CRITICAL NOTE · No. 32

One Game, a Whole World of Movement

On capoeira as the gateway to gymnastics, dance, boxing, wrestling — and the other Black combat arts

Capoeira stands at the crossroads. Its kaleidoscopic internal logic opens the way to the artistic activities — gymnastics, dance — through the inverted, acrobatic body; and to the traditional combat disciplines of grasping and percussion — wrestling, boxing — through imbalance and the touch. A single game contains the principles of many, which is why it makes so powerful a point of entry into the whole territory of physical activity.

But it opens onto something more specific too: the rest of the family. To practise capoeira is also a way to initiate students into the Black combat arts of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and Africa — danmyé and mayolè, bènaden and moring, batuque and the games of the roda. Capoeira is the best-known door into a house with many rooms, most of them unvisited.

This is the pedagogical horizon of the whole project: not to teach capoeira as an isolated curiosity, but to use it as the gateway it naturally is — into the arts of movement at large, and into the dispersed, wounded, magnificent family of the Black combat arts. One game, taught well, opens a whole world. That is not a small thing to offer a student. It may be one of the largest.

→ The Hat Game

IN THE CORPUS

→ Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World

→ Reading the Game from the Inside

→ The Family That Crosses Three Oceans