Winning by Falling, Touching Without Touching

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This is the corpus's reference article. The definition it presents is the instrument of every comparison: without it, there is no technical foundation for the family of the Black combat arts. It rests on the work of the philosopher Bernard Jeu, twenty years of practice, the observation of hundreds of games, and the discipline's own history.

The question that has rankled for a century

What is capoeira? The question seems simple. It nonetheless tore the discipline apart for a century — without ever receiving a rigorous answer.

It sets the popular capoeiras against Sinhôzinho's pupils in the 1920s. Bimba against the angoleiros from the 1930s. The capoeiras against the jiu-jitsu teachers during the sporting epic (1928–1953). The partisans of capoeira-as-combat against the partisans of capoeira-as-folklore at the symposia of 1968 and 1969. It even takes explicitly racial and social forms. In Rio, in the early 1930s, certain journalists demand the banning of dance steps judged “simian”. In Salvador, the quarrel bears on the very content of the game: are blows and throws part of it? Without slaps, without headbutts, without the counting of takedowns — is it still capoeira? What is playing? How does one win?

A century of worldwide practice had not sufficed to settle it. The answer now exists. It holds in one sentence: capoeira is an extra-ordinary combat art, of kaleidoscopic internal logic and paradoxical principles of play — “a vertical fight (the fall and the flight) and a horizontal one (the simulacrum and the touch/near-touch), based on paradoxical principles of play”. Every word earns its place. Component by component.

The fall and the flight

First component: negative imbalance — making the adversary fall. Sweeps (rasteira), headbutts (cabeçada), scissors (tesoura). It is the component with the heaviest symbolic charge: “The adversary may be the finest of acrobats, may brush the heavens in aerial reversals — a completed sweep will spell defeat.” A symbolic death.

The whole of history confirms it. The old percussion techniques aimed at the definitive unbalancing — such was Cyriaco's rabo de arraia in 1909. Bimba's scoring gave maximum points to actions of unbalancing. Burlamaqui's rules declared the loser to be the one who had fallen most.

Second component: positive imbalance — the flight. Here the player overturns himself: acrobatics in which “twists, segmental dissociations, jumps, rotations and precarious supports intertwine to aesthetic ends”, to graze the fall and attain “the impossible and perilous ascent of the sky”.

Pause a second on the strangeness of the thing. Every fighting system in the world seeks to preserve balance. Capoeira is the only one to make the voluntary overturning of oneself a road to victory.

The art of not striking

Third component: the simulacrum — “the game's most important pole, and the least formalised”. Its principle disconcerts: touching is not playing. The wide-amplitude attack, almost without uncertainty, amounts to “offering the other the possibility of touching or unbalancing us, while at the same time preventing him from reaching that goal”. An invitation to rupture, which overturns the ordinary conception of combat: “Capoeira is knowing how to play against and play with: the other is at once adversary and partner.”

Mestre João Grande gave it its most beautiful formulation, through a childhood memory: “I would go into the forest and watch the insects […] The birds in flight did not strike one another; they swerved […] In my mind this question awoke: how did they manage not to strike each other? I was ten years old.”

Fourth component: the touch, or near-touch. Touching the adversary's trunk or face produces in him “involuntary, disordered, asynchronous movements”. But — the decisive difference from boxing — the knockout is not the goal: “his freedom of movement must cease, and the harmony between his displacements and the music be broken.” The touch demonstrates the absence of mandinga — the cunning intelligence of the accomplished player.

Fifth component: rhythm in displacement. The ginga — that succession of swayings which identifies capoeira among a thousand — is at once defence, offensive preparation and bond with the music: “the player must always move in accordance with the musical rhythm and the technical conventions it imposes, on pain of losing the game.” To lose the rhythm is already to lose.

Why “kaleidoscopic”

These five poles do not operate one after another. They operate at the same time — by means of complex principles of play: dissymmetry of forces, opposition and inversion of roles, the call to rupture, the cooperation–opposition continuum. That is the exact sense of the word kaleidoscopic: “everything and its contrary coexist within one and the same regulatory and spatio-temporal frame — touching and not touching, taking flight and falling.” Where the other combat sports rank their ends in a hierarchy, capoeira superimposes them.

And this definition is not an exercise in classification. It is an instrument — the first that allows capoeira to be rigorously compared with other practices, component by component, principle by principle. That comparison, once carried out, leads to the thesis's central discovery: capoeira is not alone in the world.

SOURCES

Jeu, B., Le sport, l'émotion, l'espace, Paris, Vigot, 1977. — Parlebas, P., Jeux, sports et sociétés. Lexique de praxéologie motrice, Paris, INSEP, 1999. — Pereira da Costa, L., Capoeira sem mestre, 1960s. — Castro, M. de B., Mestre João Grande na roda do mundo, Rio de Janeiro, Garamond, 2010. — Gravina, H., Vibrant, 6/1, 2009. — Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): manuals of O.D.C. (1907) and Burlamaqui (1928), Carioca sporting press. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, sections A.1–A.6.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World

→ A Memory Without Thought?

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Winning by Falling, Touching Without Touching. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 07. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/winning-by-falling-touching-without-touching. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.