Mercado Modelo: Is “Tourist” Capoeira a Betrayal?

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The betrayal trial will be reheard for every practice in the family — it already is for danmyé, it will be for mayolè. This article replaces the false authenticity/spectacle dilemma with a verifiable criterion: the survival of the game’s deep structure within the spectacular form.

The charge

In every patrimonialised culture there is a place the purists designate as the height of betrayal. For capoeira, that place has an address: the Mercado Modelo of Salvador, where the most spectacular form of the game is performed daily for tourists.

The trial has its history. As early as the 1960s, journalists denounced “the grip of tourism and its financial corollaries on capoeira, turning capoeira into a spectacle for tourists.” The aerial inversions, judged “foreign to the national struggle,” already concentrated the reproaches. Half a century later, the indictment has not changed: “the capoeira of the Mercado Modelo in Salvador, the most spectacular form of the game in Brazil, is the most criticised.” Visitors watch the demonstrations, take part, photograph themselves “beside these Bahian dancers whose skill in capoeira is without equal in the world.”

Reread that last clause. It comes from the sources themselves — and it already contains the whole paradox: the practitioners accused of betraying the game are simultaneously described as its world-class virtuosos. Three counts of indictment: commercialisation, folklorisation, betrayal of the warrior essence. And one never-questioned premise: authentic capoeira is elsewhere — in the serious academies, in the street rodas, in a preserved past.

The archives’ verdict

The historical verdict falls, and it is final for the trial: “This capoeira, sometimes disparaged, is none other than the paroxysmal expression of the capoeira promoted from the 1940s by the Bahian masters and Tourism Office. Thus, between the acrobat capoeiristas of the Mercado Modelo and the old masters of capoeira, a continuity is drawn rather than a rupture.”

The facts recalled: Bahian folkloric capoeira was elaborated in the 1930s–40s by the masters and intellectuals, and diffused notably by the Bahia Tourism Office — books, films, spectacles, tours. In other words: the spectacle did not corrupt from outside a previously pure Bahian capoeira. It was one of its engines of diffusion from the start. The “dancers” of the Mercado Modelo did not divert the masters’ heritage. They execute it — raised to its point of incandescence. To accuse the Mercado Modelo of betraying Bahian capoeira is to reproach it for being exactly what Bahian capoeira set out to become.

The spectacular was in the structure

The technical argument goes further still. The spectacular, in capoeira, is no veneer. Positive imbalance — to overturn oneself, to take flight, to brush the fall in order to reach “the impossible and perilous ascent to the sky” — is “one of the structural foundations of capoeira, one of the reasons for its international radiance, a privileged mode of entry into the activity and a gateway to the other aspects of the game.” The duel of acrobatics is a modality foreseen by the internal logic of the game. Not its degeneration. To reproach the players of the Mercado Modelo for their aerial inversions is, in strict terms, to reproach capoeira for one of its five components.

A criterion for the future

The lesson exceeds Salvador. For every practice in the family of Black combat arts, the question of spectacle will be reheard — it already is for the rehabilitated danmyé, it will be for mayolè if it is saved. And the trap will each time be the same: the authenticity/spectacle opposition, which orders a choice between a pure past and a sold present. That opposition is undecidable. It reconducts the quarrels of essence.

The operative criterion lies elsewhere: does the deep ludomotor structure — the five poles, the paradoxical principles — survive within the spectacular form? Where it survives, the spectacle is a modality of the tradition. Where it dies, the spectacle is only its décor. At the Mercado Modelo, it survives. That is why these “dancers” remain, technically, without equal in the world.

SOURCES

Farias, R. da C. & Goellner, S. V., “A capoeira do Mercado Modelo de Salvador,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte, 21, 2, 2007. — Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): 1960s press on tourism and capoeira. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, section A.2.

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Mercado Modelo: Is “Tourist” Capoeira a Betrayal?. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 20. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/mercado-modelo-is-tourist-capoeira-a-betrayal. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.