Meia Lua de Frente

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Meia lua de frente, literally front half-moon, is a capoeira kick in which the straight leg traces an arc and returns to its starting position. Power comes from thrusting the hips forward, and the kick finishes at a point directly in front of the kicker; it targets the opponent's head and face. It is one of the first kicks taught in capoeira and is the basis of other arcing kicks such as armada or queixada; sources describe queixada as its reverse version. Because it is low and frontal, it does not expose the player to sweeps or counterattacks, so it often serves as a setup for a follow-up attack. The defense is a dodge with a quick lowering of the body, from which one can respond with a rabo de arraia kick or a rasteira sweep. The kick comes from engolo, an Angolan martial art regarded as a forerunner of capoeira, where it is called okupayeka and is one of the basic kicks. This type of kick was captured in drawings from the nineteen-fifties by the painter Neves e Sousa in the Mucope area of Angola's Cunene province; the engolo games were later documented by the researcher Matthias Röhrig Assunção, a collaborator on the documentary Jogo de Corpo (2013).