Years ago, long before I started tying, I studied capoeira. I still think about it all the time. Tying feeds off the deep and ever growing curiosity about efficiency and expression I developed in the roda. At some point I got some funding to head to Brazil for three months. So I went. I learned a lot.
The old masters I visited in Brazil all told a similar story. Capoeira didn’t start in the academy. The generations before them didn’t learn in structured classes. The neat rows and columns in today’s contemporanea academies weren’t popular until they were developed relatively recently by Capoeira Senzala. The formal academy wasn’t an institution until capoeira became legal and promoted by the state. Capoeira began as, and for many still is, capoeira de achar – a capoeira of finding, watching, and considering. It was learned informally in the street. It was learned by doing. You would watch a skill or game, you would find a movement you liked, and you would go home and repeat it. Perhaps you’d ask a friend for advice or have a mentor, but there wasn’t intentional pedagogy.
That kind of educational and communal structure has its virtues. It’s permeable. You can take whatever you know or have to your practice. You can promiscuously find inspiration. Out of those early generations, a variety of movement forms bloomed. Only a fraction of them survive today. Nonetheless, capoeira has an open-ended quality that is a blessing for people who are quick to pick up movement. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people.
After six years of really serious training, I had to stop. Injury began to pile on injury. It came to a head after I returned from a three month trip to Brazil. I was stronger than ever. I played hard, tricky games. But my new-found skills and physical ability didn’t stop me from shredding myself. I didn’t have the coordination to control my strength. While people who naturally picked up on movements could riff on them and change their quality to develop their own game, I needed something very different. I needed specific guidance on what muscles to activate when, on what alignments would prevent injury. I needed a laser focus on movement quality. As a student of capoeira that was hard to come by. Today, it’s very easy to be a prominent capoeira teacher and practitioner without having a focus on a particular movement quality or mechanical understanding.
Capoeira’s formalization was a kind violence. It quickly became a process co-opted by the institutional racism of the Brazilian state. New, more accessible approaches to capoeira that are being developed, that work more for people like me, have to contend with that. Past generations of capoeira reformers have often done a pretty terrible job of it, whitewashing the art, making it more “realistic” by stripping things out that didn’t fit into the aesthetic of other disciplines they had learned. Capoeira internationally by and large is much poorer and flatter than it is in Brazil. What became exportable had to be sanitized, to be recoded and made recognizable to an audience who knew nothing about the circumstances from which capoeira sprang. Schools that developed specificity didn’t develop understanding alongside it. What was formalized was made rigid and conservative and was made to be held to external rubrics.
Another approach, however, exists. Artists like Itapua Beiramar and Baris Yazar take an interdisciplinary approach and break down movements. They don’t seek to create conformity, they seek to identify the components of movement quality and create awareness and the ability to aim for specific quality. One can learn from watching. But something important happens in terms of formal education: the specific forces, materials, and millieus that constitute a particular movement are identified and analyzed.

That kind of approach has served as a main inspiration for teaching how to tie. I don’t think there are right or wrong answers. The only mistake one can really make is not being aware of the effects and impacts of an action and what that means for those who are involved. My goal in teaching is to give students the resources to affect how they want, to exert some agency in their own interaction and becoming. There are often suggestions to give about things that might be more efficient to one end for another. But I am no dogmatist.
Japanese rope is a very different art than capoeira. It was made in a different place at a different time. The marginalizations of its early practitioners are impossible to compare. Yet both arrive in North America and Europe and are faced by similar forms of orientalism, similar bickering about what’s traditional and what’s efficient, similar worship of tradition for its sake, similar aspersions against origins outside a supposedly proper white scientific and progressive European context. Both have their waves of preservation and reaction, both are in the midst of a struggle to exist in institutional contexts that are not amenable to the structures of communication built into each respective art.
If I can make a suggestion, it’s to turn towards this model of awareness and intentionality. It’s to look at some of the great work that’s being done outside of Japanese rope. Push your teachers to furnish explanations for why they do what they do. Find teachers that can explain contexts and qualities. Find teachers that can adapt their material. If you teach, take learning how to do those things onto yourself, even if it means turning outside of rope. And all the while, we should be aware of the same dangers. We must strive to preserve a diversity of approaches. But we should not forget the violence of many approaches’ birth.
The goal tying education should be a simple one: to increase the capacity of people to be aware of those around them and to intentionally act. That’s all. Tying education, as far as I’m concerned, should have no other specific end. Tying, like capoeira, isn’t just for one thing. It’s what you make of it. But you should be aware of what you do, and the consequences you will reap.