<B>Dance your way to a fighting finale</B><BR>Capoeira has hit our shores to literally sweep the nation off its feet, says Margaret Mall in The Herald (Scotland)<P><BR>IT'S a game, a dance and a martial art and comes in only second after football as Brazil's most popular sport. The way the Brazilians play football, the beautiful game, has been admired worldwide for the last half century. But now out of the same South American country comes capoeira.<P>Developed in secrecy and disguised as a dance, the Brazilian martial art has survived for more than 500 years - and today its intricate moves are being taught in Scotland.<P>In a draughty hall at Maryhill Community Centre in Glasgow, two wiry and muscular Brazilian men with a strange one-stringed musical instrument made from a gourd (a berimbau) and a drum, form a circle with a group of Scottish men, women and children. The leader, or mestre, sings a verse in Portuguese, to which the participants respond, clapping, chanting and swaying with the words and the thrumming, primal beat.<P><A HREF="http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020406006273&query=dance" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><p>[This message has been edited by Stuart Sweeney (edited April 09, 2002).]