Capoeira was outlawed as crime before it became Brazil’s art
Capoeira mixes Afro-Brazilian martial skill with dance, acrobatics, music and spirituality. Scholars point to engolo, a Bantu fighting art from Angola, among its roots, and the first official Brazilian document to name it, in 1789, called it the gravest of crimes. Legalised in 1937, it now holds UNESCO intangible heritage status.
Play happens in a roda, a ceremonial circle, to music led by the berimbau, a traditional musical bow. The basic movement is the ginga, a rhythmic side-to-side step, and players add kicks, hand strikes, rasteira sweeps and aú cartwheels, often with hands on the floor and upside-down kicks. Flowing motion matters more than fixed stances. Police files called the art capoeiragem and a practitioner a capoeira, a word most often traced to Tupi terms for round forest, the patches of woodland where escaped slaves hid.
The art emerged among Africans in early colonial Brazil. Some researchers link it to the Cunene region, others argue for several sources, and Assunção names moraingy from Madagascar as a possible ancestor. Shared moves with engolo include crescent kicks, sweeps, handstands and the meia lua de compasso, though a direct line is debated, and no comparable art arose anywhere else in the African diaspora.
A nineteenth-century street-fighting style, capoeira carioca, was outlawed too. In the early 1930s Mestre Bimba created capoeira regional with standardised teaching sequences, and after legalisation the state promoted capoeira as national culture. In 1941 Mestre Pastinha, also from Bahia, opened a school keeping traditional capoeira Angola distinct from both the reformed style and the national sport idea.
Rio's Grupo Senzala pushed an athletic version from the 1960s, and in the late 1970s Jelon Vieira and Bira Almeida carried capoeira to the United States and Europe. Women, once sidelined, joined in far greater numbers, the 1980s brought capoeira Angola more attention and an explicit anti-racist emphasis, and the art has since shown up in martial arts films and some mixed martial arts styles.
Source: Capoeira
