„Meta-Roda. The Body as a Garden is a performance of Araiké Da Silva and Luan Caja, inspired by Capoeira and ritual chants. As a ‘ballet’, different individuals dance and play inside an imaginary garden woven from fabric, slowly turning themselves into a collective moving organism. Invoking Lygia Pape’s practice of creating organic group performances, the audience is invited under the round cloth and into the garden, to experience different sets of body and sound practices from within and without. There, under the skin of earth, bodies become a landscape, part of an ecosystem. Introducing the idea of the body as an instrument, a body percussion workshop led by Araiké da Silva, the son of a capoeira master takes place prior to the performance, on 7 th of June 2024. The participants of the workshop can take part in the performance.“

– Daniel Neugebauer

The garden, according to Michelle Foucault, is the very first heterotopia. A place where different cultures that do not belong together find a space to coexist. Music, dance, play, are the means by which different bodies meet pacifically. The garden is a flying carpet travelling through the world… our garden is round, warm and welcoming like a yellow sun but also fluid and wavy like the sea.  Meta-Roda means „Beyond the Circle“ because it is an open circle, a circle in which the energy is projected not only inside but also outside. The audience is invited to be part of the performance, and part of the audience will already be familiar with the performance beacuse partcipated at the workshops, using the body as an instrument to play music collectively. The rythms and the songs which are played during the performance are the motor that activates the flying carpet, like a snake being enchanted by the music of a snake charmer.

This Performance is not a typical roda de Capoeira but rather a dialogue between rhythms and memories of ritual chants.

The Roda is usually the circle in which the game of Capoeira occurs, but usually is a closed circle, only the people that are familair with it and that are invited can participate. 

Capoeira is an art form, a fight, a dance, a game created in Brazil 400 years ago by enslaved people from Africa, who were deported to the ocean from the Portuguese colonies. Capoeira was banned until 1940 as any other form of afro-diasporic culture. Capoeira has survived untill now because was practiced in secret, hiding the fight inside the dance, thanks to the music, playing with ambiguity between these different elements. Capoeira is considered a game because the purpose of practicing it was not to harm each other but to rather keep the Capoeiristas in good health and defend themselves from the violence of the colonizers. It also survived thanks to the „Quilombos“, invisible villages founded by the slaves that escaped, where they created their own society, hidden in the forest and survived for Centuries.

„Quilombismo“ is also a term used by the Anthropologist Abdias Nascimento to define the resilience of the afro-inidigenous people in Brazil and as a manifesto to create a new society based on different values.