The Inner Circle - Capoeira Teacher Blog

Capoeira and Sexual Assault -- Part 2: The House We Built, or, Behavior's a Bitch

• 3/14/2018 8:04:42 PM
• Evan
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A few things before we begin.  First, this is not one for underage readers.  There’s going to be a lot of talk about sex, sexual assault, and rape.  Second, I’ve reduced things down to just heterosexual men and women.  I largely ignored sexual assault and rape within/against gay, trans, agender, and genderqueer folks because I have no personal experience, knowledge, or data in that area, and don’t want to pretend I can represent those issues.  Third, obviously all this stuff is complicated and, being human, I’m biased.  

Part 1 deals with how power structures and hierarchy worsen sexual assault.  Part 2 is all-male, all the time.  Machismo, masculinity, with attempts to offer some solutions.

Capoeira and Sexual Assault -- Part 1: Mo' Power, Mo' Problems

• 3/1/2018 1:53:09 PM
• Evan
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A few things before we begin.  First, this is not one for underage readers.  There’s going to be a lot of talk about sex, sexual assault, and rape.  Second, I’ve reduced things down to just heterosexual men and women.  I largely ignored sexual assault and rape within/against gay, trans, agender, and genderqueer folks because I have no personal experience, knowledge, or data in that area, and don’t want to pretend I can represent those issues.  Third, obviously all this stuff is complicated and, being human, I’m biased.  

Part 1 deals with how power structures and hierarchy worsen sexual assault.  Part 2 is all-male, all the time.  Machismo, masculinity, with attempts to offer some solutions.

A Capoeirista’s Guide to MMA

• 12/5/2017 2:53:48 PM
• Evan
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Over the past few months I took some time to travel a bit, visiting family and exploring new parts of the country.  As the leaves darkened and then dropped I shifted from place to place, rarely staying anywhere for more than a week.  My bohemian lifestyle, freewheeling as it was, meant a de facto hiatus from capoeira.  After a week on the road, feeling my low back muscles congealing into crunchy peanut butter, I started sniffing around for other ways to stay active.

What Does a 17th-Century Escaped Slave Have in Common with a 21st-Century Brazilian Breakdance Fighter?

• 9/27/2017 9:18:58 AM
• Evan
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Some time around the year 1600, Portuguese settlers were making a fuss because some of their slaves had snuck off into the interior of Brazil. The government duly sent some expeditions in after the slaves, but the tangled jungle proved to be a serious obstacle. While the occasional slave was recaptured, most avoided the Portuguese and formed independent communities that came to be called quilombos. At the same time, the Dutch were harassing the Portuguese all over the globe. This, the Dutch-Portuguese War, lasted about sixty years, during which the Dutch commandeered a great deal of Portugal’s trade routes and colonies.

The Unwise Decision to Define the Undefinable - Malícia

• 6/28/2017 1:51:03 PM
• Evan
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Out in the real world, when I’m not wearing abadas, I spend a lot of time riding bikes.  Cycling is, for me, predominantly a solo activity and a good antidote to capoeira’s relentless social scene.  However, the other day I bucked my usual routine and went out for a ride with two friends.  Both are serious cyclists who train just about every day, eat distressing amounts of kale, and track their power-to-weight ratios with all the fervor of trader eyeing her stock portfolio.  In capoeira, getting stronger means doing queda de rins; in cycling, getting stronger means riding uphill, so upwards we went.  I live against the Rockies, which makes it easy to find places where the road is steep and the oxygen scarce.  Gasping along, my friends chanced on the subject of capoeira, something they’re vaguely familiar with as my evening job, but have never actually seen in the flesh.  Haltingly, in between inhalations, they asked a question I hadn’t really considered before: is capoeira harder than cycling? 

Capoeira is Like an Analogy

• 5/8/2017 2:44:28 PM
• Evan
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On the surface, capoeira is built out of movements and music.  A monolith pieced together over the last few hundred years out of stones labeled “martelo” and “au” and “Paranaué.”  The base of the monolith is wide, and you can spend years sliding horizontally from one section to another, learning how the underpinning all fits together.  But gradually your climbing skills improve.  The more fluid you are, the better you know those stones, the easier it is to scale the thing.  Up, down, sideways, wherever you please.  All the while the foundation stays buried, a vast underground structure holding everything from capoeira’s patchwork past—slavery, maltas, poverty, exportation, globalization.  And although we don’t always remember it’s there, the monolith would tip right over without it. 

Batizados, Traveling, and Life as a Not-So-Young Man

• 4/24/2017 1:54:04 PM
• Evan
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Capoeira, as has been previously noted by just about everybody, is a paradoxical sport.  And for us teachers, one such paradox is the yearly push-pull of travel.  Capoeira’s deeply social nature makes it easy to build connections to far-off studios—there’s always a batizado going on somewhere.  But your home studio and your own training can suffer with too much traveling.   Balance is hard to find.  For me, traveling to events has always served a purpose, but that purpose is changing. 

Pioneering Capoeira in the U.S. -- An Interview with Mestre Ombrinho

• 1/3/2017 1:12:49 PM
• Evan
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In June 1945, a boy named Norival Moreira do Oliveira was born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.  It was a historical time—Germany had surrendered only weeks before; Little Boy, Fat Man, and Japan’s capitulation weren’t far off.  Brazil was caught in its own chaos—Getúlio Vargas was deposed in October 1945 and six months later a new constitution had been ratified, effectively remaking the government for third time in fifty years.  Norival Oliveira’s life, however, was dominated by capoeira.  Training capoeira in Salvador in the ‘50s and ‘60s was like playing basketball for the ’95 Chicago Bulls—the sport was dominated by superstar cast whose innovations defined an epoch.  Mestre Bimba’s Regional style had found its feet, Mestre Pastinha simultaneously opened his academy and cemented a phrase (“Capoeira Angola”), Mestre Waldemar still organized street rodas in Salvador, as did Mestres Pirró, Zeca, and Nilton.  Capoeira was already in its middle-age, but this time in Salvador was where capoeira’s modern form began to emerge. 

The Making of a Capoeira Instructor - An Interview with Graduado Guerreiro

• 12/19/2016 1:30:26 PM
• Evan
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In the mythology of capoeira, there’s a familiar origin story: a young capoeirista starts training, dedicates herself to the art, grows under her mestre’s tutelage, and one day shoulders the mantle of “teacher” to guide a new generation of starry-eyed alunos.  Knowledge is passed from hand to hand by carefully considered instructors who assiduously guard a group’s lineage. 

But capoeira is still relatively rare in many places outside of Brazil.  Un-easy access to capoeira engenders to a different origin story: a young capoeirista begins training, dedicates herself to the art, something unexpected comes up and her mestre moves away or quits, and she can’t find a new teacher.  Now what?  Out of necessity, she starts teaching.  It’s the only way she can train at all, but it’s an onerous undertaking.  There’s no guidance from above, no one to point her in the right direction. 

Problem-solving and Entrepreneurship -- An Interview with Faisca, owner of VirtualCapoeira

• 12/6/2016 12:14:25 PM
• Evan
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A capoeira studio, as we all know, only functions with a lot of behind-the-scenes work.  On the surface, teaching classes seems to be the most important thing, but sneak out of the classroom and find a storage closet, or a handy drawer, or even the trunk of the instructor’s car, and you’ll find a hodgepodge collection of unlikely objects: unstrung berimbaus, messy loops of wire, assorted sticks and rocks.  Piles of pants and shirts, pressed and folded and ready to go.  Old gourds, long cracked and re-glued.  All the accreted gear necessary to keep a school running and its students outfitted.