Over some four decades, Márcia Treidler, known to students as Mestra Márcia and to friends as Cigarra, has spread the gospel of capoeira, the acrobatic Afro-Brazilian martial art-cum-dance tradition performed to the elastic twang of the one-string berimbau.
Based in the Mission since 1992, Treidler’s reach is global. The founder and leader of the ABADÁ organization, she’s built a far-flung following, teaching and performing across Brazil, Europe and North America. Her visibility and influence is all the more striking as she started her career when there were few female choreographers and teachers in capoeira, let alone openly lesbian immigrants with undocumented status.
This weekend ABADÁ-Capoeira San Francisco Performance Company presents “Cigarra & Guerreiras Nessa Arte,” a multimedia celebration of Treidler’s legacy. Running May 3 to 5 at Z Space, the production traces the story of her groundbreaking ascent via capoeira ritual and stories from students and fellow mestras who’ve thrived under her tutelage. Woven throughout the evening are film clips by documentarian Claudia Escobar, who first started hearing about Cigarra as a capoeira-besotted college student in Medellín and formerly worked at Mission Local as a videographer.
Escobar grew up immersed in dance and gymnastics but had given them up while studying architecture. When a friend invited her to a capoeira class, she was immediately hooked.
“It’s this explosion, there’s music and you jump and kind of fight with each other and dance,” said Escobar, who co-created “If Cities Could Dance,” the Webby Award-winning KQED video series. “There’s this whole language of movement with so much fire in it. I got seduced immediately, and was really obsessed for many years.”
In Colombia and the rest of the world, women were largely sidelined in the world of capoeira. But before long Escobar started hearing about a charismatic mestra who had trained in the direct lineage of Mestra Bimba (1900 –1974), whose work in codifying the Regional style made capoeira more athletic while preserving its African roots.
“Cigarra opened a path for a lot of women to practice,” Escobar said. “She was an example, even in Colombia. Her name was around as a person who opened paths for all of us.”
Her story has become part of Bay Area lore. Arriving in San Francisco as an undocumented gay immigrant, she built up her practice starting with a handful of students attending twice-weekly practices. By 1997, she had become such a force in the international capoeira movement that she became the first female artist offered to obtain a green card via a National Interest Waiver as an “Alien with Extraordinary Abilities.”
Working with Jennifer Walsh in 1997, Cigarra established the ABADÁ-Capoeira San Francisco, which is where Esobar sought her out in 2004 after moving to the Bay Area. For the next decade, she trained regularly at the 22nd Street center and, in hindsight, it seems inevitable that her vocation as a filmmaker would converge with her admiration for Cigarra.
As part of the Z Space presentation, Escobar is giving a peek at footage from a work in progress, “a little teaser of a doc that I’m starting on her,” she said. With works like 2020’s “Dear Homeland,” about Mexican singer-songwriter Diana Gameros, Escobar has already created a powerful work about an undocumented Latina who lands in the Mission and builds an international career. With Cigarra, she’s found a story about an artist who radically transforms the image and demographics of her field.
“I love that it’s very focused on the power of women in this art form,” Escobar said. “Capoeira is definitely a very testosterone-driven art form. What drew me to this project is ringing powerful women and her group is very unique in cap world, very diverse.”
Puccini and Wong Resound In Mission Dolores
On Sunday afternoon at Mission Dolores, Palo Alto’s Peninsula Women’s Chorus joins forces with the Golden Gate Men’s Chorus to perform Puccini’s glorious “Messa di Gloria,” a Mass that’s come to be regarded as his farewell to world of sacred music, where he got his start before turning his attention to opera.
For the Peninsula Women’s Chorus solo set, the ensemble presents the world premiere of “Night Into Dawn,” a newly commissioned work by Berkeley cellist and vocalist Theresa Wong, the PWC’s outgoing composer-in-residence and recent Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
The work is dedicated to the Hawaiian community of Lahaina, and is inspired by Wong’s experience of arriving in Maui for a vacation on the eve of Hurricane Dora’s landfall and the disastrous wildfires.
The PWC program also includes Canadian composer Sid Robinovich’s tango-inspired “Noche de Lluvia,” Alice Parker’s lustrous arrangement of the hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing,” and an a cappella arrangement of Mozart’s “Overture to the Magic Flute.”