The following piece was made to showcase some of the ideas I have been playing with in the last year.
It all started from a place of stagnation and boredom with the state of modern capoeira, my own practice and the future in which it is all heading.I was desparate for some inspiration, motivation, something new and interesting that goes beyond spinning on my hands one more spin or kicking that old Meia-Lua a bit faster.
I needed a new physical and mental challange and also wanted to renovate, create and express while at it.
That is the beginning of the journey. I started to cross train heavily in other arts, diciplines, movement systems and also worked hard at mental aspects such as cultivating creativity, concentration, emotional expression, associative flow and more..
At start it was full of enthusiasm. Later on it became frustrating as I realized, I'm just a baby in those new and foreign places. I had to push through. Believe in my choices.
After a while things started to clear out. New possibilites were revealed, in movement, in thinking, my body and mind started to change.
This whole process was accompanied with quite a bit of isolation from the 'normative' world I was so determined to escape from and exposure to a new world, different from my own, at the time. This isolation allowed me to experiment, drift away and innovate without getting stuck back into the box of what is a normal progression of an artist (or capoeirista) should be.
My nightly classes and workshops became a hit. Not only due to new, inspirational material that was a result of a lot of work and thought, but also because of the complete and total submergence I went into this material. I truly 'bathed' in this, it was ME and people tend to get attracted to original things. I think..
Every aspect of my work was influenced by it: pair work, solo trainings, group trainings, strength and conditioning, flexibility, music, rythem and movement. Everything was examined and reexamined in a filter of 'is this moving me in the right direction?'
Sometimes painful choices of elimination were made. I rejected the useless and made a choice.
This first published clip is only a tiny bit of my work displaying certain aspects of it. Please, dont put me in a box after watching this, it is just playing around with something interesting, it is far from the 'big picture' of my art. It is the first of many clips and only the beginning. The future material will include some of my students work, (what I call 'homework' in our nightly trainings and also the training themselfs) my own work and developement and application of our practice.
The clip won some awards on Youtube, and the response to it was something I didnt suspect, even in my wildest dreams. (full mailbox and comments from not only friends but professional in the field of capoeira, circus, gymnastics, dance and more. I hope you like it, but dont realy care... please post your comments below.
Check back here soon, subscribe to the blog and my youtube acount and send me your email if you want me to add you to my mailing list. This will allow me to stay in closer contact with you all, thank you,
Ido.
