Batuque (Brazil)

Batuque (drumming[1]) was a general term for various Afro-Brazilian practices in the 19th century, including music, dance, combat game and religion.

These performance circles were a regular occurrence on Sunday evenings and holidays, drawing large crowds of enslaved Africans.

[5] In Bahia, the batuque dance evolved into various forms of samba,[6] while the combat game was gradually absorbed by the capoeira.

[8] In 1802, Luís dos Santos Vilhena, a teacher in Salvador, complained on the slaves performing batuques: It does not seem very prudent, politically speaking, to tolerate crowds of negroes of both sexes performing their barbarous batuques through the city streets and squares to the beat of many horrible atabaques, indecently dancing to pagan songs, speaking various languages, and all with such frightful and discordant clamor as to cause fear and astonishment.

They assemble in groups of the same nationality, either Congo or Mozambique, or Minas; then, in dancing they forget their ills and servitude, and only remember their native country and the time that they were free.

[4]Spix and Martius' reported that by the end of the colonial period, not only improvised songs but also the emerging Brazilian modinhas were already being sung at batuques.

[6] Batuque was a wrestling-like game played in Bahia in the early part of the twentieth century by African slaves, but now extinct.

The attacker, often after feinting, made one decisive attempt to knock down the defender with his hips, upper legs, or feet.

Capoeira innovators like Anibal Burlamaqui in Rio and Mestre Bimba, the founder of the regional style, incorporated numerous batuque techniques.