professional and fazendeiro (owner of a large estate) Rafael Flores and his brother Paulo decided to resume
capoeira exercises on the veranda of their penthouse flat in Laranjeiras. Soon a bunch of adolescents, among
them their younger brother Gilberto, Peixinho, and Cláudio Danadinho were also training. With the
exception of Garrincha and Sorriso, two moleques from the nearby shanty town of Morro de Santa Marta,
they were all middle-class and white, most of them with academic backgrounds. Only Gato (Fernando
Cavalcanti) and Gil Velho had practised capoeira before and had had some contact with the students of
Sinhôzinho in Leblon. The group called itself Senzala (slave hut).^15 They did not have a specific mestre to
teach them on a regular basis, but tried to build on what Bimba had taught the Flores brothers and to learn
from each other. M.Nestor Capoeira, who joined the Senzala in 1968, cbaracterized their training style as
follows:
The kids from Senzala—beyond Bimba’s sequence and the ‘despised waist’—introduced trainings
based on the exhaustive and methodological repetition of kicks using the extended hand of their
partner as a target; systematic trainings of kick-counterattack and kick-fall carried out by pairs;
adapted trainings observed at Oriental martial arts schools; and instituted rather hard warm up
exercises before the trainings [...As a result, they developed] an excellent physical condition; a
technique of rapid attacks, precise and powerful, but without the malice of the esquiva and the
rasteira, and completely alien to the philosophical foundations of the game.^16When the show ‘Vem Camará’, featuring Bimba’s best students, came to Rio in 1966, they met the Senzala
group. Camisa Roxa even took over some training sessions on Flores’ veranda. When the Bahians returned
to Salvador, one of the younger members, Preguiça (Wanden kolk Manuel de Oliveira) stayed behind to
train with the Senzala. In that year the group also had its first public performance at the club ‘Germânia’.
Baiano Anzol, another student of Bimba, also moved to Rio in 1968 and trained with Senzala.^17 Senzala
then participated in the recently created capoeira tournament ‘Berimbau de Ouro’, where each school was
judged according to criteria such as the rhythm and the game. To their own surprise, Gato and Preguiça won
the cup in 1967, and Senzala also reaped victory in the two subsequent years. These victories contributed to
Figure 7.1 Street Roda in Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, 1970s. Courtesy of FICA (International Capoeira Angola Federation),
Washington, DC.
170 CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA