Sala de Jogos

The name Sala de Jogos — Portuguese for "playroom" — comes from a simple, personal decision: Chef Monchana converted a room in his own home into a space for capoeira practice. What started as a private gym became a proper school. As he put it, if he already had the knowledge, why not let it generate value? The first classes charged 250 baht per session, with seven sessions running at a time.

Sala de Jogos was documented by Sarakadee Magazine in 2022 as one of Bangkok's active capoeira schools, sitting alongside the city's other capoeira communities. Its students at the time were noted as being largely in the 35–45 age range — adults who came to capoeira not for social media posts, but for the commitment it demands: sustained training, unfamiliar muscles, and a slow mastery that takes years, not months.

Classes covered all the essentials of capoeira as both art and sport: the ginga footwork, kicks, acrobatics, the negativa floor movements, and the rhythms of berimbau, atabaque, and pandeiro that give every roda its heartbeat. Capoeira, as Chef Monchana and others in the community describe it, is not a fight — it is a conversation. You express yourself through movement, and your partner responds in kind.

For Contramestre Cobrinha, capoeira has never been separate from life. "Capoeira shows you difficulty, shows you how to find a way through — same situation, many different choices," he has said. That outlook shapes every class: the mat is a place to train not just the body, but the mind's capacity to read a situation and respond.

He has also spoken candidly about what the school meant to him practically — that a skill you genuinely have should be allowed to create value, both for yourself and for others. Every student who joins a Capoeira Zoador Thailand class today steps into a tradition built on exactly that belief.