Capoeira Teaches History, Music and Culture
As you get closer to the gym at Reavis Elementary School in Bronzeville, the music, singing, clapping and chanting swells.
Inside, Marisa Cordeiro, a capoeira senior instructor (or “contra-mestre”), is leading schoolchildren through exercises and lessons designed to teach the Brazilian martial art—using music, a touch of a foreign language, and some history.
The sounds of cow bells, drums, tambourines, the berimbau (a stringed instrument), and rattling gourds fill the gym as the “capoeirista” claps her hands emphatically. Children scurry from chair to chair exchanging instruments. “One, two, three! Boom, boom, boom!” chants Cordeiro, a slender, dark-haired woman who is a world-class martial artist and founder of Gingarte Capoeira, a Chicago-based non-profit.
Assistant instructor Bianca Aviles leads students at Reavis in an exercise.
Eric Young Smith
She claps her hands, helping students capture a rhythm important to movements to be executed later. She walks around the circle of students in chairs like an orchestra maestro, coordinating singing and clapping and demonstrating proper use of the instruments. Finally, she calls the clamor to a halt, collects the instruments and places them in the center of the circle.
The six-week program, which was getting started as regular school was coming to an end, will run during the summer as part of the Integrated Services in Schools (ISS) program, an innovative approach, funded with a major grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies, that seeks to transform education and improve the lives of disadvantaged middle school students.
The effort involves extended-day, weekend and summer activities, in-school health centers and special programs designed to expand the experiences of students at Reavis and four other Chicago Public Schools that partnered with groups in LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program. The Quad Communities Development Corporation, a Bronzeville-based neighborhood organization and NCP lead agency for the community, is administering the ISS program at Reavis.
“You are learning how to sing in a different language,” Cordeiro tells her students. “First you have to listen.”
She teaches the students to sing using a call-and-response that reflects the African roots of her art form, similar to what’s heard in African-American churches. As she sings, she beats a tambourine and the restless children sing and clap.
A student readies for a handstand.
Eric Young Smith
Then students remove their shoes and place them against a gymnasium wall. They form a few single-file lines to practice the basic “ginga” movement, constantly sliding legs and arms backward and forward. They move from side to side and alternate legs and arms.
Mimicking their teacher, the students stretch their hands and wrists. Next they push up like crabs from the floor, pressing their soles and palms against the hardwood surface and arching their bodies upward. Cordeiro outstretches her arms under the back of each child, helping each one flip from the position. “You have to land on your feet,” she says, “and don’t fall.”
Move around and adjust for space, don’t get too close, she adds as children tumble across the gym floor. The session ends with the children sitting in a circle, a small ensemble sings and plays a drum, cow bells and the twangy berimbau, providing music for classmates to follow.
One by one the children are invited into the center to “play the game” of capoeira with a second “capoeirista” assisting Cordeiro with the class. The instructress makes fluid moves, walks on her hands, and passes kicks over the heads of the students, who follow her movements, trying to kick, do handstands, squat and flip—often tumbling to the floor with a giggle.
The children are quickly picking up the movements, the music, the new language, she says. Learning about capoeira means learning about Afro-Brazilian culture, playing music, and walking handstands, which were designed to deceive slave masters into thinking slaves were simply “hanging out,” not practicing an art for self defense, said Cordeiro.
Students pound out a rhythm.
Eric Young Smith
“It’s a new innovative way to learn and still have fun,” said sixth-grader Michael Isaiah Daniels, when asked to compare capoeira to other classes.
“Basically what we’re doing is a form of kung fu, but it’s not as hard because it’s not as pressured,” added Demarcus Fisher, 12, who enjoys learning new ways to express himself in a physical way and through music. “It’s a way to learn without involving severe violence,” he adds.
Deondre Fitzpatrick recites lessons about the struggle of Afro-Brazilians against slavery and oppression and expresses an appreciation for exploring a new culture — but a culture he can easily relate to.
“I learned that some of the Africans died trying to do it (capoeira) or got in jail,” he said. “So we praise their sacrifices, and the music about it is not like enslavement. It’s happy music.”
What will he take from the class? “The African culture, the music and the signature steps to help me remember about Africa because I wasn’t born yet, to remember my great-great grandparents and my great-great grandfather,” says Deondre.