Tag: tradition

Reflexões de Salvador: Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Forte da Capoeira
Tuesday’s theme turned out to be Capoeira and began with a visit to the Forte da Capoeira/Forte Santo Antônio.This site is an old fort that has been repurposed into a training space for various Capoeira academies, as well as the location of an exhibit that honors the legacies of Mestres Joao Pequeno and Joao Grande. The exhibit features classic photographs of the two masters playing Capoeira against one another. It also showed several instances of them wielding knives during a certain type of game in Capoeira.

The fort also features a magnificent representation of Ogun that one sees upon entering. Further, it contains a shrine dedicated to him where various visitors left coins as offerings.

Several mestres had spaces in the forte including Mestres Boca Rica, Bola Sete, Curió, Moraes, and Nenel. While there I visited the academies of Mestres Boca Rica and Mestre Curió (the only two open at the time). Each of these mestres’ academies were like museums. The walls of the Mestre Boca Rica’s academy were covered with posters, articles, awards, pictures, and other symbols of his many years in Capoeira. The walls Mestre Curió’s academy featured various representations of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, Capoeira, and his decades long presence in the art, in addition to two shrines.

I spent a great deal of time visiting with Mestre Boca Rica, as he shared a great deal with me about his life in Capoeira including his travels, awards, various published works featuring him, and the masters that he’s produced. He took great pride in having produced many masters, considering them as a part of his legacy. He expressed his concern about the distortion of Capoeira’s history–particularly among Capoeiristas in the United States–with people denying its African origins. Further, he expressed his commitment to the maintenance of the art’s tradition and authenticity.

He and I also played some Capoeira music and sang songs together. I was so impressed by his generosity with his knowledge and his skill with the instruments, that I asked if I could return the next day to train with him on the various instruments one-on-one. To which he agreed.

Fundação Mestre Bimba
The final activity of the day was a visit to the academy of Mestre Nenel, son of Mestre Bimba and founder of the Função Mestre Bimba and the group Filhos de Bimba. His academy is located in Pelourinha in a small, but dynamic training space.

I arrived to find Mestre Nenel working on making instruments. I greeted him while I waited for class to start. I was soon joined by over a dozen other visitors, most of whom were from other Capoeira groups in the US, who had also come for class.

Class was taught by two of the mestre’s professors, who, due to the size of the group, divided the class into two groups and taught each group one at a time, with one group taking the floor after another. Their method of teaching was exceedingly efficient and made very effective use of the limited space. The highlight of the class however were the two-person drills, which focused on the application of various takedowns to different types of attacks. Despite my nineteen years in Capoeira, this phase of the class was the most interesting and also challenging. Finally, the class ended with a lively and energetic roda.

Celebrating the Kemetic New Year: On cycles and rituals

I am very happy to have been able to attend the mswt ra wpt rnpt today. We met on the shore of Lake Michigan to the sound drumming and the glimmering of the sun just beyond the horizon. It was a beautiful occasion that served to remind me of some central values that informed the lives of our ancestors.

For them, time was cyclical. They viewed these cycles as, not merely temporal phenomena, but as expressions of the orderlies of the universe. These cycles, often represented by their celebrations of the new year, served to reinforce core social values and behaviors, particularly those which were so central to the maintenance of community and the nation. This is exemplified by the importance of agricultural festivals in many parts of Africa. Further, the new year symbolized the renewal of the bonds between humanity and nature, which in the ancestral paradigm, was the clearest manifestation of the divine.

Personally however, these cycles held further significance. They served as reminders of the unfinished nature of our being, that is, our continued journey through life and the possibilities within us to transform ourselves, to be the exemplars of good speech and good character, of the importance of striving to both discover and fulfill our purpose in the world. Herein, the celestial, terrestrial, social, and intra-personal were all conjoined within a coterminous cycle of being and transformation.

Lastly, today was a good reminder of the importance of rituals. Rituals serve as anchors of meaning which delineate critical junctures in the unfolding of time. They provide us the opportunity to focus our energy and intention. They also enable us to affirm the ideals which we seek to concretize in the world.

Adaptation in the martial arts

Years ago, while watching videos of Kung Fu practitioners sparring against each other, I noticed that many of these arts tended to look like kickboxing during sparring. Sometimes this was a rather rough transition. At other times, depending on the art, it was more seamless.
 
My take on this is that some of these arts are difficult to apply in real-time against a resisting opponent due to the manner in which they are traditionally trained. Some arts have footwork and stances that may only works under certain rare conditions. Others, due to training with insufficient resistance, fail to acquaint their practitioners with the proper approaches to apply them in real-time in a self-defense or combat sport situation. Others styles have strayed from the combative and reside firmly within the realm of the ritualisitc–wherein the combat theory of the art becomes a matter of religious conviction and the mythic history of the art’s past glories and champions becomes the basis of its legitimacy as a fighting art, rather than the ability of its living practitioners to “show and prove” that their progenitors’ skills are alive and well in the current generation. Some stylists train to fight against low-skilled opponents and are unable to apply their training against high-level opponents. Finally, too many arts only train against practitioners of the same style. This may not be a problem if the parameters of one’s fighting (in tournaments or in the street) is limited to one’s fellow practitioners of this same art. However, it become an altogether more complicated matter when faced with stylists of other arts with which one may have limited familiarity.
 
My thoughts are that this problem of translation, that is of transiting from training to combat, can only be satisfied by building the combative into one’s training–that is of (1) training with varying degrees of resistance, (2) by regularly sparring against various styles or approaches to fighting, and (3) of relinquishing doctrinaire mindsets that prevents one from thinking critically or analytically about one’s art, its combat theory, its strengths and weaknesses.
Interestingly enough, those arts renowned for their effectiveness, particularly in the context of sport, such as Western Boxing, Muay Thai, Wrestling, or Judo reflect the principle of training in a manner that approximates combat application. This is achieved via training with varying degrees of resistance. These arts are key parts of the skill set of mixed martial artists due to their interoperability with and effectiveness against other styles. Finally, these arts’ histories evidence various changes and adaptations over time as new knowledge and technique came into play. It is not to say that this has not occurred in many other traditional arts, but often quasi-religious commitments prevent such adaptation. However, where it has taken place, such arts continue to demonstrate their relevance as combat arts.