About

The idea for CapoeiraGens was born when I started learning capoeira. As far as I can remember, I was always asking my mestre about his mestre, and about his mestre's mestre, and his mestre's mestre's mestre... I was trying, by doing that, to understand the continuity of capoeira - not in the meaning of "crystallized tradition", but specifically in the meaning of "constant change".

Well, if capoeirista X learnt from capoeirista Y and capoeirista Z, X will surely have something of Y and Z inside him/herself. Even if Y and Z belong to different schools, lineages and way of thinking, I believe it's humanly impossible for X to unlearn everything each one of them has taught, in detriment of the other.

If X was a student of Y in the past, and now is a student of Z, he/she will have capoeira of both of them in his/her hands, even that unconsciously. The way the body learns occurs in a deeper level - think of how one never forgets how to ride a bicycle.

But I'm getting lost on my thoughts. The idea of having some kind of "genealogic mapping" of capoeira stuck to my head since that beginning, and started sprouting when I saw, at FICA/Salvador, a diagram depicting the great mestres angoleiros of the past, and their descendancy.

The question was immediate: "What if there was a way to generate that kind of diagram automatically, based on a database ?" This way, it wouldn't be necessary to draw and redraw stuff on paper...

CapoeiraGens was then implemented as desktop application which made such diagrams. The information that populates the database arrives through conversations, books, emails, public domain songs - and the listing keeps growing.

Now that the database has a certain volume, I decided to publish the information - so it can be useful for the largest possible number of people. The data here don't intend to be absolutely correct (exactly because they're obtained by many ways, from simple chats to historical recordings on a book), and will be updated whenever necessary.

If you stumble upon wrong data, or if you want to enter your ascendancy or descendancy into the database, please get in touch with me: [email protected].

Axé and good research!

Teimosia