CRITICAL NOTE · No. 28

Most Kicks in Capoeira Are Lies

On the simulacrum, and learning to read a feint

In capoeira, the attacks are principally simulacra: kicks whose function is not to touch or quasi-touch the adversary but to make him react, to maintain a virtually pugilistic relation, and to offer him the chance to counter. The kick is a question, not a conclusion — a proposition thrown into the space between two bodies to see what it provokes.

The difficulty, for the one facing them, is to read the trajectories of these circular simulacra and evade them — to distinguish the feint that will not land from the strike that will, and to do so at distance, in motion, in the instant. This is a perceptual skill of the highest order: the reading of intention in a moving body, the separation of the true threat from the thousand false ones.

It is exactly the skill the street demands and the drilled catalogue cannot give. An attacker’s body, too, lies — feints, telegraphs, hides its real intention. The player trained on simulacra has spent years learning to read the lie of a moving body; the student trained only on announced, cooperative attacks has never faced the question. To read the feint is perhaps the single most transferable skill in all of combat — and capoeira is built, from the ground up, to train it.

RELATED NOTES

→ A Pedagogy of the Emotions

→ Every Street Fight Is a War That Refuses to End

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Fight Everyone Cites and No One Has Read

→ The Game That Is Played on Two Planes at Once