styles of capoeira—Regional and Angola—arrived in Rio mainly through the participation of Bahians in
free style competitions or through capoeira exhibitions marketed as folklore. If both types of performances
contributed towards capoeira from Bahia becoming known to wider audiences, it was not enough to
guarantee its spread as a practice. This situation only changed with the arrival of Bahian migrants, who
started teaching capoeira on a regular basis, among thousands who left the Northeast and came to the
Southeast of Brazil in search of jobs and a better standard of living. Among the first who came to stay was
the angoleiro Joel Lourenço do Espírito Santo, who settled in Madureira, where he married the daughter of
the vice-president of the famous Portela samba school. His father-in-law Antenor dos Santos became a firm
supporter of capoeira, which was associated, once again, with samba. According to one report, Joel was the
leader of 20 or 30 capoeiristas from Bahia living in Rio in 1953, and organized performances to
demonstrate Bahian vadiação.^3
During the 1950s and 1960s many more Bahian capoeiras came to Rio, such as M.Pitu (Roque Mendes
dos Santos), Mário Santos and Djalma Bandeira. Artur Emídio de Oliveira (c .1930–) from Southern Bahia,
a region famous for its cacao plantations, stood out among them because of his crucial influence on
contemporary capoeira. He spent his youth in Itabuna, the capital of the cacao zone, where he practised
different martial arts and learned capoeira from M.Paizinbo (Teodoro Ramos).^4 Because his native region,
the former captaincy of Porto Seguro, constituted an area fairly distinct from the Bay of All The Saints, it is
possible that Paizinho’s capoeira was quite different from the styles practised in Salvador and the
Reconcâvo.
From 1948 onwards Artur Emidio participated in different prize matches in São Paulo. He was widely
acclaimed in 1951, when he won against Edgard Duro in what newspapers called a ‘sensational match of
capoeira against free style’.^5 In 1953, Valdemar Santana, a famous free-style fighter in Rio de Janeiro,
invited him for a series of prize matches. Artur Emídio lost against Rudolfo Hermanny, a student of
Sinhôzinho but won a range of other fights, and also faced some of Carlos Gracie’s ju-jitsu students in the
ring. At that stage Artur Emídio, just like Bimba 20 years earlier, became involved in an argument over the
rules of these contests: the Gracie brothers required him to put on a kimono in the ring.^6
One of the reasons why Artur Emídio had such an impact is that although being a fighter in the ring he
still stuck to capoeira with music, songs and rituals in his everyday practice. Alongside his combat
performances, which relied on the use of a wide range of martial arts, he exhibited capoeira for a public
more interested in folklore and exotic rituals. At the same time he started teaching capoeira, originally
opening an academy in the beach district of Copacabana, which was not very successful. He then taught in
the northern zone of the city, in the neighbourhood of Bonsucesso. By this time his academy became ‘a kind
of headquarter of capoeira’ in the city.^7 According to M.Gato, he became the most famous capoeirista in
Rio de Janeiro at the time thanks to ‘his showy style, with jumps and spectacular kicks’.^8
Most of the capoeira mestres that emerged during the 1960s—Leopoldina, Paulo Gomes, Celso do
Engenho da Rainha and Djalma Bandeira—were his students. Some of them started to teach on their own,
and in 1963, at least a dozen ‘academies’ were operating in Rio de Janeiro, almost all of them in the
northern zone. Artur Emídio was acclaimed as ‘one of the best capoeiristas in the country, and in Rio, its
greatest promoter’.^9 Although he was not a direct pupil of Bimba, he contributed to the spread of a capoeira
style that was in many respects—in the dominant use of fast rhythms, for instance—close to Regional. Yet
in contrast to Bimba and his students, Artur Emídio did not make systematic use of long ‘sequences’ of
movements.^10
Artur Emídio also taught capoeira in the armed forces, thus contributing to the realization of the Brazilian
nationalists’ dream since the beginning of the century (see Chapter 1). The key figure, who made the
recruits sweat with syncopated ginga instead of martial drill, was Lieutenant Lamartine Pereira da Costa.
168 CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA