Shall We Dance?

Seen proudly sporting bruises around campus, members of the newly revamped Capoeira Club are more than willing to withstand a few sore muscles in mastering a 400-year-old Brazilian martial art. “You do get kicked a couple of times,” says Elena M. Krieger ’06, one of the club’s two leaders, “yet it’s mostly harmless.”

Despite the accidental blows that will inevitably come with any martial art, a lack of physical contact is actually at the heart of the Capoeira tradition. Brought to Brazil from Africa by Angolan slaves who needed to defend themselves from their newly appointed masters, Capoeira evolved as a self-defense mechanism masked as a recreational dance. “Now I can literally say that I dance like I fight, and I fight like I dance,” says Krieger.

The martial arts influence is clear in both major styles of Capoeira: Capoeira Angola, characterized by aesthetic, rhythmic movements executed close to the ground, and the more recent Capoeira Regional, which favors a quicker, aggressive form accentuated with spinning kicks that narrowly miss their target. “It’s hard because it uses a lot of muscles people don’t even know they have,” says Capoeira Club Co-Founder Brenden S. Millstein ’06, “and it makes you flexible, graceful, agile and strong in order to execute most of the moves.” To complement the athleticism, Capoeira is also a form of artistic expression and is set to music for performance. “Two people play each other at a time, while the others encircle them, singing Brazilian children’s songs,” says Krieger.

At Harvard, students have tried to form Capoeira Angola groups in the past with only short-lived success. Eager to work on her skills at college after having discovering Capoeria through gymnastics, one of the first things Krieger asked herself when she arrived at Harvard was, “Where’s the Capoeira?” After a futile search, she teamed up with high school classmate Millstein and this semester they’ve taken it upon themselves to introduce Capoeira to others, with about 15 students currently in the club. “Anybody can learn,” Krieger says, “and everyone’s welcome to join.”

Applying for grants is the next task on the group’s agenda as they hope to invite a professional Capoeirist, called a mestra, to instruct the club’s biweekly classes. By the end of the semester, Capoeira Club members will be ready for performances next fall. “Capoeira has everything I love,” says Millstein. “You do it to music, it has a [lot of] ground fighting and it has all the showy-off parts of gymnastics that make you look like a bad-ass, but aren’t actually that hard to learn.”