Eusebio Da Silva

Eusébio Lobo da Silva, known in capoeira as Mestre Pavão, is a Brazilian dancer, capoeirista, teacher, researcher, and university professor who connected capoeira with academic dance inquiry and carried Katherine Dunham's diasporic pedagogy into Brazil. Born in December 1952 in Salvador, Bahia, Lobo entered capoeira while young and worked with the ensemble Olodumaré before pursuing formal dance training. In 1972 he entered the School of Dance at the Federal University of Bahia, where he studied ballet with Margarida Parreiras Horta and modern dance with Clyde Morgan, completing the program in 1976.

Lobo's formative work in the United States proved decisive. He completed an arts degree in 1979 and a master's degree in 1980 while studying and performing at Katherine Dunham's Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis. His 1980 dissertation, *Cappoeira*, was completed under Dunham's guidance and became the first master's dissertation on capoeira written in the field of dance. This accomplishment placed capoeira's embodied knowledge inside a dance-research framework while its author remained a practicing capoeirista, linking performance, Black diasporic modern dance, and academic inquiry rather than treating capoeira only as sport or folklore. Archival moving-image records preserve his teaching and performance during this period, documenting both a capoeira class led by Lobo with center exercises, floor progressions, kicks, somersaults, cartwheels, and partner exchanges accompanied by live drumming, and a performance with the Capoeiras of Bahia Dance Company.

Returning to Brazil, Lobo merged artistic practice with scholarship and pedagogy. He published *Comentários e Instruções sobre a Dança* in 1983 and completed his doctorate at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. His 1993 doctoral thesis, *Método de ensino integral da dança: um estudo do desenvolvimento dos exercícios técnicos centrado no aluno* (Integral Method of Dance Teaching: A Study of Technical Exercise Development Centered on the Student), proposed tools for cultivating dance-specific motor ability from each person's potential without separating technical development from the whole person. At Unicamp, Lobo became a professor and one of the founders of the university's Department of Body Arts, supervising theses and dissertations spanning dance, theatre, improvisation, choreography, capoeira, somatic awareness, and performer training. He earned the rank of *Livre-Docente* in 2004.

Lobo's four-volume 2008 project *O Corpo na Capoeira* consolidated decades of practitioner-research, treating capoeira's history, bodily principles, basic movement operations, and action. His influence remains visible in the many theses and dissertations he supervised and in ongoing scholarly discussion of Black dance, capoeira, and decolonial knowledge. A May 2026 record placed him on the academic memorial committee for Renata de Lima Silva, evidence that his mentorship and disciplinary authority remained active.