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RYAN MEEHANThe Brazilian-born sport of capoeira lures adherents with its primitive beat, disciplined grace and acrobatic power.
UNIVERSITY NORTH - Delphine French is perched on a wooden bench, grimacing in pain and examining the bottom of her right foot. A gash has reopened, and the pain will surely slow her down if she decides to go again.
But 20 minutes later, she's back out on a splintery wooden deck at Skipper's Smokehouse that has wreaked havoc on her foot on this humid Friday evening. She's playing capoeira, a Brazilian game that incorporates martial arts, dance and acrobatics and seems to have little regard for gravity.
Against the neon glow of flashing beer logos at Skipper's, the "capoeristas" circle up and sway to the beat of a drum and a single-stringed instrument called a berimbau. Within the circle, or roda (pronounced "hoda"), two of the participants begin to spar, cautiously lobbing precision kicks in what appears to be slow motion.
The drumbeat picks up, the berimbau's rhythm intensifies. Players switch in and out of the circle, the movements of their bodies in unison with the music. One player awes the crowd by sliding across the floor on his head. Another walks around on his hands. Still another incorporates what looks like break dancing into his kicks.
French's turn is up. She steps in, shakes her opponent's hand, flips head over heels and comes down hard on her feet.
The opponent is bigger than she is. Much bigger. His roundhouse kicks repeatedly whiz past her face. Unfazed, she kicks back, weaving in and out of his attacks and staying close to his body to prevent his powerful arms and legs from extending.
She's 5 feet tall. But in the world of capoeira (pronounced "ka-PWEH-rah"), skill pays little attention to size.
"Everybody underestimates me," says French, who is proud to display the teeth marks on her knuckles. "For my size, I pack a hard punch."
A hard punch, indeed. French says outsiders watching capoeira performances probably get so caught up in the flashy acrobatics of the game, they don't realize how potent its martial arts aspect is.
French knows firsthand, though. The 23-year-old was inline skating through a park one day when three men tried to attack her. But they didn't get far, she says. The man who grabbed her caught an elbow to the face. Another man caught the back edge of her skate as she was falling to the ground - a tactic she learned through capoeira.
"They teach you to fall into a move, so when I was falling, I was kicking," French said.
The would-be attack lasted just a few seconds. With a few cuts and bruises, she got up and skated away. There was no time to waste, she said. She had someplace to be. She was on her way to capoeira class.
For the past year and a half, French has been training with Eduardo Torres - known to his students by his nickname, "Girino," which means "little tadpole." Torres recently converted an old dance studio at Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and Bearss Avenue into a venue where he can teach the game he has come to love.
Torres, 25, credits capoeira with saving his life. At 11, the Mexican immigrant ran away from his home in California and moved in with a friend. Over the next few years, he got involved with a gang and dabbled in hard drugs.
It was the music that drew him into Rony Costa's capoeira studio at the age of 16, and Torres immediately took a liking to it. But the physical demands of the game weren't conducive to his wild lifestyle. So with capoeira in his back pocket, he changed just about everything about the way he lived.
"You can't be a skinny crackhead and do capoeira," Torres said. "Your body would just break."
Costa, Torres' mestre, or master, moved his capoeira school, Volta ao Mundo, to Sarasota eight years ago and persuaded Torres to make the move as well and help him spread the game in the Sunshine State.
Torres came to Florida in 2000 and opened a school of his own the following year on Waters Avenue. Today, he's trying to put struggling youths on the right path, the same way Costa helped him nearly 10 years ago.
He says many of his young students come from rough homes and struggle in school. One student can't afford lessons, so gets them for free in exchange for cleaning the studio.
When Torres learns students are doing poorly in school, he'll sometimes make them do homework in the studio until their grades go up. And if they don't bring their homework, they can only sit and watch.
When Torres is teaching, his demeanor is commanding. He doesn't hesitate to single out his students when they seem to be losing interest or are talking during a roda.
During one roda, a young student jams his finger. As he retreats to the outside of the circle, Torres interprets his lack of clapping as pouting and calls him out on it.
"Don't stand around," Torres yells. "If your finger hurts, you have a mouth. Use it."
And for Deborah Chase, that kind of chiding is okay.
"There's a certain discipline to it," Chase says of capoeira. For six months, her 7-year-old son, Cameron, has been a student of Torres. The lessons have made him more confident, she says.
But there's an educational aspect to capoeira that Chase appreciates. Torres teaches his students the history of the game, which originated with African slaves in Brazil. The masters allowed the slaves the freedom to sing and dance, and with that freedom they developed a complex code language that allowed them to organize revolts.
They assigned each other nicknames, called apelidos, which confused slave owners who were only familiar with their regular names. And they learned how to turn the playful game into a form of deadly combat. Some historians believe capoeira served as the backbone of the slaves' eventual liberation.
At Torres' studio May 20, his original capoeira master, Costa, pays a visit. Inconspicuously, Costa joins a roda in progress and jumps into the circle to play with some of the students. His style is laid back.
He laughs and taunts as he spins, kicks and even tickles some of the students with whom he spars. Even the most advanced students are no match for this expert stranger to their studio.
After about 15 minutes, Torres puts aside his berimbau and the music stops. Addressing his students, he turns to Costa.
"This is the guy that taught me capoeira," he tells them. Before speaking again, he pauses and looks down at the ground and then back up. "He is the reason I am here."
The students applaud.
Torres then decides to move the roda outside. There, the game feels a bit more natural. As the sun goes down, the sounds of berimbau and the songs of the capoeristas attract passers-by from the surrounding shopping plaza. Two youths, more than 100 feet away, watch from the other side of a chain-link fence. Within minutes, a small crowd has formed.
This time around, Delphine French has wrapped her foot in white tape, but it's no help. After playing for a half-hour, she hobbles from the circle and props herself up on an adjacent picnic table.
Taking the bandage off, she reveals the same gash from the week before, reopened again. And next to it, a half-dollar-sized blister.
"I went to kick, and I don't know what I did, but I just felt it go "split,' " she says.
"But that's just capoeira."