About

Nigôlo tooks its beginning in 1991 when Lua Santana and his family moved to Morro do Chapéu, a village in the Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, Brazil. There he bought a small piece of land with the aim of living there following the principles of environmental sustainability and preservation, including reforestation of the whole area.

During the same period, in 1994, started the group of Capoeira Angola, having the main objective of helping the most socially vulnerable children and young people giving them the knowledge and confidence to be part of the “felicidadania”. Slowly, thanks also to the help of Ana Maria Jacobs, it brought together the necessary elements for the realisation of the social project nowadays known as Projeto Minhoca (port. = earthworm).

Afterwards, thanks to the encounter of Lua Santana with Suni, Luca and Barbara Tomasi, two more groups of the above mentioned movement were born in Munich, Germany. These groups, on the basis of Capoeira Angola, supported together along with other entities, the Minhoca Project and also the Herbarium, an ecological project that started to take shape, having as main objective the preservation of Mother Earth.

In this way, we define the Capoeira Angola that we practice, being born of the most legitimate yearnings of freedom of the black people, as a dance, a dialogue, a ritual, a game, a culture, a feeling, a "vagrancy", a group joining, and at last, a "cunning" of the celebration of life, directed toward the union of body, mind and spirit, in the path for the harmony of the being, for a worthier world.