Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art
Greg Downey
Oxford University Press, 2005
At the outset of his research, anthropologist Greg Downey intended to write about Brazil’s capoeira scene as a kind of microcosm of the country’s social and political struggles. He planned to stay close to, but outside of, the roda – the circle in which the game of capoeira is played – to peer in as though watching some allegorical play about “social identity and political views.” He soon found that during capoeira lessons, students were not concerned with questions of politics and society, they were too focused on developing the skills they needed for the roda, and that what happened in the roda was not a performance to be watched, but a living art that could only be understood through direct participation. He threw himself into training under a prominent capoeira teacher named Mestre Moraes, and regularly played in rodas in and around Salvador, Bahia. Soon he learned that the time spent playing in the roda changed his perception of the outside world. “It challenged me to do without the comfortable explanatory tactics I had brought with me,” he writes. Consequently, his research developed into this fascinating and absorbing book.
“The roda is not a universal form inscribed on the soul of each devotee; it is an event balancing conflict and cooperation, knit together by song, music and ritual, where players negotiate and discover what the capoeira between them will be.”
- Greg Downey
Capoeira is a “blurred genre,” Downey explains, using Lowell Lewis’s phrase from his 1992 book Circle of Liberation. Capoeira has a contested history and purpose, and exists in many, not necessarily compatible forms. These different capoeiras have certain common components. All focus on the roda, gatherings in which participants stand or sit in an inward facing circle. Some of these participants play certain standard rhythms on berimbaus (one stringed musical bows), pandeiros (tambourines) and an atabaque (a tall hand-drum). One participant will lead call-response songs and all others sing the responses. There are many such songs that are sung by all capoeira groups. Two participants at a time will enter the roda and jogar (play) the game of capoeira, a strange, ambiguous, and inconclusive interaction in which they move, invert, and contort their bodies in time with the music being played and often in response to the songs being sung. In the type of capoeira both Downey and I are interested in, this movement game involves invading the space of the other player, using one’s own body to prompt the other player to move. Here too, as with the instruments and the songs, there is a call / response dynamic, with an expectation that more advanced participants will demonstrate their finesse by creating surprising and well-timed improvisations. It is through this game that the lessons in cunning are learnt.
Unlike most athletic pursuits, says Downey, it pays for capoeiristas in the roda to disguise their abilities. It is malicia (cunning), not athletic displays that are most valued by adepts of the art. Players seek to coax or provoke one another into taking risks with their movements, slowly ceding ground to or putting pressure on the other player until he renders himself vulnerable to a swift leg sweep or an unbalancing nudge with the head. The rules of the game, prohibiting grabs and hand strikes, are “artificial obstacles,” that “force players to develop creativity, flexibility and cunning.”
The musicians stimulate the action through rhythm and song, often taking the players to the very precipice of outright conflict, then taking them back to a more restrained pace. Theatricality and humour are highly valued. Sensitivity to the game’s peculiar aesthetics is to be cultivated over time. Skilled players must follow the often solemn-seeming traditions and perceive when and how far the limits can be pushed before it ‘jeopardizes the game’s dynamics.” It is this curious and constant tension between cooperation and conflict, between solemn ritual and childlike mischief, that renders this form of capoeira so fascinating and compelling to those of us who practice it.
His journey as an inquisitive capoeira initiate led Downey towards an interest in neurology and human biology, something he seems to have developed more as his academic career has progressed. He raises the issues tentatively in this book, recognising that some of his fellow cultural anthropologists “may be uncomfortable with these references.”1 He reasonably argues that biology and culture are in two-way communication with one another, a fact that may have been unfashionable in his faculty at the time, but that was brought home to him as he fumbled through his early capoeira apprenticeship. He found that nothing explained the difficult learning process better than papers on infant neurological development by biologist Colywn Trevarthan.
And that is one of the reasons the book is so readable. It was not just the delight of reading the experiences of a fellow student of Capoeira Angola, nor is it only the pleasure of seeing his research and observations neatly presented for a general readership. The book is also a story of a man who changed. The training changed him physically. The game changed the way he interacted with others. And capoeira changed his perspective. He found it was not about meaning. It was about doing. It was about living.
The schisms in anthropology are a fascinating subject all on their own, and one I’ll revisit in a later post.