Capoeira is an ambiguous, ambivalent activity developed by Africans and their descendants in Brazil. Although it is often presented as a kind of "sport" or "danced martial art" today, in reality the practice is a subtle mix of history, tradition, movement, trickery, play, deception, competition, improvisation, and personal sorcery (mandinga).
Under diverse and evolving historical circumstances, capoeira has been performed in many ways: as a subversive dance, an evasive form of self-defense, a strutting acrobatic display, an urban street fighting form, a semi-competitive game, a trick, a joke, and an idle pastime associated with street rogues, vagabonds, and lower-class workers. More recently, it has been transformed into a modern, multivalent art form, synthesizing many or all of these aspects for contemporary purposes. "Lowly" in its origins and "unsavory" in its history, capoeira is thus perhaps the most visible Brazilian cultural expression outside of Brazil, and arguably the second most important cultural export of Brazil after the samba.
Among the many contemporary iterations of capoeira, however, the oldest extant form—capoeira angola, from the Brazilian state of Bahia—has resisted the reflexive modernization and streamlined pedagogy that has turned capoeira into an international martial art or sport. Capoeira angola, despite some modernizations, is still practiced as a secretive, streetwise form passed down semi-formally from one practitioner to another in lines that can be traced directly to the early 1900s, and indirectly hundreds of years earlier. Capoeira angola is thus positioned by its practitioners as an authentic cultural tradition rooted in local history, communal memory, and Afro-Brazilian (or specifically, Afro-Bahian) identity.
This preliminary study weaves together objective research methods, subjective kinesthetic experience, informed speculation, observation, movement notation, and movement analysis to outline the more visible historical, philosophical, and physical aspects of the jogo de mandinga ("game of sorcery").