the Bahian MP Nita Costa, took Bimba and his group to Rio de Janeiro, in 1956, where they did a
demonstration in the Maracanazinho stadium, alongside with the local police band and the samba singer
Elizete Cardoso. The whole show proved to be a success and eventually persuaded other sponsors to
support this kind of event.^79
A couple of years later—in 1959—the Bahian Department of Tourism and the airline company Lóide
Aéreo Brasileiro sponsored an excursion for Mestres Pastinha and Canjiquinha, and five of Pastinha’s best
students (Bigodinho, João Grande, João Pequeno, Almiro Honorato and Vivaldo) to Porto Alegre, where the
Brazilian army accommodated them. With them came a handful of ‘beautiful morenas [brown women]’,
among which the Yacht Club candidate for the ‘Miss Bahia’ title, supposedly to reassert ‘the prestige of the
beauty of the Bahian woman’. This kind of combination for one single event illustrates how capoeira
Angola was, at that moment, still struggling to establish a space on its own among displays of folkloric
dance, ‘primitive’ religion, and beauty contests.
On their way back Pastinha and his group stopped over in Rio de Janeiro, where they gave a show for the
press at the prestigious Hotel Glória. The presentation seemed to have matched the journalists’ expectations
of a ‘picturesque’ spectacle. Pastinha’s dexterity, despite his advanced age (he was already 70) never failed
to impress the audience, as well as his resistance (he played for more than 20 minutes with different
students). His elegant movements were invariably likened to those of a cat. The music of capoeira seemed
to have produced a cultural shock in its own right. Comments in Southeastern mainstream newspapers
consistently associated the music of capoeira with that of Afro-Brazilian religions—known at the time
under the rather derogatory term macumba. The reception of Bahian capoeira groups during the 1950s in the
main cities of the Southeast made obvious the cultural distance between the Brazilian middle-class public
and the Afro-Bahian culture—a gap that capoeira was attempting to narrow.^80
Pastinha and his group eventually made some other trips within Brazil, for instance to the ‘Night of
International Folklore’ at the Minas Tennis Club, in Belo Horizonte, in 1964.^81 They also gave a
demonstration at the National School of Physical Education in Rio, in 1961.
During these early demonstrations Pastinha created a specific pattern for shows:
[Pastinha] made thirty sapinhos (frog jumps), in the roda. He made it for the tourists to see. After that
he gave thirty or forty rabo de arraia, alone, for the show, for the tourists. He took a student:
Vermelho da Moenda, or Anselmo, João Pequeno. He did rabo de arraia and they [only] did negativa
[...]^82The mestre ’s ultimate accomplishment was, without doubt, his trip to Africa. His group was part of the
Brazilian delegation attending the First World Festival of Black Arts (Festival des Arts Nègres), in Dakar,
Senegal, in April 1966. The delegation demonstrated capoeira,^83 traditional samba de roda, lundus, and
modern samba presented by well-known artists (Clementina de Jesus, Ataulfo Alves and Elizete Cardoso),
and also included outstanding candomblé priests (Olga from Alaketo) and academics researching Afro-
Bahian culture (W. Freitas, E.Carneiro).^84 M.João Grande still remembers how much the capoeiristas were
moved when they saw Africans near the hotel dancing to a balafo (a type of xylophone) and executing
movements that resembled those of capoeira.^85
Yet Pastinha’s health was deteriorating: a cataract, not treated for lack of money, was slowly blinding
him. By the time he went to Senegal he was already almost sightless and unable to play. Now the mestre
had to stop travelling altogether and retreated to the academy where he continued to receive many visitors
from afar. But his complicated and—according to his words—‘disturbed life’ (vida atrapalhada) was not
yet over.
162 PASTINHA AND ANGOLA STYLE