I had my my first Capoeira class last night. Capoeira is a unique Brazilian martial arts developed by Dutch slaves. It’s set to rhythmic music played on a instrument called a berimbau that looks like a bow with a gourd hanging off of it. The actual movements itself resemble sort of gymnastic dance incorporating cartwheels, handstands, high kicks, flips, and such.

It is very. Very. VERY. VERY strenuous. Participants are constantly in motion, staying still is an invitation to get a foot in the face or a head in the stomach. Even if you aren’t directly participating in the action, you are expected to stand in a circle around the opponents and participate in the music.

Being that my gymnastic ability was limited to a strained somersault and my flexibility was limited to a very difficult toe-touch, the first day was tough. The first thing I had to learn was the ginga: A sort of stance that forms the basis of Capoeira. I only say “stance” in the most general meaning, as even it is a constant motion involving the whole body.

The moved on to the negativa, a sort of ducking/squating dodge you use can use to avoid high kicks. Then on to cartwheels, something I failed miserably at, but continue to improve. Finally we tried a move I can’t even begin to grasp called the Queda de Rins or “stand on the kidneys.” I have no idea why it’s called that, but it requires something like standing on your head while twisting an elbow under your torso to support your body weight. Weirder and more difficult than I can describe.

It’s crazy. The next class in tomarrow, but my attendence requires my sister to fully recuperate from yesterday’s session (She hadn’t practiced Capoeira in at least a year). We’ll see if that happens.

Wish me luck ~ LittleZephyr.

Bonus Movie: Here is a clip of a Capoeira cord ceremony called the Batizado (Quciktime, 6MB). You can hear the berimbau in the music.

Bored out of my mind while Hannah was out of town, I found an incredibly striking tool: An application that automatically produces stepfiles for Dance Dance Revolution from almost any song*. Originally a student’s project while at Imperial College London, it’s now a publicly available open-source program.

[*] For the best results, according the student’s report, the song must have a beat, preferably computer generated (Human drummers aren’t precise enough for DDR), have no tempo changes, and must be from 1 to 2 minutes. This stuff isn’t really too much of a problem, considering all DDR music is like this ~_~

It’s amazing in that it calculates the BPM, time from song start to arrow start, and arranges the arrows in a physically possible and danceable pattern all without any human involvement. It’s not perfect: the steps are a bit too easy, and the arrows usually start too early in the song, but it nonetheless manages to create good stepfiles without requiring tweaking.

The utility even manages to place freeze arrows appropriately and detects dramatic pauses in the song. I’d like to try editing a step file the program produces to try to improve the steps just a wee bit. Honestly, the grunt work of producing a stepfile may be the best use of the program.

Download and learn about the program at the Dancing Monkeys wiki, or read the student’s final report [pdf] (Quite interesting if you are a music or programming geek, talks alot about machine processing of music theory and whatnot. Worth at least a skim for the pretty pictures.)

So I got the theme working in IE. So dumb. Grr. So all you IE users out there get a big FireFox ad over there to the right. All the rest of you can rest soundly, the ad only appears on IE.

So with the theme done, I can work on the next set of projects, most notably LJI2: