Maculele

Quick Facts

Country of OriginBrazil

RegionSouth America

Primary FocusWeapons

Contact LevelLight contact

Character & Origin

Organisation & Competition

What the style is built from

Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.

Catalogs & Databases for Maculele

About Maculele

According to Paranaguá (2024), maculelê is a blend of fight, game and circular collective dance, that is, luta, jogo e dança. Green (2001) describes it as both a dance form and a fighting style with sticks called grimas. Paranaguá notes the tension between understanding maculelê as a fight or as a dance, and rejects equating it with a capoeira style, because in her view it is a separate cultural expression. We have not found a founder in the sources.

History

Oral tradition, according to Paranaguá (2024), names three first masters before Popó: Ti-Ajoua, a malê from Engenho Partido, João de Obá and Pedro Assunção, known as Barão, from whom Popó took over maculelê. According to the same author, as a boy between 8 and 12 years old Popó took part in maculelê led by João de Obá and Barão. Around 1943 or 1944, according to Paranaguá, he gathered friends and relatives in front of the house on Rua da Linha and, in his own words, first took the revived maculelê out into the streets on 2 February, the feast of Purificação. Green (2001) states that in the forties Paulino Aloisio Andrade taught the stick game to local children, who then performed at festivals and folklore shows. According to Biancardi, the first description of maculelê was given by the researcher Darwin Brandão, who saw it in Santo Amaro in 1948. According to the folklorist Hildegardes Vianna, maculelê began to disappear from Santo Amaro from the mid-fifties. With Viva Bahia, according to Paranaguá, Popó performed at the 1966 carnival in Rio de Janeiro with the samba school Império Serrano. After Popó's death the group was led, according to the same author, by his stepson Valfrido Vieira de Jesus, Mestre Vavá, who died in 1994.

How it differs

Paranaguá (2024) distinguishes Maculelê Tradicional, based on Popó's foundations, from the stylized maculelê of capoeira groups, where the agogô is hardly used. The facões also caused disputes. According to Paranaguá, Zezinho's use of facões instead of wooden grimas at Viva Bahia led to a quarrel with his father, and Mestre Vavá claimed the facão did not belong to the maculelê of old. Folklorist Hildegardes Vianna, according to Manuel Querino, considers maculelê a fragment of the Cucumbi, whose climax is a fight between the Indian and the Black king, writes Paranaguá. According to the author, stick-fighting dances are not unique to maculelê. She lists the Bate Pau of the Terena Indians in Mato Grosso do Sul, the Moçambique from São Paulo and the Pauliteiros of Miranda do Douro in Portugal. Green (2001) writes that stick maculelê closely resembles Basque folk dances with the makila stick.

Technique

According to Paranaguá (2024), citing Mascaro (2023), grimas are struck in four beats. The first three strikes are at trunk height, the fourth with an extended arm at head height, where it blocks the partner's strike and forms a cross, the cruzeta. Between the first and third beats, according to the same author, the players improvise, strike the stick on the ground, jump or do pernadas. According to Paranaguá, grimas are always held in cruzetas so as not to hit the face, hands or fingers. According to Paranaguá, the movement consists of jumps, turns, light lifting of one leg and rhythmic squats, while the grimas are struck quickly and in rhythm, when attacking and defending against an opponent. According to her, each participant has a pair of grimas about 50 cm long and two fingers wide, and the master uses one larger grima of 55 to 60 cm. According to Mestre Macaco, cited by Paranaguá, the main instrument is the agogô, which begins, ends and sets the rhythm. In Popó's time, according to the same author, drums of carbide cans, zinc and wood covered with snakeskin were used instead of atabaques. According to Paranaguá, maculelê is accompanied by the rhythms ijexá, which according to tradition Popó introduced, barravento, congo and, according to some, also nagô.

Training

According to Paranaguá (2024), grimas are traditionally singed over fire and scraped with glass. Dona Nicinha, according to the same author, explains that they are neither sanded nor varnished, so they do not slip from the hand with sweat. Asked about grima wood, Zezinho named biriba, pitiá and canzi according to Paranaguá, and the author also lists biriba de solteiro, pau d'arco and araçá. According to Paranaguá, the performance begins with the louvação, a responsorial song during which the master crouches in the middle. After the first chorus come the atabaques, then the strikes of the grimas, and finally the master starts a song. According to the author, maculelê is mostly male and has no set number of participants, and women now perform in the zinguê, a white strip of cloth across the chest. According to Paranaguá, drawing on Moutinho (2022), the link of maculelê with capoeira reaches back to the fifties and Mestre Canjiquinha. Mestre Anzol, a student of Bimba, taught maculelê, samba duro, samba de roda and puxada de rede in Rio at the Grupo Senzala in the late sixties, she says. Green (2001) writes that capoeira retains weapons training in the form of maculelê, rhythmic clashing of short sticks in dance.

Today

The second of February, the day of Santo Amaro's patron saint Nossa Senhora da Purificação, is also regarded as Dia do Maculelê, according to Paranaguá (2024). Today, according to her, performances take place at Praça da Purificação on no fixed day. According to Paranaguá, Popó's legacy is claimed by the groups Netos de Popó (masters Ventilador and Pandeiro) and Raízes do Samba e Maculelê (Mestre Valmir, son of Mestre Vavá and Nicinha do Samba). Popó's students already bore the name Netos de Popó and, according to Paranaguá, performed in Europe in 1982 thanks to Maria Mutti. In 2019, according to Paranaguá, the Associação Beneficente Ilê Axé Oju Onirê applied to IPAC for a Registro Especial of maculelê as state intangible heritage, and to IPHAN for a similar document. According to her, the registration studies were postponed by the pandemic. When she defended her thesis in 2024, the expert opinion awaited discussion in the Conselho Estadual de Cultura da Bahia, and the registration would go into book III, Expressões Lúdicas e Artísticas.

Did you know

According to the Priberam dictionary, as cited by Paranaguá (2024), maculelê is a word from Umbundu, combining Maka, a challenge or provocation, and Lele, quick. According to Paranaguá, Zilda Paim derives the name from macuas and lelê, two sticks, and Plínio de Almeida from the instruments Macum and Le. The author calls Zezinho's snake cult version his invention for the curious. Paranaguá cites the memorialist Pedro Pedreira (1974) with a legend about a runaway Black man with a skin disease, taken in by an indigenous tribe, who alone defeated a hostile tribe while the others were hunting, and became a hero. According to Biancardi, the Senegalese ethnologist Ousmane Silla compared maculelê to a Fula dance on a visit to Salvador in the sixties. According to Paranaguá, Caetano Veloso recalls that Popó's whistle while driving the tram had the same beauty and mystery as maculelê songs. According to the author, Popó introduced a ritual with the jurema drink, in which a drunken Black man challenges the others to a fight. According to Paranaguá, Mestre Vavá said that if a slave could have fought maculelê with a machete, slavery would not have existed, because the machete would have dealt with the overseer.

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Similar styles

Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.