The show is called Gungas, Marimbas e Urucungos em Encantorias Ancestrais. Eight acts, capoeira and dance woven through live music, brought together by Mestra Valdira Barros, co-founder of the Centro Cultural Mandingueiros do Amanhã, and Mestre Bamba, the group's artistic director.
The performers came from five communities in Itapecuru-Mirim, in Maranhão — Vila da Fé em Deus in Santa Rita, Santa Luzia, Santa Joana, Santa Rosa and Oiteiro dos Nogueiras. These are quilombos: communities founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who freed themselves or were freed, and whose collective right to their land Brazil's 1988 Constitution recognises. Itapecuru-Mirim lies roughly a hundred kilometres from São Luís, the state capital. Rio is much further than that.
The route to the stage was long in another sense too. The production was chosen from 8,000 projects submitted to a national cultural grant programme. Before Rio, the company played Parnaíba in Piauí, São Luís and Itapecuru-Mirim, then Belém in Pará.
What the cast practises is Capoeira Angola, the older and slower style — built on ritual, musicality and play close to the ground rather than acrobatics. Its roots run to a martial art carried in the body and disguised as dance, so that enslaved practitioners could train without alerting those watching them. The berimbau at its centre has no European or indigenous Brazilian equivalent; it descends from African musical bows brought across the Atlantic in the holds of ships.
Mestra Valdira Barros describes the work in plain terms: it strengthens the self-esteem of Black young people, and it hands Capoeira Angola on to the generation that comes next.
The Rio performance carried audio description and interpretation in Brazilian Sign Language. Nobody in the hall was meant to be left outside the circle.