Capoeira

So.

As I said some time in December when you made Cinnamon say capoeira is choreographed fighting, I will talk more about capoeira.

Before I begin, I want to say, once again, that capoeira is not a dance. It is a martial art. To give you one difference between it and other, more known martial arts, it is that in capoeira you move all the time. Might be one more thing why people think it's a dance. There isn't a basic position from where you start, there is a basic movement, ginga, that you repeat when you're not doing something else. In capoeira, if you stop for a moment, you will get a foot into your stomach. Or head.
Also, it is not, like you suggested, choreographed. If it was, I wouldn't get my ass kicked twice a week. Of course when we train, we to different kinds pre-determined of sequences of kicks and dodges, but that's training. You have to learn the movements before actually using them.

To the point. I'm doing this now because we had a batizado on Sunday. A batizado is an event where people get their first ropes (=belts, but someone has decided to call them corda in Portuguese, and that translates to rope, so I guess that's what I have to use...) or the ones who already have one and deserve the next one, get the next one. I got the first one lat time, so now I changed from the first to the second.

Now, capoeira is not a unified sport, there are different styles, and different rope-systems, and some don't use them at all. Our group uses the system ABPC (Associação Brasileira dos Professores de Capoeira) uses, because we're a part of it. Or at least our mestre is. I'm not entirely sure how all that works on that level. I just know that apparently our group is kick-ass even in Brazil, and that our mestre is famous back there, because he left Brazil and came to Finland to teach capoeira, and his students are known in Brazil too simply for being his students. I still haven't actually found out how he ended up in Finland of all places, but I'm happy he did.
Anyway, our system has 10 belts.
1.Light green
2.Light yellow
3.Light blue
4.Dark green. The step between the third and fourth one is a big one; from here on you are training to be a professor.
5.Dark yellow
6.Dark blue
7.-9. are white with some color tips, but I haven't yet learned what colors. People with these ones are officially professors.
10. All white. This one comes with the title mestre. It takes decades to get this far. Our mestre just got his last November. He's thirty or thirty-one, and he's been training capoeira ever since he was a kid and is a big reason to there being capoeira in Finland. It's one of the reasons I find it weird that in other martial arts you can have the highest belt before you're twenty. There is no way that could ever happen in capoeira. In capoeira, you can always do better.

Now to what exactly capoeira is.
This...

...and this...

...and this...

...is what capoeira is.
Yes, our batizado was at a mall.

I was actually a little surprised there were so many good pictures. It seems to me that taking a picture of a person (unless they're really good, in which case just the way the person is in the picture suggests you really know what you're doing) in the middle of a movement is like taking a picture in the middle of eating. It almost exclusively looks stupid. That was the way it always happened. Before.

But I've started to like having pictures up here.

The thing why people think is a dance might mostly be because we have music. Music and Brazilian culture are actually a big part of capoeira, and you have to get familiar with those too, if you want to really learn it. It's like you can't really get the third belt unless you've been to Brazil (and I assume train there with locals) and you can't get the fourth one unless you speak Brazilian Portuguese. Not fluently at that point yet, I suppose, but you can't become a teacher if you don't speak the language.
Anyway, I was going to talk about the music for a bit.
So, the main instrument we have in capoeira is a berimbau. You can see one in the last two pictures. It's the long stick. I don't know if you can see it properly, but it has a metal string between the ends of it. Google it if you can't. People surprisingly often mistake it for a bow. Although you do take the round thing near the low end off when you're not using it, so I guess if you don't know there is an instrument like that or anything about archery....
You play that by basically hitting the string with a stick. You also have a rock that you can either touch or not to the string it gives a different sound. I haven't actually ever played one myself, which is a little embarrassing, since a couple of people in our group has one, and I already do have the second belt. But the point is you can beat different rhythms with it. We also use tambourines and occasionally drums. And we sing and clap. The singing is one person singing something and the rest answering something, that might be repeating the first one, or then not.
The songs are, obviously, in Portuguese. Some of the chorus bits are simple enough, but a lot of it is impossible to repeat without actually knowing how the lyrics go. Which is one reason why you should learn the language.

What else....
I don't really know what more to say without repeating what I said earlier here. Or without actually showing how the kicks go, which is quite difficult in text. What do you want to know about it? Ask me. I want to tell you more about capoeira.

But, for now, that's all.

Except: No, we don't hear anything about Justin Bieber here in Finland. Why would we?

~matu