General

A blog as a means to share my thoughts with the capoeira community

There comes a time in every capoeira’s career when he or she realizes that he/she wants to do more than just training (movements, music, reading, …). I have been an active capoeira for almost fifteen years now. And during my “career” I came to that conclusion several times.

Personally I am very entrepreneuring and I often look for new opportunities to explore and challenges to undertake. In capoeira, this translated to several projects that I have been involved in over the years (ranging from organizing workshops to building online communities, I’ll tell about those in a future post). With those projects I always had the goal to give something back to capoeira, because capoeira has given me so much.

This feeling declined during the last couple of years and I became more focused on just training. Until tonight.

Due to an injury I haven’t been able to play capoeira for a good six months now. As the weeks go by and I am watching classes from the sidelines I miss training more and more. But surprisingly I also started to feel more inspired to do something new. Now that I had a lot more time on my hands, I had the chance to think and reflect about what my future goals in capoeira really are.

Where do I want capoeira to take me? Which path should I choose? Am I happy with just practicing moves, playing instruments and reading a book or two? Standing in line and following the teacher is easy. If it goes wrong, you’ll have someone to blame: “I quit because my teacher didn’t motivate me”. Or do I want to build something myself that I can look back on in the future? Am I a good enough capoeirista to take that risk? Who can I blame if that fails?

Those projects I did in the past were never meant to share my personal thoughts and experiences. Where I live there isn’t that much capoeira going on and people just aren’t that involved anymore nowadays. I feel somewhat isolated and therefore I want to do something so I can share my thoughts and the stuff I pick up along the way.

And so I decided on this late evening that a blog seems a perfect start to do something more.

The thought of starting a blog had popped in my head a few times before. But I always thought that I wasn’t experienced enough or a good enough capoeira to be able to do so. There is always someone better, someone with more experience and more knowledge out there, you know? Who was I to share my limited knowledge? Why would my ideas matter to the capoeira community?

When the thought of blogging came into my mind tonight, I realized something important after reading some general blog: There will always be someone better at the things you do. But does that matter? Turns out it doesn’t.

So does it really matter that not everything I’ll write will be accurate or perfect? No! Because I want to base myself upon personal experiences. I want to write about my path in capoeira and that path is not always smooth. There are small bumps and huge hills to conquer.

Only a handful of good and active blogs about capoeira exist today. Most of them share the same premise: philosophy and culture, music and academic writing. I miss a blog about a regular capoeirista who we can relate to. Someone that loves the art, but also experiences those frustrating moments we all know so well.

Experienced capoeiristas are often ideologized. To the regular student they seem perfect: they perform the craziest moves, know every variation on the berimbau and know every detail about the history of capoeira. In reality, that über capoeirista doesn’t exist. This is my attempt at sharing my path in capoeira. I am not that über capoeirista you dream to be. I am just passionate about our art and want to share stuff with anyone who is interested.

The blog will cover a variety of topics. Sometimes I’ll just have a cool song or some advice to share, other times I’ll write about the crazy politics in capoeira, and occasionally I’ll share my frustrations when those high belts took over the roda once again.

People should to be able to reflect themselves in my experiences. I want it to be real, open and honest. With the ups and downs.

As every real capoeirista says:

“Oh we’ll just see how it goes”.

 

— Vinho

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