Sarah as Trickster
I see the joker and the capoeirista as essential parts of the trickster, or perhaps the trickster is an essential part of the joker and capoeirista.
When I first read Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, I saw capoeira all over it. Capoeira was born in revolution. Capoeira is a subversive act. Playing capoeira well depends on finding all of the loopholes and exploiting them while still keeping it within the game of capoeira. As a trickster, you don't want to intentionally and obviously break the rules. You don't want to be the brutish lion who can muscle his way through rule breaking. As a trickster and capoeirista, I look for every way I can get around the rules or what was, perhaps unintentionally, not excluded from the rules, or a perspective that wasn't explicitly forbidden though perhaps not intended.
When I first read Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, I saw capoeira all over it. Capoeira was born in revolution. Capoeira is a subversive act. Playing capoeira well depends on finding all of the loopholes and exploiting them while still keeping it within the game of capoeira. As a trickster, you don't want to intentionally and obviously break the rules. You don't want to be the brutish lion who can muscle his way through rule breaking. As a trickster and capoeirista, I look for every way I can get around the rules or what was, perhaps unintentionally, not excluded from the rules, or a perspective that wasn't explicitly forbidden though perhaps not intended.
Often in life, we see down the path that we are pointed towards, but there are so many paths along that path and if we just turn our head from side to side we can see that we aren't necessarily violating boundaries, just reshaping them slightly. If we stand on our head, we might see something else entirely. What if we turn our body and walk sideways down the path, we aren't breaking any rules, just exploring new perspectives.
This has been one of my greatest challenges as a capoeirista. I realize I have been programed to follow rules to the letter, and to break out of it has been very challenging, but in art making and in capoeira, I see the cracks. I see the joints, and this is where trickster can play and deconstruct. I see new ways to go about things without actually breaking the rules, but certainly not following a path laid before me. In art making, a prompt can be given, but we are to go from that prompt wherever our expression takes us. Even if we aren't fully tricksters, this can give us access to trickster mindset, and these moments of trickster are essential to a revolution.
As a joker, this playful aspect of trickster is essential to balancing the contradictions that we will come across in our work. How do I handle deeply personal stories and not make them precious? How do I keep working in a community when I feel myself being oppressed by various members of that community? How do we negotiate layers of privilege and oppression with play, fun, curiosity while at the same time challenging them and finding new ways through them?
This has been one of my greatest challenges as a capoeirista. I realize I have been programed to follow rules to the letter, and to break out of it has been very challenging, but in art making and in capoeira, I see the cracks. I see the joints, and this is where trickster can play and deconstruct. I see new ways to go about things without actually breaking the rules, but certainly not following a path laid before me. In art making, a prompt can be given, but we are to go from that prompt wherever our expression takes us. Even if we aren't fully tricksters, this can give us access to trickster mindset, and these moments of trickster are essential to a revolution.
As a joker, this playful aspect of trickster is essential to balancing the contradictions that we will come across in our work. How do I handle deeply personal stories and not make them precious? How do I keep working in a community when I feel myself being oppressed by various members of that community? How do we negotiate layers of privilege and oppression with play, fun, curiosity while at the same time challenging them and finding new ways through them?
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