African-Latin Dance Doubles as Martial Art : Culture: The Brazilian <i> capoeira </i> has been introduced to urban youths who, its promoters say, can more easily identify with it than with Asian self-defense techniques.

The man from Brazil and the boy from Watts face each other, squatting on their toes, arms crossed, fingers clasped.

They close their eyes in prayer, then cartwheel simultaneously out onto the gym floor, where they break into an identical two-step dance, punctuated by high, graceful kicks, effortless handstands, accompanied by the twang of an odd-looking bow instrument known as a berimbau .

The student--14-year-old Andre Snell--had come to the master--Joselito Santo--months before to learn how to fend off street bullies in his gang-ridden neighborhood.

When Santo, in a sudden blur of movement, drops to the floor and uses his legs like scissors to deftly sweep the startled youth off his feet, the teen-ager officially becomes a capoeirista , or practitioner of capoeira , an African-Brazilian martial art and dance form that also incorporates music and song.

Santo, who grew up poor on the tough streets of Salvador in the northeastern region of Brazil known as Bahia, brought capoeira to the tough streets of South Los Angeles last year with twice-weekly after-school classes at Markham Middle School paid for by the city’s Cultural Arts Department. Last month, his dozen students were initiated into the art in an elaborate batizado , or graduation ceremony, in the school gym.

Last week Santo--who is known as Mestre (or master) Amen--completed a two-week capoeira workshop for five classes of fifth- and sixth-graders at the 99th Street Accelerated School, also in Watts, as part of the Music Center’s “On Tour” program.

Santo and others promoting the art in the United States say its African-Latin roots are helpful in places like South Los Angeles where many young people are able to establish a sense of cultural identification that they might not be able to do with the Asian martial arts.

“The kids are getting a lot of African culture and a lot of Brazilian culture and that makes it more meaningful to them,” Santo said.

Odie Hawkins, a Torrance-based capoeirista and writer whose novel about the art is scheduled to be released later this month, believes the values and rules associated with capoeira , the “way of life,” can be a special teaching tool among urban youth.

“It’s a philosophy that encourages our children to play together instead of fighting each other,” he said. “It has the potential of being a great alternative to gang fighting.”

As dance, capoeira looks like a hybrid of slow-motion break-dancing, karate and the samba. As martial art, it looks every bit as graceful, but it is as dangerous as any weaponless combat, it’s practitioners say.

In fact, capoeira was brought to the United States about two decades ago by Brazilians who had performed in their country’s many folkloric dance troupes. Its history, however, inextricably links the dance and martial art.

Capoeira is as old as the roots of African peoples in the Americas. It originated in Brazil three centuries ago when enslaved Africans modified an initiation dance from their homeland into a martial art as a way to defend themselves against their captors.

Passed from one generation to the next disguised as harmless dance, capoeira survived attempts to discredit and repress it until it was revived in the 1930s by an African-Brazilian. In the 1930s, Mestre Bimba, an African-Brazilian who has become the virtual patron saint of the art as it is now popularly practiced, modernized it and created the first capoeira schools with strict codes of conduct.

Capoeira is probably the most widely known of several African-based martial arts that have survived or were created in North and South America and the Caribbean. In Brazil, it is second only to soccer in popularity and is gaining enthusiasts around the world.

In the United States it is rarely seen outside of storefront studios and the exercise rooms of recreation centers. But that may soon change.

It has already crept into stunt scenes in such movies as “Lethal Weapon,” “The Mighty Quinn” and “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.” The capoeira fighting style is more prominently featured in “Boomerang,” Eddie Murphy’s upcoming movie; and Brooke Shields’ “Brenda Starr.”

A full-length feature film about it is being shopped around to the Hollywood studios for distribution, said Willie Simmons, an American-born capoeirista and budding movie producer who was instrumental in introducing capoeira to Hollywood.

