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Afro-Brazilian Martial Art Gains Local Following
That a rigorous practice combining dance and martial arts exercised to songs sung in Portuguese with roots that are deeply African has taken off in Hampton Roads may seem surprising. Yet Capoeira is indeed achieving popularity across the Seven Cities, and booming around the world. “There is a big flood of people seeking Capoeira right now,” said Michael Jordan, who teaches Capoeira Angola at the Attucks Theatre in Norfolk. The Daily Press and the Virginian-Pilot have each written about the Afro-Brazilian art in the past six months. The Linxx Academy Martial Arts Training Center in Virginia Beach holds training sessions three days each week, “to build the core of Capoeiristas dedicated to preserving the true philosophy and meaning of Capoeira Regional,” according to the Academy’s Web site. The development of Capoeira is actually anything but a recent trend. Africans enslaved and taken to Brazil by the Portuguese 400 years ago developed the practice to disguise their combat training as a dance. The word “Capoeira” in Portuguese refers to the brushwood where enslaved Africans hid from their captors in Brazil, organizing themselves into societies that resembled their homeland of Angola. Lacking weapons, they developed combat rituals to defend themselves with their hands and feet. Jordan said the tradition of combat dance within the African community is in reality not even new to the Eastern Seaboard. “It’s really been here since the 1700s, showing up in certain musical circles,” he said. “In this area it wasn’t always called Capoeira; coming together to have combative dance fights has been called a lot of things in this country.” Capoeira Angola stood out from other forms of martial arts to Jordan as being the most saturated with African rituals. “I was looking for something that was African; that had the same roots I had,” he said. “Capoeira hid behind a façade of being South American, because the songs are sung in Portuguese.” As Capoeira surges in popularity globally, Brazil’s culture ministry has worked to document the practice’s mostly oral history as a means of honoring the country’s Afro-Brazilian heritage, according to a 2007 Associated Press article appearing in the International Herald Tribune. The country appealed to UNESCO to designate Capoeira as part of “the intangible heritage of humanity,” a distinction the United Nations agency established to preserve cultural traditions in a time of increasing globalization. Jordan believes in maintaining the historical and philosophical essence of the practice. “For some people, Capoeira is what they do on workout night,” he said, “for others, Capoeira is how they live; the music, the instruments are always with them.” Jordan has clearly placed himself in the second camp. |
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By Caroline Stauffer
