Mestre Jelon Vieira founder of Capoeira Luanda, a world renowned master and teacher of Capoeira. Born in Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, Brazil, in 1953. Started training Capoeira Angola at the age of 10 years old with Mestre Emerito and later on continuing with Mestre Bobô. In 1969 he met Mestre Eziquiel with who he studied Capoeira Regional and had the honor to enjoy classes at Mestre Bimba’s academy. Since his arrival in the US in 1975, Mr. Vieira has catalyzed the growing interest in and understanding of Brazilian culture while simultaneously developing and teaching Capoeira. Mr. Vieira teaches Capoeira to people of all ages and from all walks of life in both Brazil and the United States.

He has taught the soccer great Pele and American movie stars Wesley Snipes and Eddie Murphy. And worked in movies with Brooke Shields, Timothy Dalton, and the directors Robert Wise and Robert Miller. Although he resides in New York, Mr. Vieira spends several months a year in Brazil. One of his long term goals is to open a center for underprivileged children, using capoeira to build self esteem and self-discipline and to begin moving these children off the streets and into the educational system and mainstream society. Mr. Vieira and Loremil Machado are the pioneer of Capoeira in the United States.

Mr. Vieira has taught in many residency workshops and has been a guest instructor at Yale University’s African-American Studies Department for 12 years with Dr. Robert Ferris Thompson. He has also taught at many other universities and colleges including University of Pennsylvania, Denison University, Oberlin College, Columbia University, New York Yniversity, Stanford University, Duke University, University of Nebraska, University of Miami among others. In 2000 he was a guest as Eminent Scholar at Florida University, in Gainesville, FL for a semester.

In 1993, after a decade of collaboration between Tha Capoeira Foundation and the Carver Cultural Community Center, Mr. Vieira and Carver Center Director Jo Long decided to create Ilê Bahia de San Antonio, the House of African-Brazilian Arts. The organization was incorporated in 1993 to establish a professional level instruction and training center in the African-Brazilian performing arts. Special emphasis is placed on training at-risk, minority youth in a positive and culturally affirming activity.

Professor Washington Luiz Lima Porto (Esquilo)

An enthusiast of martial arts since childhood, Professor Washington Luiz Lima Porto (Esquilo) developed an interest in Capoeira as a teenager when he began studying with Mestre Jelon Vieira in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. A student of Mestre Jelon and a member of Grupo Capoeira Brasil since 1994, Mr. Porto has devoted his life to Capoeira and the instruction of this unique Afro-Brazilian martial art. He is currently teaching Capoeira in Miami and Miami Beach.

He was a visiting artist with Ilê Bahia de San Antonio, of San Antonio, Texas, where he taught Capoeira classes for all age and skill levels. Mr. Porto has organized and directed several annual international Capoeira events, and he has also given numerous Capoeira workshops in New York, New York; Denver, Colorado, Fresno, California; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Salvador, Brazil, Saint Louis, Missouri; San Antonio and Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Bethel and Anchorage, Alaska; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Gainesville, Florida; Hartford, Connecticut; and Trenton, New Jersey. Between 1996 and 1998, he served as an assistant to Mestre Jelon for beginning level students in Salvador.

In 1997 and 2001, Mr. Porto also toured with the internationally acclaimed African-Brazilian dance company DanceBrazil, performing and choreographing in Phoenix, Arizona; New York City and San Antonio, Texas. Other performances include ESPN’s Global X-Games & Asian New Year’s Festival in San Antonio, TX, and the Off-Broadway production of “Rio” in New York, where he both choreographed and performed, and a performing tour in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan in 2001. He also choreographed Capoeira fight scenes for the Off-Broadway Musical “Miracle Brothers” written by Kristen Childs.

Capoeira is a Brazilian dance form that incorporates self-defense maneuvers. Capoeira was originally a deadly sport in which the participants, often with blades strapped to their ankles, swung their legs high in attack, somersaulted, and passed within a hairsbreadth of their opponent’s knees, head, groin, or stomach. Flexibility and rapidity of movement were more important than sheer muscular strength. In the modern dance the same quick, graceful movements are employed in dance; usually two men face each other, emulating the blows and parries of “the fight” in time with the rhythms of the berimbau, or musical bow. Clubs in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro train dancers in the arts of precise kicking and passing.

If you ask ten people to describe capoeira, you will most likely hear ten very different answers. Capoeira has been described as a martial art, a dance, an art form, a form of self-defense, or any hybrid of these. Many people often use more than one of these definitions in the same breath when describing this form of movement that combines spins, turns, precisely-aimed kicks, evasive defense moves, and breathtaking acrobatics into a rich fabric of motion, percussion, and song.

Whatever terms may be used when one tries to define capoeira, there is some truth in all of them. Mestre Jelon Vieira, a leading Mestre (“master”) of capoeira in Brasil and the United States, has described it as a dance which is a fight and a fight which is a dance. Capoeiristas, anthropologists, historians, and others have developed several theories about the exact geographic and cultural origins of capoeira.

For more information please visit: http://www.miamicapoeira.org/Capoeira%20.html