At a recent batizado I took an unusual workshop. The first half was familiar—warm-ups and a partner sequence—but at the halfway mark we halted the kicks and dodges and sat down. It felt like I was back in kindergarten, all of us in a big seated clump around the contra-mestre, who was perched on a small stool with a white board balanced on one knee. After we'd all settled down he asked us what came to mind when we thought of someone who was a good capoeirista.

"Name some qualities they have," he said.

We sounded off, raising hands to be called on like the obedient students we were. Our answers — usually one-word nouns like "smoothness", "control", "vision"—made their way onto the board in a loose scrawl. Once the board was covered, our kindergarten Contra Mestre stopped us to make a point.

"There's a distinction here," he said. "Most of these are techniques. Stuff like 'cleanliness' or 'solidity.' But some of these are principles. Techniques can be taught, but how do you teach someone principles?"

As a group, we were stumped. I at least had never really considered the question. But he was right, some of our answers had been things like "creativity", or "discipline", or "work ethic." If techniques are the blueprint for doing movements or music, then principles are loose ideas that help guide a student's overall capoeira philosophy. We all want to be disciplined in our training, but how exactly do you learn to be disciplined? How do you learn to have good vision in the roda, to see the game the way a chess master sees the board?

I still don't have the answer. A month later, the question is lodged in my brain and refuses to leave. Clearly, repetitive, consistent practice has something to do with it. Creativity in the roda can get picked up by attending a lot of rodas…right? A student develops work ethic by coming to class regularly and working…probably? But as I've been thinking about this I realized there was one word missing from the board, an idea that straddles the line between techniques and principles: elegance. In the game, elegance means control, fluidity, awareness, and effortlessness all at once. In principle, elegance is an amalgamation of knowledge, sophistication, grace, and goodwill. It's perhaps the ultimate compliment to a capoeirista. Telling a capoeirista she is elegant is to connect her game and her personality into a single, charismatic presence that shines whether she is in or out of the roda.

In capoeira, execution matters very much. Other, more self-defense- oriented martial arts prize effectiveness, but not necessarily appearance. Clean technique is better than sloppiness, but if you're in a truly dire situation who cares how you escape that headlock? But in the strange context of capoeira how a kick looks and feels is just as important as what a kick does. Hence the importance of elegance, but of a very particular sort. In normal, everyday life elegance carries a whiff of elitism to it. Refinement comes by distinguishing between high and low practices, which necessarily means discarding "lower" ways of life. In Western society, elegance and sophistication are the purview of the rich. The poor and the marginalized are never described as elegant. But capoeira has a unique heritage that redefines the concept. And this is captured perfectly by capoeira's take on the Portuguese word "vadiação".

Like malandragem, in Brazil it's not a term of endearment. But in our roda-centered world, the word has become an archetype of an older, more relaxed style of going about the business of capoeira. It comes from a time (pre-1940s) when there was no such thing as a capoeira school. The art was learned only on the street, hand-to-mouth. Generally, before academies of ginga existed, a young man (and it was usually a man) interested in learning how to artfully kick and dodge had to hang around street rodas, soliciting advice from the players there. Eventually, if the stars aligned and some persistence was applied, one mestre might take the young man aside and offer genuine guidance. An arrangement was established, a partnership was entered. They might meet together to train as a pair or with a few friends, attending rodas periodically.

But, looking back, we wouldn't necessarily call it formal instruction — that is, the student's "lessons" didn't follow any standard curriculum with regular intervals to mark his progress. For the most part, the roda was the classroom and the student's knowledge came by snatching insights on the fly, tempered by his master's advice on technique and strategy. Vadiar and vadiação symbolize this earlier, more anarchic capoeira. It is not merely a way of doing capoeira, but also learning how to be a capoeirista.

In a very true sense, the way the vagabond occupied the roda mirrored the way he occupied the world. Historically, the majority of capoeiras were saddled with deep poverty. They were forced to take a pragmatic approach to procuring food, shelter, and money. It's a universal truth that the lower class have difficulty making their voices heard or their needs met. The law (what we—21 st -century Americans—might term the "formal rulebook for living in a society") offers little help to severely poor, severely impoverished peoples. Self-sufficiency is more important for survival than law-abiding- ness. So, much like the malandro, the vagabond lives mainly by his wits. Lacking the fallback cushions of money or status or reputation, the vagabond's existence falls on the slender line between poverty and starvation. In the face of such a life, the twin structures of law and social norms become a little flimsier, a little more open to interpretation. Necessity is a harsher master than a policeman could ever be.

Currently, the term vadiação has a slight political bent to it. In the 1940s, as Capoeira Regional's prominence was growing, the idea of vadiação became something of a rallying standard for the mestres who would come to represent the corpus known as Capoeira Angola. Part of Mestre Pastinha's formalization of the style Angola centered on the idea of capoeira being a vagabond activity. To play capoeira was vadiar, to bum around. Like the term "malandro", Angola's claim that playing capoeira was the antithesis of productive activity was a sarcastic statement toward capoeira's critics. In the debate over capoeira's worthwhileness, it was a way of seeming to capitulate while really reframing the entire argument. As always, covert resistance disguised as overt compliance. To invoke vadiação now is to hearken back to an earlier time when capoeira only existed on the street, before the schism between Angola and Regional.

In contrast, Mestre Bimba established his style partly on the idea that capoeira could be learned in an academy with uniforms and prescribed ranks. The resultant ideological struggle between Regional and Angola split capoeira down two different paths for a time, stretching the art's underlying philosophy in orthogonal directions. But Angola's typification of this vagabond capoeira ensured that even we (again, 21-st-century non-Brazilians) inherited some of it. In general, our lives may not resemble that of the early capoeirista's, but our game can.

In appropriating the word vadiar, capoeira both redefined its own value and removed the elitism from elegance's definition. And so this strange Brazilian battle-dance marries high and low. The elegant vagabond thrives in the roda like he does nowhere else. By embracing this peculiar context, we can gain some insight into both the techniques that guide capoeira's movements and music, and the principles that support its general philosophy.