CRITICAL NOTE · No. 27

From capoeira, the study of other combat sports and artistic activities becomes possible. To begin a physical-education cycle with the Brazilian game is especially fertile in an interdisciplinary, transversal approach — because capoeira sits at the crossroads of the five poles of its internal logic. Negative imbalance, or descending verticality, is the will to bring the adversary down — the terrain of wrestling and judo. Positive imbalance, the inverted body, opens onto gymnastics, acrobatics, breakdance.

The touch and quasi-touch open onto the striking arts — boxing, savate, karate. The continuous flow and the rhythmic frame open onto dance. The simulacrum and the feint open onto every art of deception and play. Capoeira contains, in embryo, the principles of a dozen disciplines — which is why it makes such an extraordinary point of departure for teaching movement as a whole.

This is a large claim, and a serious one: that capoeira is not one martial art beside others but a kind of matrix, a crossroads from which the whole territory of physical activity can be entered and connected. To start there is to give a student not a single technique but a map — the principles that underlie striking, grappling, tumbling and dancing alike. The Brazilian game, so long dismissed as marginal, may be the ideal doorway into the entire world of the moving body.

RELATED NOTES

→ One Game, a Whole World of Movement

→ Learn to Touch Without Hitting

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Archives That Only See Capoeira When It Enters Public View

→ When a Bahian Admitted Rio Was Losing the Game Too

→ 1903–1909: Black Athletes as Equals in the Arenas of Rio — and the Luta Livre Born of It

TAGS

Pedagogy · APS · Crossroads · Internal logic

HOW TO CITE THIS NOTE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Is the Crossroads of All Combat. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Critical Notes [online]. No. 27. 2026. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/notes-en/capoeira-is-the-crossroads-of-all-combat [accessed date].