blog (category: capoeira)
game vs. play
A variation of it's the journey, not the destination:
Games are structured by rigid boundaries... You win, and, surrounded by adulators, you live to enter the contest on another day. You lose, and you lose alone; you are out of the tournament; you might as well be dead. If you continue winning, you are given virtual immortality status. You have been able to do a slam-dunk on death. Since play, in contrast, knows of no ultimate winners or losers, all boundaries become vague, fuzzy. There is no all-or-nothing demarcation between life and death as far as play is concerned. You don't play in order to acquire some sort of sham immortality. You play simply because you are alive. Life is most fundamentally play, with little or no concern over death, since it hardly ever enters into the equation. Games are serious business. The play of life, in contrast, is joyous. It resounds with a kind of laughter.
[...]
Games look to the future. The goal entails triumph of the future over the past. Games are therefore purposeful: the future holds a reward, and he who gets there first gets the gold. For this reason, games are relatively easy to define. They specify what must happen in the future when the gamers are in combat. Play, in contrast, is excruciatingly difficult to define. Since each moment presents some new context and different circumstances, improvisation becomes the name of the play. [italics mine.] In other words, play lives for the moment. Whatever the future brings, it will bring, and it will be negotiated whenever it enters into the present.
-- Floyd Merrell, Capoeira and Condomblé: Conformity and Resistance through Afro-Brazilian Experience
This is a vital distinction between many modern articulations of Capoeira, and the traditional, or Angola form. Contemporary Capoeira, -- as fight and structured game -- at surface level, is typically more flash, feat, glamour and glory, while Angola -- as play -- is not only richer in history, but deeper and broader in actual experience.
Cleveland Capoeira Calendar
In an effort to raise awareness about Capoeira opportunities around Cleveland, I've compiled the schedules of the local groups I know of into a Cleveland Capoeira Calendar.
UPDATE: I've moved this to ClevelandCapoeira.info.
The HTML version is viewable in your browser. Click events for details on instructor, location, cost, etc., and to add the event to your own calendar if you use Google Calendar.
Use the iCal and XML links to subscribe to the whole calendar using applications like Mozilla Calendar, iCal, or Google Calendar.
Please let me know of events that need be added or changed, or if you'd like to co-author the calendar.
capoeira in kentuck'
Heading out now with os meus amigos to Lexington, Kentucky, (my first intentional trip to Kentucky) for a weekend Capoeira workshop led by my instructor's master, Mestre Beiçola.
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Day to day is AOK, but I feel the need to bust out a little more. I'm in a different place, but I've fallen into a routine -- and routine is what I came to the different place to interrupt. I quit going to Capoeira (see Aug 27) after my first class because I was working during the two timeslots, but I've changed my work hours a bit, and yesterday I had to the opportunity to go... but didn't. Instead I called up the girl I'm working so hard to make mine, and we saw the typical Galway rock cover band at a typical Galway pub, and said the typical goodbye where I'm reminded without words that she has a boy back home in France that she's been seeing for, oh, 5 years. So, I'm lingering in between things; hoping that if I can finally swing her it will be an adventure in itself, worth missing out on some of the other ones I could be having right now.
But, I'm being too critical of the situation. I'm decidedly giving up a lot of time for marathon training, (btw, had my longest run yet this sunday...) and am definitely enjoying the typical bands and typical clubs, and enjoying my frustrations with Emeline. But, I want more adventure and more action, and more time! And a camera and a mobile phone, and a better memory, keener eye, and sharper tongue to make this page more interesting... Keep the peace, kids.
Oh, and it's to my refreshment that Burns' site is alive again.