Guerreira Tactics: Women Warriors’ Sonic Practices of Refusal in Capoeira Angola

Every Saturday morning on the streets of Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil, members of the Angoleiros do Sertão (Capoeira Angola Players of the Backlands) gather for a weekly roda, where they play capoeira Angola followed by rural samba.¹ The roda refers both to the event and to the circle of bodies formed by participants, who take turns on the instruments and playing capoeira in pairs or later dancing samba, one or two at a time (see figures 1 and 2). During both the capoeira and the samba, a leader sings out the calls, and everyone else responds as a chorus. For over twenty years, Mestre Cláudio, the master-teacher-leader (mestre) of the group, has held the roda on a median strip in downtown Feira between two double lanes of opposing traffic and under a sweeping tree, whose broad leaves provide shade from the pounding sunlight and whose trunk and branches resonate with the group’s singing and musicking.²

Mestre Cláudio’s voice strains to cut through car exhaust, heat, and the din of traffic, and the chorus rallies in response, raising all the vocal energy they can muster. The women in the circle are few, but they make themselves heard by singing out above the thick choir of men’s voices, matching the men’s volume but not their pitch—neither in unison nor at the octave. The resulting dissonances add color clashes to the sonic palette, filling in the intervals with microtones and vibrating with the coin-against-wire buzzes and rattling seed shakers of the berimbaus.

Fig. 1.

The roda of capoeira Angola, with percussion instruments from left to right: three berimbaus (bowed percussion with resonator gourds), two pandeiros (tambourine-like membranophones), reco-reco (scraper), agogô (double bell made of two large nut shells), and atabaque (hand drum). Photo by the author.

Fig. 2.

The roda of rural samba, whose main percussion instruments are two timbales and the bomba bass drum. (The capoeira atabaque can be seen resting, unused during the samba.) Photo by the author.

Since my ears cannot shed their formal music training, I hear dissonant intervals and intonation disparities. But the time I have spent training capoeira and samba with this group has also changed how I listen, so I also hear this “dissonance” as a form of sonic irreverence on the part of the women, a collective creative will that refuses the standards imposed by gendered musical practice.

Singing along in the roda, I must make a choice: Do I sing with the men, using the lower register of my voice, where I cannot project as loudly? When I do this, I feel as if I am playing it safe, blending in, conforming to and hiding in the sound. But when Mestre Cláudio gestures forcefully, scooping up the air with his arms, clutching his throat, he is demanding we all give more, sing louder! How can I keep singing down low? I try singing up an octave to match the men’s intonation, but it is too high for me, and straining is uncomfortable. So instead I join the other women, choosing my own pitches and opening my voice in a range where I can sing at full volume without forcing. None of us women are singing the exact same notes, but by forgoing the conformity of pitch, we can sing out and give more energy to the sound we are all producing together.

I open with this scene of the women’s sonic nonconformity as a way into considering how women in the Angoleiros do Sertão navigate gendered domination in their capoeira practice and their lives.³ In this article I consider what I call “guerreira (woman warrior) tactics,” indirect responses with which the women answer indirect gendered “attacks” (to use the capoeira term).⁴ In this essay, I explore two instances: one of the women’s sounding and the other of silence—or the refusal...