Ring of Liberation | The Little Capoeira Book | Capoeira, a Brazilian Art Form | New!Samba:Resistance in Motion | Order

Practiced widely today in urban Brazil and elsewhere, capoeira is a complex Afro-Brazilian martial art that originated in early slave culture. At once game, sport, mock combat, and ritualized performance, it involves two players, who dance and "battle" within a ring of musicians and singers. Feats requiring great acrobatic athleticism and strength combine with music and poetry in a form as expressive in movement as it is in word.
Based on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation in the urban center of Salvador, Bahia, Ring of Liberation offers both an indepth description of capoeira and a pioneering synthetic approach to the analysis of complex cultural performance.
J. Lowell Lewis explores the convergence of form and content in capoeira. He shows that in the struggle to catch their opponents off guard, capoeiristas repeatedly enact scenarios of dominance and submission while simultaneously building the comradeship necessary to master the game. In this creative tension, essential to capoeira, Lewis finds that capoeiristas express the conflicts, the liberating possibilities, and the ideals of freedom they discover within the constrains, of their lives.
The many components and characteristics of this elaborate black art form - for example, competing genre frameworks and the necessary fusion of multiple modes of expression - demand, Lewis feels, to be given "body" as well as "voice". In response, he uses Peircan semiotics and recent work in discourse and performance theory to map the connections between physical, musical and linguistic play in capoeira and to reflect on the general relations between semiotic systems and the creation and recording of cultural meaning.
Brimming with keenly observed accounts of capoeira bouts, Ring of Liberation provides a rare look at the inner workings of this demanding, physical art form. It will interest ethnographers, African-Americanists, and students of dance, semiotics, performance, and discourse theory.

J.Lowell Lewis is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney and and amateur capoeirista.

Nestor Capoeira

The Little Capoeira Book

Paperback, 147 pages
Published by North Atlantic Books
Publication date: August 1, 1995
Dimensions (in inches): 8.96 x 5.98 x .48
ISBN: 1556431996

"Capoeirista, historian, sociologist, actor, author, teacher, end inquisitive traveller, Nestor Capoeira presents the reader with a unique and personal vision of capoeira. I hope all students of capoeira will have the opportunity to use his teaching for their own growth and understanding of this art."

Bira Almeida (Mestre Acordeon)

Mestre Jelon Vieira

Bira Almeida

Capoeira, a Brazilian Art Form : History, Philosophy, and Practice

2nd Edition
Paperback
Published by North Atlantic Books
Publication date: June 1986
ISBN: 0938190296

"Capoeira weaves fighting, music, dance, prayer, and ritual into an urgent strategy by which people live, struggle, celebrate, and survive together. In this book Bira Almeida--or Mestre Acordeon as he is respectfully called in Capoeira Rodas--documents his own tradition with both the panoramic eye of the historian and the passionate heart of the capoeirista. He transports the reader from the dawn of New World history in Brazil to the streets of twentieth-century Bahia (the spiritual home of Capoeira) to the giant urban centers of North American (where capoeira is now spreading in new lineages from the old masters). This book is valuable for anyone interested in ethnocultural traditions, martial arts, and music, as will as for those who want to listen to the words of an actual mestre dedicated to preserving his Afro-Brazilian legacy." Review written by Richard Strozzi Heckler (author of "The Anatomy of Change" and "Aikido and the New Warrior")

Barbara Browning

Samba : Resistance in Motion (Arts and Politics of the Everyday)

Paperback, 189 pages
Published by Indiana Univ Pr
Publication date: November 1, 1995
ISBN: 0253209560

Barbara Browning. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Barbara is a dancer and teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.A social history of the development of samba, danced religion, capoeira and the popular dances of Bahian carnaval. This is how she describes the samba: "The feet keep up a rapid patter, while the hips beat out a heavy staccato and the shoulders roll a slow drawl." No wonder it's not easy to learn! I especially love the chapter on capoeira.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Samba: The Body Articulate

2. Divine Choreography and the Embodiment of Metaphor

3. Headspin: Capoeira's Ironic Inversions

4. Of the Daughters of Gandhi and the Dance of the Chicken

Conclusion

Notes

Index