Fighting Dance

Jennifer Osborne, now in her midtwenties, is learning to do flips. Did she ever try them as a kid? “Nohoho,” she says. “And I am too old to be starting, but I’m working up to that point.”

For the past five years, Osborne has been practicing capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that looks more like dancing than fighting. Osborne says it has origins in Brazil’s former slave communities. “It used to be, slaves in Brazil wanted to keep honing their fighting skills, but they didn’t want their masters to know what they were doing. So they disguised it as a dance,” she explains.

Osborne’s troupe, Grupo Beribazu, performs in this weekend’s CrossCurrents Arts Festival, along with performance artists, spoken-word poets, musicians and actors. Adding a layer of authenticity to Grupo Beribazu’s work onstage will be capoeira experts Adriano and Luis Allemand, who are traveling from Brazil for the occasion.

“It’s all about play,” Osborne says of capoeira. “It’s not a fight; it’s a game.” The point of the one-on-one action is that each partner’s movements support and counteract the other’s. The two players move independently but must be tuned in to one another’s rhythm and strategy in order to stay close without getting kicked in the face. “You just want your movement to be well done, well placed and out of the way,” she says.

Osborne, who discovered capoeira while helping with a program that taught it to at-risk youth, says she likes to “be in that moment where you’re just connected to the music and the movements and nothing else matters.” She adds that “it’s so cool to not be worried about the world for a couple hours.” The best part, she says, is doing things she had “no idea human bodies were able to do.”