Globetrotter
Stearns' wanderlust began at the age of six, when his parents moved from the United States to Germany. He grew up speaking English at home and Swiss German at school.
By the time he got to high school, said Stearns, "I was completely fed up with Switzerland. It was just a very boring place for a teenager to be." The sentiment is common among many high school kids, but Stearns actually decided to do something about his boredom. At age 16, he spent a year as an exchange student in a remote village in Chile, where he became fluent in Spanish. After graduation, he spent a year in Tanzania working at a public health center in the bush.
Stearns started as a lab intern, dissecting malaria-carrying mosquitoes, but eventually he gained fluency in Swahili and became a field worker supervisor. He also performed translating duties for the researchers.
"It was lots of fun," said Stearns. "Just what I needed coming out of high school. They paid for airfare, housing and food. I had a salary of maybe 20 bucks a month, which was all I needed."
After his year in the bush, Stearns matriculated at Hampshire College. After three semesters there, however, he became frustrated with the limited resources of the school and transferred to Amherst.
Capoeirista
Stearns is probably best known in the Amherst community as the driving force behind the Capoeira Angola Club. If you have ever been to one of the club's demos or have passed by one of their practice sessions outside the Campus Center, then you probably recognize Stearns as the tall guy in the white hat spinning around on his hands and contorting himself like a pretzel.
Stearns had studied the Brazilian dance-martial art in Switzerland for a year-and-a-half before coming to college; when he joined the new Capoeira Angola Club at Amherst, however, he had been out of practice for two years. Nevertheless, under the instruction of Boston-based master Deraldo Ferreira, his interest and skills rekindled quickly, and he took over the club upon transferring to Amherst.
Capoeira Angola typically involves two players squaring off against each other in an "encounter." To the rhythm of drums and singing, the players (capoeiristas) engage in an improvised dialogue of movement-part confrontation, part collaboration-that involves dance steps, spinning kicks, headstands, handstands and other maneuvers requiring tremendous strength, flexibility and body control.
"You play with and against your opponent," explained Stearns. "It's like a game of chess. The objective is to humiliate the other player. Get inside his game and show him how he messed up. You don't beat him by force or strength-you don't try to hurt the other person. Instead you use feints, you use trickery."
Capoeira Angola is not codified as a competitive sport, so there are no "points" or "winners" per se. As a performance art, however, much honor is at stake. When the crowd laughs or claps, according to Stearns, that's when you know you've gotten the edge over your opponent.
"It was definitely not love at first sight," Stearns said of his experience with Capoeira. "The worst thing is that it takes so much patience before you really get to enjoy it. It's actually a lot of pain and frustration at the beginning. A lot of the movements feel clumsy for a long time."
His fascination with the art, however, outweighed any initial frustrations. "Capoeira is fascinating," said Stearns, "partly because it combines so many different elements. To be a good capoeirista, you have to play instruments, know the songs, know the philosophy, know the culture and the language and be able to do the moves."
Stearns credits Ferreira for much of his development as a capoeirista. According to Stearns, reaching Ferreira's level of mastery is exceedingly difficult. "There are maybe half a dozen true masters of Capoeira Angola living in the U.S.," he estimated. "And you only become a master when your own master makes you a master, so your lineage is very important. Deraldo has been teaching for twenty years, and he has never made anyone a master."
Stearns said that Ferreira exemplifies Capoeira not only through his moves but also through his personality: "The philosophy of Capoeira Angola involves a lot of trickery," he said. "And that philosophy extends beyond the roda [playing circle]; it becomes a way of life. For example, with Deraldo, in terms of organizing things for the club, I'm always playing games with him-bargaining. There's always a big smile on his face-he's a nice, lovable man-but every time I call him he'll say something different. He'll go, 'Five o'clock ... no, six o'clock ... two hundred ... no, three hundred dollars.' It's not that he has bad intentions, it's just the way he works."
Capoeira Angola, the more traditional form of the art, is actually far less popular worldwide than Capoeira Regional, a modern style which places more emphasis on acrobatics. "In Regional," said Stearns, "the acrobatics are just for acrobatics' sake." Practitioners of Capoeira Angola, on the other hand, try to integrate their acrobatics into the play with their opponents.
Capoeira Angola, according to Stearns, more purely preserves the heritage of Capoeira, which has its roots in Brazilian slave resistance. "It developed as a means of preserving Afro-Brazilian culture," he said. "A lot of the songs deal with issues of identity and class and racial oppression. For many years, because it was associated with black nationalism, Capoeira was illegal in Brazil."
Stearns stresses that Capoeira was always more about cultural resistance than physical resistance. "Capoeira can only be taken so far as a martial arts defense form; I would never use it in a street fight," said Stearns. "To me, the resistance idea has more to do with people coming together on the weekends, singing songs together, sharing that culture and heritage. It's similar to breakdancing in a way; breakdancers took the frustrations of the streets and turned it into movement."
Unfortunately, Capoeira is highly taxing on the body, and Stearns has the scars of recent knee surgery to prove it. "I love doing Capoeira," he maintained, "and I would love to continue with it, if my health permits."
But even if he never does another handstand, Stearns said that Capoeira has indelibly affected his worldview. One of the most important things it has taught him is to take things less seriously. "You learn how to keep a big smile on your face, even when it hurts," said Stearns. "For instance, Deraldo, when he's playing with you, will sometimes make a point of kicking you, as a teaching strategy. Today, he kicked me in the balls. It hurt."
Stearns accepts this as part of the Capoeira training. "I just continued on and told myself not make that mistake again. It's the same way outside the roda. There's a lot of infighting in the American Capoeira Angola scene; it's a very incestuous environment, because the community is so small. There are all kinds of race, class and gender issues going on. You can't navigate that environment while taking everything seriously. You learn to be adept at playing the game," he added.
Seeing crimson
Stearns, who will graduate as a political science major, is interested in becoming involved in public-interest law and policy-making. He plans on working for a year as a public defense investigator in New York or D.C. before going to Harvard Law School.
"I'm interested in situations where people are getting screwed over by the state and by politics. The law disadvantages a lot of people, especially minorities," he said. Is there any connection between his interest in helping the disadvantaged and the resistance idea behind Capoeira? Perhaps, said Stearns, although he is quick to say that he is not an idealist: "I'm not drawn to public-interest law out of some moral compulsion. It's more selfish than that. I don't think I would be happy being a corporate lawyer. [Public-interest law] just seems more interesting to me. And the moment I stop enjoying it-it's not like I'm going to sacrifice myself for the good of a greater cause."
"Law," he said, "is not going to save the world. I think the civil rights movement is the only example of the law making a big difference. But on a smaller scale, there's the underprivileged person in New York who doesn't speak much English, who doesn't know his rights. And that person could use some help."
Reflecting back on his Amherst experience, Stearns praises the academic environment. "I've been passionate about the classes I've taken, and I've had very good professors," he said. At the same time, he questions the Amherst overachiever mentality. "That has made both social life and running the Capoeira Club more difficult," he said. "People here are involved in so many different activities. They usually have to drop something; Capoeira, because it can be so frustrating to learn, is usually the first to go. Also, I think people are so busy doing so many different things that they don't have enough time to chill out and relax."