O gato está adormecido. O bebê está acordado.

Earlier, i said i'd tell you about capoeira. I think it's overdue.

More than ten years ago, while living in jamaica plain, my housemates and i crossed the highway down from our house on Saint Rose and walked into the Arnold Arboretum. At the top of a spiraling path, at i think the highest point on the property, my friend GR began explaining a performance she had seen. In it, several women were moving on their hands, twisting and returning with control and power. GR was hooked and started studying the form post haste. And then GR began to demonstrate it there in the grass, that day on the side of the hill. And i knew that this was what i wanted, this dance was the reason i have hands and feet and can move in three dimensions.

You can find extensive resources on capoeira. There is a good wikipedia article on it. You will find some good videos on youtube searching the word. There is probably a group that trains the form in your city and they probably perform from time to time, either downtown on weekends or at festivals in the area. I don't really need to tell you what it is or it's history and i can't demonstrate the movement here. But maybe i can explain why to me it's more like a drug than a martial art.

Whenever i tell someone i train capoeira, or that i play capoeira or practice it-- which comes up a fair bit because i'm always going off to my class or if you call i'm in class-- i get sort of embarassed. because it is a martial art, having attacks and defenses and sparring. But to say that conjures images of guys standing stick-straight with their fists out, jabbing out in bursts.

The resting position of capoeira is a back and forth movement. If you're not doing something else, you're in the ginga. And most of the time, you're doing something else, like rolling around your partner on your hands or spinning backwards on your head and elbows. So it's really more like a dance than anything you'd picture from the words 'martial art'.

And it is a holistic artform tied strongly to the culture from which it came. Capoeirista learn, concurrent with the movements, the songs and the instruments, the language and the history. The whole form is tied to the rhythms of the bermibau, the pandeiro, and the atabaque, which are playing any time we are. The different toques (rhythms) of the berimbau dictate the style of the game, whether open or closed, fast or slow, playful or aggressive.

I grew up contra dancing at the Old Farmer's Ball (before the roof collapsed) and waltzing at pinewoods, so these aspects of dance and song are simply as things must be. It's just a massive perk that i'm strenuously conditioning my entire body and learning something about self-defense also.

Besides, portuguese is a beautiful language. You might watch Orpheu Negro sometime if you've never listened to brazilian jazz or worked with the cooks in cambridge, ma.

There will never be enough days on earth to learn all that capoeira encompasses. First we'd start with how to cartwheel. Then how to control the cartwheel so as to stop at the apex and roll backwards, turning to face forward at the same time. After that, the rhythms of the berimbau, and the songs about great capoeiristas and their trickery. But to understand the songs, we have to know portuguese, so there's a bit of homework.

Eventually you begin to see the open game, the closed game, and the different styles of capoeira which are practiced. You learn to recognize the intent of the players and their individual patterns. Moving to the left is easier for certain people, for others, the foot turns out just before they throw that one kick. For every attack there is a response and each of those is itself one.