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 Last weekend, the Burhan Fellek Kubbe
Salonu in Istanbul hosted
“Alegria Combat 2009,” a
three-day festival
celebrating the sport of
capoeira. Bilkent University was represented
by seven capoeira club
members: Sonat
Kanberoğlu, Deniz
Abüsellamoğlu, Barış Özgül, Kamran Bagirov,
Ravşan Aziz, Robin Turner
and instructor Tuna
Sentuna.
In case you're thinking “What on earth is
capoeira?” it is a Brazilian
sport combining martial
arts, dance, acrobatics and
music (if you can imagine a
mixture of taekwondo, hip-hop and samba, you've
pretty much got it!).
Developed by African slaves
in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as a
way of defending both
themselves and their
culture, capoeira remained
an underground movement
until the 1930s, when the
first official schools were
opened. Now it has achieved
the status of a national sport
in Brazil and is practiced in
many countries around the
world.
Like the other clubs
participating in the event,
the Bilkent club
demonstrated their skills
in capoeira and maculele
(a dance based on stylized
combat with sticks) and
even performed a capoeira
song in Portuguese composed by Deniz.
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