Capoeira
Chairs were pushed to the walls. Thirty-five notebooks slammed shut. And different sized shoes scattered across the linoleum floor. The demonstration of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira opened up a space for the not only physical bodies, but also introduced an air of exuberance and experimentation. Within this recycled space, students kicked up their legs, concentrated on their arms’ rhythm, contorted their bodies into conscious and unconscious shapes. This was a different kind of learning, based upon a repetition of movement or jenga. Pretty soon students were incorporating the rhythm and simple dance steps into more complex formations and combinations. Most surprising to me was that the theoretical implications of this, dare I say it, intercultural performance struck me after class, walking to the subway. Only on my long commute home did I explore the layers of intercultural questions embedded in the Capoeira workshop and how students’ reactions recalled the many criticisms of performing ethnicity.
There was a sharp line between the workshop space and the classroom. During the informal workshop I forgot notions of racial and cultural difference, concentrating solely on how Mario’s body moved and attempting to move my own body in the same way. How did the unfamiliar music, accented instructor, and the Afro-Brazilian demonstration cease to be a political or ethnographic performance and become an engaging visceral experience? When did my own admitted ‘othering’ disintegrate? In order to explain the experience to my friends, I focused on the exotic ethnic elements: music, movements that translated good and bad energies, foreign names, and the ethnicity of the instructor. But these descriptions were an afterthought, a residue of the actual experience of the workshop. During the performance, the class seemed to have traded the cerebral for the visceral, more readily absorbing the dance through our bodies than our brains. Unfortunately my brain cannot recreate or describe the body’s experience, unless I use terms like phenomenological, embodied, or immersive. These phrases, however, are not specific to the Capoeira dance, but instead speak to a more universal or generalized experience of the body.
Perhaps the workshop was a way out of the gridlock that Andre Lepecki describes. I was able to subvert the objectification of the ethnic Other by physically engaging my bodies with ‘their’ bodies. I was much less concerned with what Mario’s body represented during the workshop and more interested in how it worked. The information that passed between instructor and student was accrued through a shared performance, repetition and iteration of gestures. Knowledge was exchanged through the bodies and stored within those bodies. Unfortunately, writing or analyzing this experience calls for a more specific vocabulary that enunciates the many different ways that bodies flow and exchange information viscerally. This vocabulary might allow me to talk about intercultural performance without codified representations and cultural categorization that stress difference.
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