What is CAPOEIRA? Capoeira Regional.

Bimba 1973



It is true that Bimba preferred some movements to others,
particularly the ones most suited to combat, but contrary to the purely
violent version practiced in Rio he kept a lot of elements of the
traditional capoeira, such as music. Indeed, he was a talented player
of the traditional instruments berimbau (pronounced beh-rin-bow),
caxixi (pronounced kah-she-she) and atabaque (pronounced
ah-tah-bah-keh), and he added some prayers and rituals from Candomblé
religion.



Bimba is said to have incorporated some techniques from boxing and
judo, but probably there isn't much truth to this. After all, the hands
are used for striking in Angola, too, and while Regional has some hip
throws and arm locks you don't need to know judo to know how to do
those. But it is possible, as you don't see these techniques in Carioca
or Angola, only Regional.



Anyway, Bimba wanted to teach students a mixture of practical
fighting and traditional culture. So he taught them to play musical
instruments and to set traps and ambushes and use dirty tricks, and he
talked about capoeira's Brazilian rather than African heritage.
Nevertheless the pedagogical method was Bimba's true innovation, and
this was most responsible for making a formerly working-class art
palatable to rich white people.



Of course capoeira was still illegal. So to open his school Bimba
couldn't say he was teaching capoeira. But, as boxing, wrestling, and
judo were not illegal, one of Bimba's students, a lawyer, suggested
that Bimba should simply use a different name. The name chosen was Luta
Regional Bahiana, which could be translated as "Bahia's way of
fighting." But everybody knew what it was and so everybody called it
capoeira Regional ("from that region" "local").



Shortly after, Bimba's students, some of whom were the sons of
big-shot politicians, started to work for capoeira to be legalized, and
they were lucky. During the 1930s Brazil was under the dictatorship of
Getulio Vargas. Vargas was a fascist, but he was also a nationalist,
and in capoeira he saw a national art that should be promoted rather
than banned. Therefore new laws were written that allowed capoeira to
be taught in licensed academies and demonstrated publicly provided
permits were obtained.



With the new laws, traditional teachers also began renting rooms
and obtaining business licenses, and soon there were capoeira schools
everywhere. To distinguish between traditional capoeira and capoeira
Regional, during the 1950s people started calling the traditional
method "Angola." No one knows who first started this name, or precisely
what it meant. A good bet is that the name referred to the slaves who
started capoeira and who came from Angola and the Kongo kingdoms, in
Africa. But that is a guess.