Capoeira begins in a circle. And it always comes back to a circle. But at nine o’clock on a cold Saturday morning, six children (along with a couple of their parents, toddlers wriggling in laps) are sitting in a line of chairs in a bright room at the Truro Community Center, waiting to play. Some wear loose white pants, rope cords knotted at the waist, denoting rank. Others are in leggings or cozy sweats.

Andre Lima kneels to look the children in the eye. “What is capoeira?” he asks.

“Capoeira is a dancing martial art,” says Cora Cook of Truro.

“Capoeira is music,” says Auggie Edwards of Truro.

“Capoeira is a way of learning a new language,” says Bubba Schiffer-Kehou of Provincetown.

Lima nods and repeats their words. They land like lines of a poem. He lets the thoughts settle before handing out instruments to the kids: the pandeiro, a Brazilian hand drum; the agogô, a hand bell; the caxixi, a shaker. Lima plays the berimbau, a single-stringed bow-shaped instrument that originated in Angola.

Lima starts threading the beat with the pandeiro, thumb and palm striking in rhythm. “No music, no capoeira,” he says.

“With all martial arts, there is a lineage that stretches back,” says Lima. Capoeira was born in Brazil in the 16th century as a martial art but was conceived in Africa, carried by enslaved people who brought with them the rhythms, instruments, movements, and rituals of their homelands. Under colonial rule, much of what they carried was stripped from them. Their music became survival; dance became defense.

“There was a time that capoeira was seen only as a bad thing,” says Lima. It was outlawed in Brazil in 1890 and after that evolved in ways that continued the tradition of disguising rebellion as dance and, eventually, as sport.

Lima, who is a special education teacher assistant at Truro Central School, grew up in Brasília, Brazil, where capoeira was ever-present but always on the cultural periphery of his life. He never played it until he moved to Hawaii in his early 20s and met Mestre Kinha from Rio de Janeiro, who was teaching in Honolulu.

“I was not looking for capoeira — I was just looking for friendship,” Lima says. “It was more like capoeira found me.”

It brought him into a practice of martial arts, movement, and music, of resistance and presence. “When I’m within the practice, it feels like I’m present to that moment and there’s nothing else,” he says. “It’s understanding the positioning of yourself.”

Lima met his former partner, Christy Braga de Lima, through capoeira in Hawaii, and after living in Rio de Janeiro for three years, they moved in 2013 with their daughter, Maya, to the Outer Cape, where Christy’s family is from.

“When I got here, I asked my mestre if I could start teaching,” he says. Teaching advances through a hierarchy. Lima has been an instructor and a professor, and recently, Mestre Kinha awarded him the title of contramestre, an advanced teaching rank. Lima says that his mestre has asked only one thing of him: that he not leave his students without a teacher.

That has shaped Lima’s approach. Through his organization, Capoeira Besouro Cape Cod, he is trying, he says, to create a self-sufficient capoeira community here. He envisions students who not only show up but who learn from each other and build something lasting.

The children start to sing over traditional capoeira rhythms emanating from a speaker in the corner: “Twinkle, Twinkle,” “Old MacDonald,” “You Are My Sunshine.” The songs aren’t traditional and not in Portuguese, but Lima allows it. “This is me trying to connect with my students,” he says.

“Roda, please,” Lima says. “I want to see a circle.”

The group shuffles, jogs, and brings knees high, tracing the circle round and round. They move like animals — crabs, bears, frogs. “Back in the day, capoeira was also learned by watching animals in nature,” Lima tells them.

They practice ginga, the fundamental move of capoeira.

“It’s the base move to get to any other move,” says Levi Merrill of Chatham. The other moves include sweeps, kicks, cartwheels, and handstands.

Some of the younger kids groan. The ginga is too hard, they say. They sink to the floor.

Lima watches. “That’s why you’re here,” he says. “To learn and do hard things. Capoeira is a practice of resistance.”

He moves deliberately, like a quiet blessing over the space. Then he pulls a neon green pool noodle — a makeshift “capoeira sword” — from the storage closet. The kids giggle. They ginga as Lima prowls across the floor, dragging the noodle like a blade. He sweeps it near the children’s feet, and they cartwheel. He lifts it above their heads, and they duck low.

As he approaches, the kids squat, feet glued together, left palms planted on the ground, right hands arched over their heads.

“I want you to have a good relationship with the ground,” Lima tells them. “It is your friend.”

The session ends where it began: in a circle.

“Salve,” Lima says.

“Salve,” the children echo.

“We’re saluting our instruments, our ancestors, our mestres, our families, our space, and ourselves,” he tells them.

They shake hands, looking at each other directly. Then, after a couple of minutes of free play, parents bundle their children up and usher them out.

Lima watches them go. He has been playing capoeira for 23 years now, and the future is on his mind.

He sees what happens when children practice capoeira. They are building grit, stepping away from instant gratification, he says. They are finding focus in rhythm. They are learning to trust their awareness, their boundaries, their instincts.

He tells them that the music matters. That the circle matters. That they are part of something old and alive. And that, more than anything, they must keep moving.

Every day, Lima returns to the circle.

“Every day you have to dance, you have to move,” he says. “The moment you stop, you become a target. It is resistance against the outside — and the resistance within, too.”