The Danmyé Kick That Vanished from the Books

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The danmyé is assumed to have kept its repertoire. The thesis documents a lost technique and shows that today's acrobatics are borrowed from contemporary capoeira, not survivals.

A lost technique

A handstand kick — a kick delivered while balanced on the hands, executed to a particular drum-rhythm and song — was lost over time. No reference to it appears any longer in the technical works or the literature. Today, acrobatics performed in the danmyé rodas exist, but they are drawn from contemporary capoeira.

Dunham's witness

Katherine Dunham's article, published in Esquire in 1939, teems with information on the ladja and the internal logic of the Martinican wrestling in the early twentieth century. It is the player of the tibwa — the little wooden sticks — who sets the basic rhythm, while the drummer indicates the movements of the dance: the advance and retreat, the feints, the sudden whirls and the lightning-like leaps followed by sharp drops flat to the ground.

Why it matters

A tradition is not a sealed vault: techniques vanish, others are imported. Today's danmyé acrobatics are borrowed, and an emblematic old kick is gone — recoverable only through an archive like Dunham's.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III, B.3: danmyé; citing Katherine Dunham, Esquire, 1939, and the disappearance of the handstand kick).

IN THE CORPUS

→ How You Win at Danmyé — and How That Changed

→ When Ladja and Damié Lived Side by Side

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Danmyé Kick That Vanished from the Books. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 72. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-danmye-kick-that-vanished-from-the-books. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.