By Cynthia Khoo
- International Grupo Axé Capoeira Chan Centre at UBC.
Walking along West Hastings on certain evenings this past July, passers-by impulsively pause in front of a half-gated storefront. Perhaps it was the array of uniformed bodies swaying, inverting, flying, or otherwise irregularly moving in mesmerizing ways; the mysteriously compelling resonance of an instrument often mistaken for an archery bow, a fishing rod, or in some bemusing cases, a bus pole; or the pulse-accelerating, rhythm-pounding Afro-Brazilian dance music brazenly soaring out the door.
On Sunday, July 19, the international Grupo Axé Capoeira deployed all of the above in a cultural siege on the Chan Centre at UBC. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art, a kaleidoscopic mixture of fight, dance, music, game, acrobatics, strategy, philosophy, and ritual. The 1996 establishment of Grupo Axé’s Vancouver headquarters by Marcos da Silva, or Mestre Barrão, marked one of Canada’s earliest introductions to capoeira.
While the practice and promotion of capoeira is significant in its own right, to Marcos (Lelo) Aurelio, Mestre Barrão’s son and current head of the Vancouver academy, it is also about the preservation of history.
According to Aurelio, capoeira has roots in Africa and was further developed in the late-1500s as a disguised form of self-defense by Africans and their descendants in Brazil, who were taken primarily from Angola and the Congo in order to be slaves to the Portuguese colonizers on sugar cane and coffee plantations.
“The intriguing thing about capoeira development in Brazil is that because the slaves were oppressed, they had to hide everything…so the culture started to change, to not be the original African culture, but more of a mixture of African and Brazilian cultures mixed together.”
Aurelio, a lifelong capoeirista, adds that due to lack of written records about capoeira during its development, and the 1891 destruction of nearly all African- or slave-related documents by the Brazilian government, almost all that capoeira is today has been passed down through word-of-mouth or first-hand experience. As a result, the continuity of capoeira is, in a way, tied to the continuity of certain parts of African history and culture.
“In order for [the slaves] to practice capoeira, everything had to be hidden,” Aurelio said. Today, he and other leading proponents of the art have made it a part of their mission to bring capoeira, and all it involves and represents, out of history’s closet and into the open public spaces of the physical as well as archived world.
