Adventures in starting a Perth capoeira group

So it turns out that starting a capoeira group is quite hard. Who knew? Well, basically everybody I’d talked to about it in advance, so at least I was prepared for that. My teacher Mestre Parente has quite a few students teaching for themselves now, both close to him around Liverpool and Manchester and far away in Paris, Oslo and Russia. It’s cool to be a part of that little group, as well as the bigger Cordão de Ouro family, but it also makes me aware of how painfully isolated we are here in Perth. Nearly all my capoeira contacts are spread across the UK and Europe and it’s not such a short trip. Still waiting on the teleportation devices. Still, this is my little story about the troubles of setting up our Perth capoeira group.

So let’s go through what it takes. First you have to have somewhere to train. This is actually one of the hardest parts, because nearly every good venue has already got some sort of club or dance group renting the space at the best times. It takes a huge amount of emails and phone calls to find somewhere, but I eventually managed it. The first couple of places we rented were set far too late (7.30 pm, so by the end of a class it was 9.30) and I think this caused some problems. Also, you’re committing to paying for somewhere before you have anyone guaranteed to actually show up! Which leads to the second problem:

Finding people to come to your classes. Now first I am a little lucky here. I’m not trying to set up this group on my own, I’m getting help from my friend Monitor Quebra, a French guy with years of capoeira experience and some fantastic acrobatic skills. Having two people means a circle of friends about twice as big to mine for anyone who might be interested in capoeira (or even more since I had basically just arrived and hardly knew anyone yet!), but even better it means that on the inevitable weeks when no one comes I wasn’t just sitting there on my own. I had a training buddy! Quebra’s also pretty handy with a computer and made our website www.capoeirawa.com and our first flyer.

From the first set of flyers we received precisely one student. Luckily he has also been our most dedicated and regular student, so the flyers definitely paid for themselves several times over both in money and less concrete value.  We received a few people attending thanks to our website as well, which is always nice, as well as a few friends who have come along (and who will always have a place in my heart as a result), even if they have a bad habit of leaving the country soon after.  It’s interesting – a single good turnout for a class and I find myself ecstatic, but those inevitable days where nobody comes are very depressing.

So the next step is growing the class, establishing it and training up some people to the point where we have a nice community of capoeira players. The whole point of starting the school instead of just attending other people’s is that we want to train in the style we love, so me and Quebra are lucky that our teachers M. Parente and CM. Estrangeiro have similar visions for capoeira. Even the other Cordão De Ouro school here in Perth (and the only other one in Australia!) have a different style of playing. As part of that though we want to be in the local capoeira community. One of the best things in capoeira for me is playing new people and playing against different styles and visions for the game. It introduces a whole range of experiences and game situations you don’t get if you only stick within your own school, plus it’s just nice to meet new people! We’ve been to visit a couple of the other capoeira schools around here so far and they’ve all been very welcoming. That’s good because I was naturally concerned about getting kicked in the face. Hopefully we can keep that friendliness going and work together to make a happy and fun community, but we’ll see how it goes. Capoeira can be pretty individual and suspicious of outsiders, but I don’t want much, just to attend as many exciting and skilled rodas as possible.