An Afro-Brazilian dance workshop led by Griot and Capoeira Master Cláudio Nascimento.

This encounter arrives with a certain insistence. It asks what it means for a body to move with memory, and what remains when that movement is displaced, translated, or staged elsewhere. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, where contemporary dance often circulates within familiar frames, this workshop opens a different register. One shaped by Afro-diasporic knowledge, where rhythm is not an accessory but a structure, and where gesture carries both history and refusal.

“Corpo que dança com os Orixás” brings participants into contact with embodied practices rooted in African-Brazilian traditions. It is not simply a class, but a space of transmission. Through movement, music, and attention, it traces connections between the sacred, the social, and the choreographic. The presence of Mestre Cláudio Nascimento introduces a lineage that complicates easy narratives of origin. His work foregrounds Black identity not as representation to be managed, but as a living, contested field.

This project also operates laterally. It strengthens ties between groups working with Afro-Brazilian culture across Scotland, while situating those practices within broader conversations in contemporary dance. Glasgow and Edinburgh appear here not as neutral hosts, but as sites where cultural exchange carries uneven histories. The workshop does not resolve this. It makes it visible.

Details
Date: 10th June
Time: 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Location: Govanhill Neighbourhood Centre

Booking

Schedule
6:30 pm – Warm-up
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm – Dance workshop

Spaces are limited. Booking is encouraged to allow the evening to function without unnecessary improvisation of logistics.

Access
This event runs on a Pay What You Can basis.

Donation link

Suggested contributions:
£20 – £35: for those comfortably meeting their needs
£10 – £20: for those meeting needs with limited flexibility
£5 – £10: for those facing financial difficulty

These are suggestions rather than thresholds. The structure remains, predictably, imperfect.

Credits
A collaboration between Ponta-Cabeça and SambaScots
Supported by the Brazilian Consulate General in Edinburgh and the Guimarães Rosa Institute
Photography by Maria Buzanovsky

Mestre Cláudio Nascimento

Master Cláudio Nascimento’s trajectory resists compression. Beginning in 1968 in Morro dos Guararapes, Rio de Janeiro, his path extends across more than five decades of sustained cultural work. At an age when many institutions begin to catalogue and contain, he continues to circulate knowledge through practice.

By his thirties, he had already carried Capoeira Angola into European contexts, moving between Paris and the Netherlands at a time when such forms were often reduced to spectacle. His return to Scotland, after first arriving in 1999, is not framed as a novelty. It is a continuation.

Cláudio’s work exceeds category. Capoeirista, sambista, percussionist, singer, dancer of the orixás, teacher. The term “griot” is used here with care. It signals a role that holds memory without fixing it, transmitting across generations without securing ownership.

Founder of Grupo de Capoeira Angola Volta ao Mundo (1992), formally recognised as Mestre in 2003, his practice has reached more than twenty countries. Yet the emphasis remains consistent: preservation, formation, and the ongoing articulation of Afro-Brazilian cultural life.

To bring him to Glasgow is to stage a meeting that is already layered with contradiction. Institutional support sits alongside community knowledge. Cultural diplomacy intersects with lived experience. The workshop, like the wider programme, does not attempt to resolve these tensions. It works within them.

And so the invitation returns to the body. Not as abstraction, but as a site where history is carried, negotiated, and, occasionally, reconfigured.