between antagonistic and playful games. In a seminal article the anthropologist Alejandro Frigerio sought to
establish the key characteristics that differentiate capoeira Angola from Regional. He singled out eight
aspects for Angola, or capoeira as art, namely cunning, complementation (of the two players’ movements),
a low game, the absence of violence, beautiful movements (according to a ‘black aesthetic’), slow music
and the importance of ritual and theatricality. According to Frigerio, Regional, or capoeira as sport is, in
contrast, characterized by growing bureaucratization, the incorporation of elements from other martial arts,
ideological and political co-optation by the system, and evolutionary conceptions that encourage continuous
‘improvements’, which transformed capoeira from ‘black culture’ into ‘white sport’. 161 Even though
Frigerio recognized that his classification cannot be applied rigidly to what is rather a continuum between
two poles, he ultimately identified Angola with ‘traditional’ capoeira and took fully on board the angoleiro
discourse about their own practice and their judgement about ‘Regional’ (by which they mean mainstream
capoeira). He therefore ignored the fact that many older mestres of Regional voice exactly the same
concerns about contemporary mainstream practice, criticizing for instance the standardization of
movements, the excessive distance between players, the lack of creativity and mandinga or the frequent
recourse to violence. 162 Frigerio also neglected the fact that both traditional vadiação and contemporary
Angola music is not necessarily slow, but rather uses the full range of rhythmic possibilities. Furthermore,
bureaucratization and co-optation are by no means exclusive to ‘Regional’ groups, but also take place in the
Angola universe.
Even the idea of a linear continuum between two poles—Angola and Regional—can hardly provide an
adequate sense of the complex dynamics that take place, on different levels, between these two poles. For
instance, not only ‘Regional’ mestres, but Angoleiros as well have—since the times of Aberrê—practised
other martial arts. M.Paulo dos Anjos (José Paulo dos Santos, 1936–1999), a student of M.Canjiquinha and