Dancing, Fighting, and Staging Capoeira
Dancing, Fighting, and Staging Capoeira By:Ana Paula Höfling Published on 2012 by This dissertation analyzes capoeira's choreographies of Afro-Brazilian modernity and tradition throughout the twentieth century: from the |national gymnastics| proposals of the 1920s to the Capoeira Angola/Capoeira Regional split in the 1930s and 40s; from capoeira's participation in Bahia's tourism industry in the 1950s to the adaptations of capoeira for the international stage in the 1960s and 1970s. By using movement analysis to revisit iterations of capoeira previously dismissed as cooptation, de-Africanization, and |loss of character,| I identify previously overlooked processes through which capoeira's Afro-diasporic |traditions| were tactically re-articulated through the hegemonic discourses of modernity. Conversely, by considering Capoeira Angola as more than a static |survival| of a capoeira practiced in an imagined past across the Atlantic, I acknowledge both the modernity and the...