The Most Spectacular Capoeira Is the Most Criticised

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The touristic, acrobatic capoeira is dismissed as a modern debasement. The thesis shows the reproach is a century old, and that the spectacular flow belongs to the game's logic, not to tourism alone.

An old reproach

The criticisms of the gymnastic movements performed in the rodas were already formulated in the early twentieth century. Mestre Bimba judged the aú inefficient; in Rio, the capers of the Bahian capoeiristas were pointed at as so many dance-steps, foreign to the national wrestling. In the 1960s, journalists denounced the grip of tourism and its financial corollaries, transforming capoeira into a spectacle for tourists.

The spectacular and the scorned

Today the capoeira of the Mercado Modelo in Salvador, the most spectacular form of the game in Brazil, is also the most criticised. Yet the spectacular flow it embodies has belonged to the internal logic since at least the early twentieth century — the gestural form become an end in itself.

Why it matters

To scorn the acrobatic, touristic capoeira as a recent betrayal is to forget a century of the same complaint — and to mistake a constitutive feature of the game for a modern corruption.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III: the Mercado Modelo capoeira; the century-old critique of acrobatics and tourism).

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Continuous Flow: A Game That Never Stops

→ Falling on Purpose: The Positive Imbalance

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Most Spectacular Capoeira Is the Most Criticised. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 94. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-most-spectacular-capoeira-is-the-most-criticised. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.