Watch a capoeira roda for ten seconds and you will notice that nobody is standing still. That rocking, swaying step from side to side is the ginga, Portuguese for “to sway”, and it is the first thing a beginner learns and the thing a mestre is still polishing forty years later.
Capoeira has no fixed stance. The ginga is the stance, and it never stops: every kick leaves from it and comes back to it, every escape is a ginga step that went somewhere unexpected, and its rhythm follows the berimbau in the roda. A player who stops swaying has told everyone what comes next.
