Filed under: Media
If you haven’t heard of or watched Human Weapon, here’s a description,
HUMAN WEAPON follows Jason Chambers, America’s own fighting Welterweight Champion & Bill Duff, former Pro Football Player & Wrestler, as they train with international hand-to-hand combat masters and learn the history behind the world’s most fascinating forms of combat…
Their thrill-seeking quest takes hosts Jason and Bill to some extreme and exotic places. Each episode of HUMAN WEAPON charts an expedition through foreign continents, famous cities, exotic villages, back alleys and lush landscapes in their quest for a different type of combat. After learning about the history and culture, and training in it themselves, they will see if they have learned enough to take on one of the professional fighting masters in the discipline – and survive.
Yeah. That’s what it is. Pretty cool concept for a show, though I haven’t seen it yet so I actually don’t know how good it really is.
Why should you care? Because on September 14th the show is going to feature our beloved capoeira. I’m definitely going to tune in, and I have my fingers crossed that they give a good representation. Apparently there is usually a fight at the end of each episode, to show how much they have learned, and I wonder if they’re going to play a game. I hope so.
Human Weapon is on Fridays at 10pm/9c on the History Channel.
Filed under: Questions
Some people are lucky and have capoeira schools right down the street. Others aren’t so lucky and may have to drive for a few hours to practice.
I’m thinking about getting my own apartment, and if I did it would cause me to live an hour from my capoeira group. This sucks, because right now I only live about 15 minutes away, and I don’t know if I’m gonna be up for driving 2 hours each day to go to capoeira.
What about you? How close/far do you live? Do you have a long drive or just a short walk?
Filed under: Faisca
There are as many different stories about how people got started in capoeira as there are people who play capoeira. Some are similar, some are very different, but they all have something in common: each of us fell in love with something that would end up changing our lives forever.My capoeira journey began when I was in 8th grade.
I can clearly remember the first time I ever heard the word capoeira. I was hanging out at my house with my best friend when he said that he found this new martial arts style. He had watched a movie about it, and it was the coolest thing he ever saw. I asked him to show me some moves, and he started to do his “version” of the ginga. Instead of the graceful movement I’m now familiar with, he looked more like a bull getting ready to charge.
I promptly laughed at him and told him that this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen.
I would change my mind, however, when he showed me the actual movie he was talking about. The movie was Only the Strong. Anyone who has seen Only the Strong knows how cheesey and typically 90’s it is, but at the time I loved it, and I was hooked. I still love it, if only for nostalgia’s sake.
So there I was, faced with the coolest thing I’d ever seen, but with no way to learn it.
Faisca, circa 2002.
Instead of sitting around crying about it, my friend and I decided to learn all we could about capoeira, and attempted to teach ourselves. We studied the moves of Eddy Gordo of Tekken 3 fame, we practiced in front of the TV watching Panther Production training videos, and we printed out and copied moves from Chimp’s capoeira site. We needed music, so I recorded “Paranue” and “Zum Zum Zum” off of Only the Strong onto a casette, and substituted traditional music (because we had no idea where to get it) for breakdancing beats.
We knew that capoeiristas had nicknames, so we wanted some of our own. I bought a portuguese dictionary, and we flipped through it looking for the coolest sounding names. My friend decided on Vispa (wasp), but I couldn’t choose anything from the dictionary. I decided to borrow the name of the world’s most famous video game capoeirista, and I began to call myself Faisca (spark). We knew that you weren’t supposed to give yourself a name, but we figured we’d never find a mestre to train with.
We were wrong.
One day, while out shopping for furniture with my parents, I came across a Brazilian imports store, so I decided to go in and have a look around. I asked the person at the counter if he knew about capoeira, and he said yes. “In fact,” he said, “there is a capoeira school right here in the back of this store.”
My jaw dropped.
He told me to follow him, and he led me through a door in the back of the shop. We entered, I thought, capoeira heaven. There was a huge mural of two capoeiristas on one wall, and floor to ceiling mirrors on the other. Berimbaus and other instruments leaned against a counter, and the school’s logo was painted on the floor. It was awe inspiring.
Faisca at the original building.
The store owner told me when classes were held, and in two days time I would find myself at my first capoeira class.
The group was called CapuraGinga, and classes were taught by a mestre named Loka. He was so impressed with what Vispa and I knew, he asked us if we were Brazilian. I’m sure he was joking, but it made me feel great. To my surprise, he decided to stick with the names that we gave ourselves. Even though I had been teaching myself for over a year, I quickly figured out that I had much to learn. Already knowing the basic vocabulary and movements helped me to progress quickly, but I really had no idea how to play the game.
Take this as a lesson, kids, it is very important that you learn from a mestre or qualified instructor. If you don’t, you may know how to throw some kicks, but you have no idea how to play capoeira.
I trained with CapuraGinga religiously until college, when I could only make it once a week at most. In order to practice while I was at school, I started the Assumption College Capoeira Club. I was a bit surprised, though, that not one other person at the college actually knew capoeira. Many people knew what it was, or had seen Only the Strong or Eddy Gordo, but nobody besides me actually knew how to play capoeira.
Thus is the story of my capoeira journey.
Do you have a similar story, or is yours quite different? Tell us in the comments!
My first introduction to capoeira was Only the Strong, which wasn’t a great movie, but it showcased this cool, different martial arts style. After that came Tekken 3 and Eddy Gordo, who was (and still is) the most faithful representation of capoeira in a video game (except for the breakdancing and gymnastics moves, of course). I had never seen capoeira before, and it’s because of these two media representations that capoeira is such a big part of my life now.
Capoeira is everywhere these days. It can be seen in commercials for women’s products and cell phones, as well as the style of choice for villains and theives in movies.
Some people say that exposure like this is good for capoeira because it will draw people in. This is what happened to me, and probably many others; we see capoeira in a movie and decide to do more research into it. But others say that it will lead to a watered down style with no music or history, because anything less than a true representation of capoeira (with the roda, berimbau, game, etc) is going to give people the wrong impression and will hurt capoeira in the end.
What do you think?
Filed under: Videos
I try not to make video posts back to back without anything else in between, but I felt that I needed to share these videos with you.
There are times in all of our capoeira lives when we feel like we can’t go on: the blisters on our feet hurt too much, our body is sore, some move is too hard, and maybe we think about calling it quits.
If you ever get that feeling, I urge you to watch these videos.
There are more videos after the break.
Filed under: Videos
This is an excerpt from the movie Cordão do Ouro, circa the 70’s. Mestre Camisa (in the black paint) and Mestre Nestor Capoeira are playing, while Mestre Leopoldina is singing and playing the berimbau.
There’s even a bit of the pre-game ritual that we talked about over the weekend. And it’s great to see the masters go at it, even if the game looks somewhat choreographed.