But Hollywood was not the first stop for capoeira in this country. Jelon Vieira, a capoeira mestre , took the art to New York in 1975. He said one of the enduring myths about the art in this country is that it inspired break-dancing, the head-spinning, hand-standing dance craze of the early 1980s.

He does not believe African-American teen-agers in the South Bronx lifted their “breaking” moves after seeing him perform capoeira, but acknowledges that the two arts have eerily similar movements. Vieira noted that break-dancing is actually a revival of another dance form last seen in the United States around the turn of the last century.

“Break-dancing is African and capoeira is African,” Jelon said simply. Jelon, like Santo, is from Bahia, an area that has maintained many remnants of African cultures.

Vieira said capoeira’s popularity is still in its infancy in this country, but added that he is heartened to see its growth on the West Coast.

In California, the largest concentration of capoeira schools is in the Bay Area, said Oakland-based Mestre Beicola, who teaches capoeira at UC Berkeley and at other places in the East Bay.

The unquestionable attraction for most younger students is the music, which capoeiristas say is essential to the art, he said. In fact, capoeira may be the only martial art in which singing, dancing and certain instruments play such an integral part.

The origins of those elements go back to the early days of the art, when Portuguese slaveholders forbade their captives to teach it, threatening at times to cut off the feet of those who defied the prohibition.

“When slaveholders would get near a real capoeira training, an alert would go up and the musicians would play a different cadence to signal trouble,” said Compton capoeirista Cedric Adams. “When the plantation owner got there, all he would see is what looked like dancing.”

The songs that accompanied the capoeira jugo , or game, as it is still known, are sung mostly in Portuguese, the national language of Brazil, Adams said. But a few African terms for which no translation exist still survive.

Capoeira as dance or sport is still referred to as “play” or “the game” and it is performed inside a roda, or circle of singing onlookers.

Each game starts with the performers squatting near the berimbau , a one-stringed instrument of African origin that is shaped like a hunting bow and has a gourd attached.

The capoeiristas begin by performing some acrobatic act that takes them into the roda .

The arm-swinging dance, known as the ginga , is as essential as the music and must be kept up as long as the player is not executing an attack or counterattack, a headstand and handstand.

In capoeira as fighting, the dancing and acrobatics remain, but headstands and handstands become positions from which kicks can be delivered.

“There is a lot of head-butting, pinching, kicking and elbowing and a lot of swift evasive moves,” said capoeirista Dennis Newsome, who teaches capoeira at a private school, a recreation center and a Girls Club in San Diego.

“It really is very effective,” he added.

When asked about the danger of capoeira, Borracha, a Brazilian-born capoeirista who uses only one name, points to the dental plate he wears.

He lost seven front teeth when a fellow capoeirista appearing with him in the stage show “Oba Oba” accidentally caught him in the face with a kick.

“I am pretty good,” said the 38-year-old resident of Hollywood. “But I have cuts in my head and scars all over.”

Some practitioners never become interested in fighting, but are attracted because they are physical-fitness or dance enthusiasts.

That was not the case in Santo’s class at Markham Middle School. To the person, students said they had started the class thinking they were going to learn something like judo.

“At first I didn’t know what it was,” said Tawana Christian, recalling her puzzlement. “It looked like karate except for the ginga .”

But when the classes ended, she and most of the other Markham students enthusiastically planned to continue their lessons at Santo’s Brasil Brasil Cultural Center in Santa Monica.

Santo says his experience at Markham is typical of how students react to capoeira training, even those who are discipline problems in their regular classes.

“It wasn’t easy getting their attention, he said. “The first few times I came here they would spend the whole time laughing.”

An assistant, Earl White, recalls that another eighth-grader announced at the outset that if anyone kicked her, even accidentally, she was going to sue everyone.

“I told her, ‘I’ll be your partner and I won’t hurt you,’ ” White said.

The teen-ager, without missing a beat, responded, “OK, then I’ll kick your butt.”

When she was initiated into the art last month and Santo gave her her ceremonial “dump,” she was all smiles.

Leaving the roda , she said. “I like it.”