Mestre João Grande

João Oliveira dos Santos, known as Mestre João Grande, is a Brazilian capoeira Angola mestre and preservationist who carried one of the art form's most important twentieth-century lineages from Bahia to an international teaching community centered in New York. Born on 15 January 1933 in Itagi, southern Bahia, João Grande grew up working with his family and encountered the circular, grounded leg action that he later understood as capoeira. He eventually reached Salvador, where the art's rodas, music and ritual knowledge were concentrated, and entered the circle around Mestre Pastinha, the major twentieth-century organizer of Capoeira Angola. Pastinha gave him the name João Grande, distinguishing him from João Pequeno, who became his close colleague and playing partner. Training took place alongside working life—João Grande was a longshoreman—and joined tactical movement to musical, ethical and ritual knowledge.

In 1966, João Grande traveled with Pastinha's delegation to the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal. He received a capoeira diploma from Mestre Pastinha in 1968 and later toured with Viva Bahia, presenting capoeira alongside Afro-Brazilian performance traditions including samba, maculelê and puxada da rede. After Pastinha's academy declined, João Grande spent a period away from public capoeira. In the mid-1980s, Mestre Moraes and Mestre Cobra Mansa encouraged his return, and he taught with Grupo de Capoeira Angola Pelourinho, linking a younger revival movement directly to Pastinha's embodied lineage at a moment when Capoeira Angola was gaining renewed visibility.

Jelon Vieira invited João Grande to tour the United States in 1989. He returned in 1990 for presentations including the National Black Arts Festival and events in New York, then established a lasting teaching base there. His Capoeira Angola Center became a place where movement, berimbau practice, song, history and roda protocol were transmitted as one discipline rather than separated into fitness and performance products. Recognition followed without replacing daily pedagogy: Upsala College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1995; the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow in 2001. Brazil's Ministry of Culture honored him with the Order of Cultural Merit in 2015, and the Smithsonian featured him in its 2017 Folklife Festival.