About me

My name is Sami Hamed. In the capoeira world I'm known as Professor Popô.

Capoeira has been with me since 1999, when I started training traditional capoeira angola in Hamburg at the age of eight. Later I added influences from capoeira contemporânea, which opens space for dynamics, acrobatics and creative development. At 15 I joined the group Xará Capoeira, where I train with Mestre Soldado to this day.

I've been teaching since 2008, first in Hamburg and, since 2012, in Frankfurt, where I built my own practice. I've worked with sports clubs, studios, cultural centers and the Volkshochschule Frankfurt, among others.

My teaching combines bodywork, musicality and cultural knowledge with modern training methods. As a certified personal trainer, I care about movement that stays healthy and sustainable. My background in cultural anthropology helps me place capoeira's practices in their cultural context and reproduce them respectfully, so they can be lived as an embodied practice. In time, you come to understand how you move, and why capoeira works the way it does.

Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. With my Middle Eastern roots, I grew up around drums and percussion, and I held my first berimbau at the age of nine. I still teach music workshops regularly, in Germany and across Europe.

At capoeira festivals I teach workshops on music, mobility and lightness in the game, sometimes with an anthropological perspective on the mechanisms of capoeira.