capoeira, the heritage of Angola, has nothing to do with Bimba’s’. Later Jorge Amado, the most celebrated
Bahian writer, invoked the testimony of ten renowned capoeiristas to conclude that ‘Regional does not deserve
respect and is a distortion (deturpação) of the old capoeira “angola”, the only genuine one’.^87 As Greg
Downey observed,
The same romanticism that inspired many elites to embrace capoeira as ‘folklore’, an authentic
expression of the Brazilian national genius, also produced in them an extreme cultural conservatism
that led to condemnations of any alterations in ‘folk’ practice.^88The press was, in general terms, more supportive of Bimba and often praised his innovations or the
performance of his group on all kinds of occasions. The reaction of the other angoleiros was rather
ambivalent (and will be looked at further in Chapter 6). A number of wider ranging attempts of
interpretation, which went beyond simple condemnation or bitter polemics, have been made since the 1970s.
André Lacé started to demand attention towards what he regarded as a ‘whitening’ of capoeira in newspaper
articles although he rather meant the contemporary practice that grew out of Regional than Bimba’s style.^89
Alejandro Frigerio uses this concept again in his analysis of the changes occurring in modern capoeira.
Inspired by Renato Ortiz’ interpretation of umbanda religion as a ‘whitened’, middle-class adaptation of
Afro-Cariocan macumba, 90 Frigerio judges the incorporation of elements from other martial arts, the spread
of the practice to the middle classes, its ‘sportivization’, growing bureaucratization, and the ideological and
political co-optation as corresponding to a similar ‘whitening’ of an originally black art form. Although he
takes care to differentiate between Bimba’s style and later developments within the Regional, his analysis
tends to take at face value the angoleiro discourse about Bimba, his students and Regional style.^91
Even though categorizations such as white, bourgeois or Western are still very popular among
practitioners of Angola style and capoeira scholars to classify Bimba’s style or later developments, they
often lack analytical depth, because they operate with simplistic and ahistorical dichotomies. The problem
with reified conceptions of African and black, white and Western is that their meaning was and is an object
of constant renegotiation. Concrete postures, behaviour, customs, and symbols are seldom easily
identifiable with one of these poles. The same aspects can and are interpreted, according to the perspective,
in diametrically opposed ways, as either white or African, Western or traditional. For example, Bimba’s
habitual use of a whistle for training or during graduation ceremonies can be seen as the introduction of a
Westernised, military routine, but equally as a typical Afro-Brazilian procedure, since they were also used
in samba schools. In fact, European whistles were in use in Africa already at the time of the slave trade.
Bimba’s custom of asking students to pay a fine for being late to a ceremony can be interpreted as the
imposition of a new, capitalist ethos; but as Liberac Pires underlined, it was also the implementation of a
rule from candomblé.^92 It is thus important to be aware of the plural meanings of specific aspects of
Bimba’s innovations and always integrate them into a wider picture.
Adopting a Weberian perspective, Luis Renato Vieira interpreted the Regional style as an aspect of the
cultural modernization in Brazil. Bimba’s re-codification of rituals, symbols and gestures and his didactics
represent the introduction of a new ‘ethos of efficiency’ in capoeira, fundamentally different from the
previous ethos of ‘vagrancy’. Vieira also underlined the affinity of objectives between Bimba and the
interests of the dominant social groups and asserted that Regional ‘reflects the penetration of militaristic
principles of the Estado Novo [the Vargas dictatorsbip, 1937–1945] into Brazilian civil society’.^93
Leticia Reis, although accepting Vieira’s modernization paradigm, criticized his view of Regional as an
entirely conformist project, because it does not allow one to grasp ‘the complexity and the cultural
dynamics of the capoeira world’. She showed that Regional ‘resists when it is conforming’ and keeps
BIMBA AND ‘REGIONAL’ STYLE 141