After Ashley and Angela left, but before our friends Diana and Joe arrived, I had a capoeira performance at a street festival! It was a lot of fun because, unlike other events, we had the chance to perform several times throughout the day. We would set up shop on one corner, play a few songs, sing, try to get the crowd involved, and show off some moves (or for some of us, try not to look too silly). Then some members of our group would grab kids from the crowd and let them participate – teach them to do some kicks and how to esquiva or dodge the kicks. There were a TON of people out, and capoeira is exactly the kind of thing that draws a crowd at that kind of event. I think we did four separate performances, moving from place to place and taking breaks in between to grab water or watch other groups perform.
We also met up with a breakdancing group in town, the head of which is friends with several CDO members. When he saw us approaching, he gave us a shoutout and invited us to take turns on the dance floor. It’s been interesting to see how many similarities there are between breakdancing and capoeira…both take huge amounts of upper body strength, balance, and rhythm. Yes, I was gently shoved onto the makeshift dance floor (read: cardboard on the street), but with a friend, so it wasn’t as horrible as you might imagine. Then the others showed off their handstands and aerials and more than made up for my lack of moves!
Watching (and participating in) a little breakdancing…some of us may have looked a little silly, but it was fun!
My beautiful and fun friend!
The ladies of CDO Panamá
Without the weird orange line down my face….
I was excited that someone captured this! I’m finding that still-shots are often a lot more flattering than video or real life when it comes to my level of capoeira. 🙂
They don’t call her Ninja for nothing!
We had fun interacting with all of the kids that day.
Lourdes doing a martelo
I think Jessie is upside-down for about 40% of the time when she plays.
Moisés shows one of the kids a few moves.
We’ll see if this works, but I think I can also put a link to the professional video from that day here. Try it out, Mom.
I also have a video of one of the girls (I can say girl instead of woman because she’s 18 and I feel the need to use the word “firecracker” to describe her…which makes me old enough to call her a girl) pulling a kid into the roda. Very cute. Click here and pray that I know what I’m doing.
Okay, so Joe and Diana, two dear friends from Raleigh, were due to arrive on May 31, our first wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, they got stuck in Atlanta overnight due to weather. Eric and I spent a couple of hours refreshing the delta.com site to see if there was any way they could make their connecting flight, then looking for a new way to get them to Panamá that night or early the next morning, but alas, there was no way for them to get to us until the following night. So instead of picking our friends up at the airport, we looked through the beautiful dating/engagement/wedding album that my mom made for us, watched our wedding videos, and tasted the wedding cake that my mom flew down here from North Carolina in March! Yes, it was still good…although the black icing looked pretty nasty. Who chooses black icing?! Um…we did. Thanks.
Wedding cake!
