MA Project

“O mundo dá voltas, camará”: The Archive and the Repertoire in the Capoeira Angola Group Estrela do Norte

This MA project investigates the past and present dialogue by collaborating with Mestre Iuri Santos' Capoeira Angola Group Estrela do Norte, based in Bloomington, Indiana, to create a capoeira musical album "Coco Maduro." The album draws inspiration from interviews with contemporary capoeira practitioners and capoeira sound archives produced by the African-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner in 1940 and 1941 in Salvador, Bahia, stored in the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at Indiana University. Based on two years of fieldwork, the study includes semistructured interviews, participant observation of capoeira classes, sessions of close listening to the Lorenzo Dow Turner collection, and the album's pre-recording, recording, and post-production process. This thesis introduces a novel theoretical-methodological approach to sound archives, presenting a different modality of scholarship that juxtaposes the archive and the repertoire and establishes a dialogue in performance-based ethnomusicology focused on sound-based participatory research.