09/12/2024
By Monica Melo

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with The Department of World Languages and Cultures, presents "Capoeira Connections,” Lessons from an Afro-Brazilian practice, a lecturer by Prof. Katya Wesolowski.

You are all invited for a conversation with Prof. Katya Wesolowski (Duke University) on the practice of capoeira, followed by a capoeira demo and workshop by the Lowell group Capoeira Rosa Rubra, led by Mestre Calango.

Join us on Monday, Sept. 23, at 5 p.m. at Coburn Hall 255, or via Zoom. Free and open to the public. 

Capoeira, created in Brazil by enslaved Africans several hundred years ago and once criminalized, is today a popular practice around the world. A dynamic blend of play, fight, dance, acrobatics, music and ritual, capoeira brings together diverse practitioners across nationality, race, age and gender. This talk explores the connections, and at times disconnections, that capoeira has fostered throughout its history. Drawing on her thirty years of experience as a capoeira practitioner, ethnographer and instructor, Prof. Wesolowski offers some lessons that this embodied dialogue can teach us about being – and moving – together across and with difference. 

Katya Wesolowski is a lecturing fellow in Cultural Anthropology and Dance at Duke University. Her research and scholarship move through the African Diaspora, from Brazil to Angola, exploring the ways bodies in movement together can create spaces of radical openness and transformative belonging. Her first book, Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion (UPF 2023), is a multi-sited ethnography that interweaves the local and global histories and flows of this Afro-Brazilian combat game with her own thirty-year trajectory as a practitioner, researcher and instructor. For more on her scholarship, teaching and media, and a link to the open access edition of her book, visit www.katyawesolowski.com. 

Mestre Calanga (Luis Carlos Galvez) has been practicing capoeira since 1980. Born in Brazil, he has lived in Lowell for more than 20 years, where he leads the group Capoeira Rosa Rubra. His philosophy is to teach capoeira as a cultural practice and a therapy tool to help his students understand both themselves and the world around them

For more information, please contact Diana_GomesSimoes@uml.edu